Congress is about to pass the biggest disaster reform in years. Last month, Congress passed a bipartisan housing bill with an endorsement from President Donald Trump. The president has said he will veto it because Congress has not passed other measures, but it will become law at the end of today if he does not veto it. Congress has enough votes to override a potential veto anyway.<\/p>\n
There are many ways for disaster victims to get help immediately after a flood or fire: FEMA gives temporary housing assistance and pays for debris removal, insurance companies pay to rebuild homes, and charities pass out food and water. But long-term recovery is much harder. The United States has only one federal program to help: the Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) program, run by HUD. It has provided billions of dollars to disaster areas over the last few decades, but almost everyone agrees it is broken. The program operates on an ad hoc basis without permanent congressional approval, so most grants take more than half a decade to execute and arrive too late to make a difference.<\/p>\n
In New Bern, North Carolina, hundreds of affordable apartments were lost after Hurricane Florence in 2018. An investigation found it took more than five years to build a few dozen apartments with HUD money. By the time the new complexes opened, tenants had moved on to other cities. Other cases show even longer timelines: some grantees from the 2017 California wildfires or 2012’s Hurricane Sandy are still trying to access funds. In a report, HUD said it was targeting for closeout a grant meant to help Arkansas recover from tornadoes in 2008. A 2024 report by HUD\u2019s internal auditor blamed these delays on the program\u2019s ad hoc authorization and failed coordination between HUD and other agencies.<\/p>\n
The new housing bill\u2019s primary focus is on building more homes in areas suffering from housing shortages, but it also contains a little-noticed provision that turns HUD\u2019s sporadic disaster aid into a permanent program. The change could prevent stagnation often seen when displaced families struggle to find housing and businesses shut down. The language frees HUD to spend money without waiting for congressional approval, creates a permanent disaster unit within the department (similar to how FEMA operates), and accelerates the timeline so HUD can start spending as soon as FEMA\u2019s aid winds down. FEMA assistance goes for 18 months maximum, while HUD assistance often wouldn’t kick in for two or three years after. This creates a \u201cvalley of death\u201d that the new reform reduces to \u201cmore like a crack,\u201d according to Carlos Mart\u00edn of Resources for the Future. The change could speed up construction of new affordable apartment buildings, rental assistance, or even fast-track financial support for new businesses and job training programs.<\/p>\n
The new authorization is not technically permanent; to appease Republicans, lawmakers added a sunset provision that will wind down the aid program after three years. However, a \u201csense of Congress\u201d clause suggests the program could continue indefinitely as long as money is available. Carlos Mart\u00edn said it\u2019s unlikely lawmakers will wind it down after creating a new unit to manage it, calling it a truly bipartisan agreement. Stan Gimont, former HUD official who oversaw the program under Obama and the first Trump administration, said, \u201cAll the tumblers are there to make it work now. They all line up, and it should all go a lot more quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Congress passes bipartisan housing bill with provision to make HUD disaster aid permanent, speeding up recovery after floods and fires. New Bern, NC case shows years of delays.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":671,"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/670\/revisions\/671"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/test2.cryptofinancewire.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}