Mike Synder of the Houston Chronicle this weekend picked up on the story about Governor Perry’s diversion of funds away from hurricane impacted areas. Read the full story here. A Texas plan for distributing hurricane recovery funds provided less than half the money needed for housing and business recovery in Galveston and Orange counties while […]
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Tag Archives: Hurricane Rita
A confession: we’ve learned firsthand the reasons for disaster rebuilding delays
June 9, 2009 
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I have to fess up. Having pointed out in yesterday’s blog the unacceptably slow pace of rebuilding homes destroyed in the Texas hurricanes, it’s only right that I point out the delays that we ourselves have encountered in a disaster housing rebuilding project we are associated with. We call the project Texas Grow Homes. It’s […]
Read moreA failed housing program will always come back and bite the responsible entity
February 20, 2009 Comments Off
One had to feel sorry for Michael Gerber Thursday morning. Appearing before a subcommittee of the Texas House Appropriations Committee he was forced to listen as as the Legislators were presented a state auditor’s report excoriating the failure of the state’s initial efforts to provide housing assistance to victims of Hurricane Rita. House members were […]
Read moreIs federal disaster assistance an entitlement?
December 1, 2008 1 Comment
The back-and-forth between the Texas governor and the US Secretary of Homeland Security over who will pay for the removal of disaster debris from Hurricane Ike raises the question, “Is federal disaster assistance an entitlement?” Governor Perry has blasted the federal government for paying to bail out Wall Street banks but refusing to bear 100 […]
Read moreCloser scrutiny will follow Texas expenditure of $1.3 billion in hurricane relief
November 29, 2008 2 Comments
HUD has allocated Texas $1.3 billion of the $2.1 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds that Congress has recently appropriated for disaster recovery. Major allocations also went to Louisiana for Hurricane Edwardo recovery ($438m) and Iowa for flood recovery ($125m). Texas officials had submitted to the feds estimates of about $27 billion for Ike-related […]
Read moreReforming FEMA alone won’t fix the problem
November 26, 2008 2 Comments
There are hopes that a structural reform and management reorganization of FEMA under the Obama Administration will solve the problems that emerged in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, Dolly and Ike. There is a lot of important work to be done with reforming FEMA but even a perfect emergency management agency won’t provide the […]
Read moreSlow expenditures, questionable priorities plague Houston and Harris County administered hurricane relief efforts
November 13, 2008 Comments Off
We have been critical of the decisions of the City of Houston and of Harris County so far as their uses of federal CDBG funds intended to assist victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.On top of the inappropriate use of the funds it now seems the city has been extremely slow to put the funds […]
Read moreLessons from Kartina and Rita about rebuilding permanent housing for low income hurricane survivors
September 18, 2008 Comments Off
We learned valuable lessons from Hurricanes Katrina and Rita about providing post-disaster housing assistance to low income families. This is part of continuing discussion about these lessons os that they can be considered as we develop our response to Hurricane Ike over the coming days. In a September 13 blog post I begin by discussing […]
Read moreA New Orleans obituary has lessons for Galveston
September 15, 2008 Comments Off
They have their hands full right now, but someday before the plans for rebuilding are set the city leaders in Galveston need to read the critique of the rebuilding effort in New Orleans in Sunday’s paper by Nicolai Ouroussoff, the architecture critic for The New York Times. The critique is brilliant and rings true. It […]
Read moreLingering concerns about Texas Hurricane Rita home rebuilding
June 25, 2008 Comments Off
I am supporting the the Texas Department of Housing & Community Affairs Round 2 plan for CDBG housing assistance for Hurricane Rita victims. The state has decided to oversee the rehabilitation and rebuilding of houses through a private contractor rather than handing checks out to hurricane victims. After seeing first hand the problems low-income families […]
Read moreNational fixes for post disaster housing programs
June 13, 2008 Comments Off
I have posted the testimony I presented to Congress regarding how the federal government can betterprovide long-term housing disaster assistance to low-income survivors in Texas. Here is a summary of what I suggested. Recommendations 1. Waive duplication of benefits prohibition A problem has emerged in the owner occupied rehabilitation program: “duplication of benefits” (DOB). Federal […]
Read moreAt least we are better off than Mississippi and Alabama
June 11, 2008 Comments Off
Watch my testimony before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity of the House Financial Service Committee, or, better yet, watch the testimony of the panel of housing advocates from all the Gulf Coast states. I was invited to Washington to testify on May 8 before the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity of the […]
Read moreTexas tempts fate and courts disaster
June 6, 2008 Comments Off
Is it that we Texans like living dangerously? Are we just slow to learn? Or are we the victims of special interests? A story in the Housing Chronicle has concluded… After calamitous hurricane seasons in 2004 and 2005 destroyed nearly half a million homes across the South, most Gulf states bolstered their building codes to […]
Read moreFEMA and HUD: not who you would want to depend on to throw you a life preserver
June 4, 2008 Comments Off
The House Financial Services Committee called HUD and FEMA to testify about when the lead federal agencies for hurricane relief are going to get the 2005 Hurricane survivors out of temporary and into permanent housing. The result: lots of agency mumbling and stammering. Listen to excerpts from the hearing in this NPR story. Also appalling is the failure of […]
Read moreWe have not learned the lessons of Katrina
May 31, 2008 Comments Off
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina we wondered what we could do to help. We settled on four things: 1) advocate on the behalf of the housing needs of the Katrina evacuees; 2) work with the State of Texas to try to come up with a good plan to help the victims of hurricane Rita […]
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