HUD announced on January 15 that the Texas Government Land Office (GLO) intentionally discriminated against communities of color in Southeast Texas when distributing more than $4 billion in much-needed disaster mitigation funding, violating the Fair Housing Act and confirming what organizers and advocates on the ground have been saying for years. Finding that the GLO’s violations “constitute both a pattern and practice of discrimination,” HUD has referred the case to the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for further investigation.
Since 2018, NLIHC Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC) partners Texas Housers and the Northeast Action Collective (NAC) have led the charge to urge GLO to remedy its discriminatory distribution of disaster mitigation funding. Funds were allocated through a competition that penalized areas with larger overall and larger non-white populations – those areas designated by HUD as most impacted – and favored inland counties with smaller, non-white populations designated as most impacted by the state. The number of people of color in those areas of Texas designated as most impacted by HUD is 10 times greater than the number of people of color in areas designated as most impacted by the state and eight times greater than the number of people of color in the state’s general population, yet the state created a project rating system that split funds evenly between the two areas
The finding reaffirms and strengthens HUD’s earlier decision in 2022 that Texas had discriminated against non-white communities in southeast Texas when distributing mitigation funds for areas impacted by Hurricane Harvey. Over the course of its investigation, HUD found that GLO’s deliberate discrimination would put 600,000 minority Texans and 1 million Texans overall at risk in future disasters. As a result, communities from Houston to Beaumont to Corpus Christi and Port Arthur have been unjustly forced to weather one disaster after another without adequate resources to repair and recover.
Despite finding that GLO intentionally discriminated against people of color in Texas, HUD is still preparing to provide it with half a billion dollars in disaster recovery funding. Until this complaint is examined by DOJ, HUD should not provide funding to an agency that has “both a pattern and practice of discrimination.” In the meantime, to address the immense harm that has been caused by Texas’s discrimination, the state should fund projects in impacted Texan communities that will protect families, mitigate risk, and establish that these communities’ civil rights are protected.
Read HUD’s full findings here.
Read Texas Houser’s press release here.