Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Adriano Espaillat (D-NY), along with Congresswoman Jennifer Gonzalez Colon (PR), reintroduced the “Housing Survivors of Major Disasters Act.” The bill was written with input from NLIHC’s Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC) and includes several of the coalition’s top priorities. The House of Representatives unanimously passed last year’s version of the bill.
The bill addresses significant title-documentation challenges that have resulted in thousands of eligible disaster survivors being wrongfully denied FEMA assistance. FEMA turns away eligible disaster survivors unable to present property title, written leases, and other similar documents to show residency and occupancy of disaster-damaged property. In areas where mobile homes and alternative property ownership methods are prevalent, such as in Puerto Rico, the Gulf Coast, Northern California, and the Pacific Northwest, disaster survivors can be prevented from accessing aid because of this requirement.
After Hurricane Maria in 2017, 77,000 households in Puerto Rico were wrongfully denied assistance by FEMA due to title-documentation issues. The bill would create a new framework to make it easier for disaster survivors to prove residency in disaster-impacted areas or ownership of a disaster-damaged home through a “declarative statement” form attesting to their ownership of the property or through the submission of utility bills, credit card statements, pay stubs, and school registration. These changes ensure that disaster survivors with low incomes would be able to access the assistance they need without being forced to endure a lengthy and complicated title clearing process or otherwise go without much-needed assistance.
“Our federal disaster relief programs have been failing for too long. Survivors of natural disasters – from Puerto Rico to Iowa – have been denied assistance due to federal relief programs’ bureaucratic barriers and nonsensical documentation requirements,” said Representative Espaillat in a press release announcing the reintroduction. “This vital legislation received bipartisan praise in the House last year precisely because of its material importance to the modernization of our disaster relief programs and the immediate health and safety of thousands of US citizens in Puerto Rico and elsewhere.”
“Catastrophic natural disasters from Puerto Rico to California have devastated families and left them searching for safe, stable and affordable housing” said Senator Warren in the same press release. “The Housing Survivors of Major Disasters Act would push the Federal government to step up for these families and make it easier for them to access the help they are entitled to and desperately need.”
Read more about title-documentation challenges in Puerto Rico at: https://bit.ly/3tLRIhe
Read the text of the Housing Survivors of Major Disasters Act at: https://bit.ly/3brqKVL
Read the press release announcing the reintroduction at: https://bit.ly/3olq9dA