Some San Diegans cried tears of joy this week, as they finally returned home more than seven months after historic flooding forced them out. “It’s priceless,” said Sally Carrillo, whose 82-year-old mother Rosalva Belmontez returned to her home of nearly six decades in Emerald Hills earlier this week. Belmontez felt in shock Monday as she walked around her home on Hilltop Drive, touching everything to make sure it was real. “It was surreal for her,” said Carrillo, whose mother had moved in with her in Chula Vista after January’s floods. “She took over basically my whole house,” Carrillo added. “I let her do whatever she wanted to do, because she’s 82 and I didn’t want to make it any more traumatic for her. … She kept saying, ‘I just want to go home.’ She was just devastated.” Both mother and daughter are excited for things to return to normal. “I just started bawling,” Carrillo recalled. “And she goes, ‘I’ll come visit you.’” But restoring her mother’s home was a tall order. The $11,000 in federal aid the family got, Carrillo says, was only a drop in the bucket compared to the hundreds of thousands needed for repairs. They didn’t benefit from local aid, either. Although the county gave the San Diego Housing Commission $4.2 million to create a program to help eligible homeowners, landlords and tenants fix their homes or find new ones, there were specific parameters on how the aid could be disbursed. Because Belmontez stayed with her daughter and didn’t use the county’s hotel voucher program, she wasn’t eligible. “It’s allowing way too many people to slip through the cracks,” said Clariza Marin, who’s been helping organize flood recovery efforts. “There’s still vacant homes on every impacted block. There’s still ‘For sale’ signs popping up each week. There’s still dozens upon dozens who have been forced out of the city. “Imagine how beneficial that (financial aid) would be to the ones that actually are desperate for it,” she added. That’s where community groups have come in to help. Working with donors, Marin and the Harvey Family Foundation created a grant program for flood victims who didn’t get county housing support and provided aid to be used for construction, labor and materials. It’s raised more than $425,000 so far, and it’s disbursed nearly $100,000 to 15 families who have completed rebuilds. Belmontez got just shy of $25,000 — plus other donations, like a free paint job from Canin Coatings — to put the final touches on her own. “She doesn’t think she’s worthy of everything that has been given to her,” Carrillo said. About 75 households have applied for help through the program, with dozens more in need. It already has a lengthy waitlist and is now closed to new applicants, though organizers hope to reopen it if more money is available. Each family helped through the program so far has gotten as much as $25,000, depending on how much work was needed and how much aid they received elsewhere, such as from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or insurance. Another $26,000 has been given to six families who were part of the county’s hotel voucher program. The Harvey Family Foundation’s grant fund was kick-started with the help of money left over from a $100,000 grant it got from the San Diego Foundation to help feed flood victims in the early months. Since then, it’s also gotten $250,000 from the Conrad Prebys Foundation, $100,000 from the county, $90,000 from SDG&E and the nonprofit United Way and $25,000 from the Rotary Club of Southeast San Diego, among others. The housing commission is slated to give $660,000, but the program has yet to receive the funds. Applications closed last week for the commission’s own financial aid program. Nearly all of the 359 households who were eligible from participating in the county’s hotel voucher program applied. As of Wednesday, the agency had paid out $2.8 million to 237 families, with another $551,000 slated to be used for future rental assistance payments, for a total of nearly $3.4 million. In general, families who applied for monthly rental assistance got more money than families who sought lump-sum payments, which required less paperwork. Another 39 applications had gotten pre-approved, another 34 were under review and 15 were awaiting review. All were expected to be processed in the next few weeks, but when applicants will be paid depends on when they can find homes and provide required documentation, officials said. Families must secure housing to get short-term rental help, and if they can’t by the end of this month, they’ll have to get a lump-sum payment instead of monthly aid. Southcrest neighbors Idania LaFon and Myrna Pelayo were among those who got help from the housing commission. And theirs were two of three families who returned to their apartments at a 10-unit, one-story apartment complex on Beta Street last Sunday. After the county housing support ended, LaFon and her three younger children moved in temporarily with her older daughter, then with her sister, before returning to the apartment she had lived in for 20 years. “They are happy to be home,” she said in Spanish of her kids. “It’s more beautiful and all new.” Pelayo, an elementary school teacher, and her husband spent months sharing a Lemon Grove one-bedroom with her sister and brother-in-law while waiting for their own apartment to be fixed. “It was a really hard journey, but we learned from it,” Pelayo said. “We are so happy to be back.” She took Friday off work to start unpacking. “It really hasn’t hit me yet,” she said. “But I’m excited. I cannot wait to start getting back on our feet and continue walking.” LaFon and Pelayo’s landlord, 76-year-old Tony Tricarico, has not gotten any federal, county or city aid. But he did receive $20,000 from a private donor, plus other donations and volunteer help. He expects to get aid from the housing commission to complete work on another three apartments soon, and he hopes a lawsuit against the city that he’s a part of could help him recoup some of his losses. In the meantime, he’s proud of what he’s accomplished. The three apartments he’s already renovated, he says, “look spectacular.” And rental income from them could help finish repairing the others. “I’m optimistic that we’re at least out of the swamp,” Tricarico said. But “on a day like today, I look up at the sky and say, ‘If we get a hell of a rainstorm today, a quick thunderstorm, we could go right back where we were.’” After all, one of the factors that led to January’s catastrophic flooding was overgrown brush choking the flood channels along Chollas Creek just behind his property. The city began clearing that brush after the floods. But as recently as last week, bushes were growing in the creek again.