Grist: “Congress Set to Overhaul Disaster Recovery, Speeding Up New Home Builds”
Carlos Martín, RFF’s Vice President for Research and Policy Engagement, comments on new disaster recovery policies.
“The language in the new housing bill would free up [the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)] to spend money without waiting for congressional approval, endow a new disaster recovery fund, and create a permanent disaster unit within the department. This is similar to how FEMA, housed within the Department of Homeland Security, operates now.
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‘It really helps,’ said Carlos Martín, the vice president for research at the think tank Resources for the Future, who has spent years studying the HUD program. ‘FEMA assistance goes for 18 months maximum, and then HUD assistance often wouldn’t kick in for two or three years after that. There’s been this valley of death in recovery, and this just decreases that valley of death to being more like a crack, and fewer people can slip through that crack.’
The new authorization in the housing bill is not technically permanent; in order to appease Republicans in the House of Representatives, lawmakers added a sunset provision that will wind down the aid program after three years. But another ‘sense of Congress’ clause in the law suggests that the block-grant program could continue indefinitely as long as there is money available, and Martín said it’s unlikely lawmakers will wind it down after creating a new unit to manage it.
‘It really was a bipartisan agreement,’ he said.”
