Nearly five years to the day after Hurricane Harvey made landfall on the Southeastern Texas coast, the Texas General Land Office (GLO) failed to meet a deadline on August 27 to respond to a request by HUD to enter into an agreement to fix aspects of the state’s plan to distribute HUD disaster mitigation funds to county governments. Previously, HUD had found that plan to be in violation of federal civil rights law. That finding, precipitated by a legal filing from NLIHC partners Texas Housers and the Northeast Action Collective, determined that the GLO’s plan for distributing disaster mitigation funds to areas impacted by Hurricane Harvey funneled funds to inland, majority white counties in violation of civil rights law. A clear indication of the discriminatory nature of the plan was that areas hit hard by Harvey like Houston, Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Corpus Cristi – all of them areas with large Black and Latino communities – received no funds during the initial award competition.
In response to the GLO’s decision to ignore the August 27 deadline to negotiate a settlement, advocates are now calling for HUD to withhold mitigation funds while the program remains non-compliant with federal civil rights law and refer the matter to the U.S. Department of Justice for enforcement of Title VI and the “Fair Housing Act.”
Meanwhile, many still await housing repairs or replacement homes. While groups of community-based recovery and advocacy organizations are still hard at work pushing for recovery resources and actively assisting neighborhoods in recovering, HUD funds for long-term recovery have been slow to disperse, in part because the program responsible for those funds is not permanently authorized at the federal level. Additional updates can be found below.
The Disaster Housing Recovery Coalition (DHRC) will continue to support the work being undertaken by disaster survivors and their advocates in Southeast Texas and will continue to work to support the equitable distribution of crucial disaster assistance and mitigation funding.
Read a press release issued by Texas Housers here: https://bit.ly/3AIo0ip