I’m appalled by this.
The Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs has spent about a third of the federal funds it received to help low-income residents rebuild homes damaged or destroyed by Hurricane Rita almost four years ago, the state auditor reported Friday.
As of June 5, the state housing agency had spent $135 million of $440.4 million in federal funds, auditor John Keel said. It had completed repairing or rebuilding 527 homes and had begun work on 422 more, his report said.
More than 7,300 Texans applied for help under the federal program, Keel said; 2,107 of them withdrew their requests or were deemed ineligible. The rest were approved or were awaiting a decision.
So what’s happening with the remaining applicants, the ones who are still waiting? There’s more than 4000 of them. I wish the story had some information about that.
Michael Gerber, executive director of the state housing agency, attributed delays to the complexity of federal requirements for spending the funds and to the difficulties in working with extremely poor, sometimes illiterate families who often had difficulty producing proof of clear title to their properties or other essential documents.
Agency spokesman Gordon Anderson said the auditor’s housing repair figures apparently do not include 224 rental housing units rebuilt or repaired since the hurricane. Contractors have completed an additional 140 single-family homes in the two months since the figures for the auditor’s report were gathered, he said.
Leaders of organizations that have worked on Texas hurricane recovery issues, however, said the auditor’s report reinforces their concerns that it takes too long for applicants to wade through required title searches, environmental and historical reviews and other procedures.
The cost of repairing many homes damaged by Rita increased dramatically because the dwellings suffered additional damage from rainstorms while their owners waited for funds, they said.
“The inordinate delays experienced in the Hurricane Rita rebuilding program will be dwarfed by the delays in the six-times-larger Hurricane Ike program” unless the state applies lessons it learned from Rita, said John Henneberger, co-director of the Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service, a research and advocacy group.
Walter Diggles, executive director of the Deep East Texas Council of Governments, said state agencies approached hurricane recovery with “an overabundance of caution” because they feared reports of fraud similar to those that emerged in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina. That attitude slowed the process down, he said.
I understand the concern about scams, but let’s not let the pendulum swing too far. It doesn’t make sense for 80% of the people who were approved for assistance to not have received it four years later. Whatever it takes to fix this, let’s get it done.