![Sample our Geography journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5937/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Geography.jpg"})
Abstract
In the months after Hurricane María’s devastation of Puerto Rico, press outlets and advocacy groups documented how Puerto Rico’s experience with housing repair and reconstruction programs was rife with complaints and inconsistencies regarding approval of applications and denial of support, especially among vulnerable communities. These problems are not unique to Puerto Rico and have been frequently raised by numerous communities in the United States that have endured disasters. This article contributes to the critical task of revealing postdisaster damages and reconstruction trends through a detailed examination of housing and personal property damages and benefits received through the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)’s Individual Assistance (IA) Program after Hurricane María. It also shows which municipalities were most affected and have the greatest housing needs. We demonstrate that, in the aggregate, poor or geographically vulnerable households were not likely to be underserved. Nonetheless, poor households are left with a greater burden in the form of pending housing needs after aid relief has been allocated, rendering them more vulnerable to being displaced. Furthermore, households that lacked clear tenure status were unable to access IA aid because of administrative and procedural burdens.
Acknowledgments
We thank Enrique Figueroa Grillasca, our research assistant, for helping us with data cleaning and other key tasks. We also thank Robert B. Olshansky and Gustavo Bobonis for their useful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1 Data regarding funds allocated, obligated, and outlaid by the federal government for disaster recovery purposes can be accessed via https://recovery.fema.gov/state-profiles. Information on housing units repaired or rebuilt through local reconstruction programs was obtained through the Puerto Rico Department of Housing transparency portal for the Repair, Reconstruction and Relocation (R3) Program (see https://cdbg-dr.pr.gov/en/transparency-portal/transparency-reports/housing-reports/r3-dashboard/).
2 Numerous journalistic inquiries and watchdog groups highlighted the discrepancies and the stream of denials. See Allen (Citation2017); Banuchi (Citation2018); Viglucci (Citation2020).
3 See La Union Del Pueblo Entero v. FEMA, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 146014 (United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Brownsville Division February 15, 2017 Filed), and Barbosa v. United States Dep’t of Homeland Sec., 263 F. Supp. 3d 207, 2017 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 106990, 2017 WL 2958606 (United States District Court for the District of Columbia July 11, 2017, Filed).
4 Special communities are areas designated by the government, as part of a state-led, island-wide community development effort that started in 2001 to identify low-income communities that also have inadequate infrastructure and whose households live in precarious conditions. Law 1 of 2001 of the Government of Puerto Rico defines special communities as those geographical areas where a large share of the population suffers from high illiteracy or school dropout rates, lives under the poverty level, or is unemployed; where a large share of households are headed by single parents; and where there is a long history of environmental and health concerns. These communities exhibit mixed homeownership patterns, but many households in these communities lack legal title for their land.
5 Most of the information on the Individuals and Households Program outlined in this section was obtained from the Individuals and Households Program Unified Guidance (IHPUG), which applies to disasters occurring between September 30, 2016, and February 28, 2019: https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1483567080828-1201b6eebf9fbbd7c8a070fddb308971/FEMAIHPUG_CoverEdit_December2016.pdf (accessed March 23, 2020).
6 According to the Stafford Act, which provides the legal framework for federal postdisaster aid disbursement, the maximum amount of aid an individual can receive is capped. This amount is adjusted annually. The maximum amount of total monetary assistance provided by the IA Program in Puerto Rico for Hurricanes Irma and María is $33,300. See Federal Register, Vol. 81, No. 197, p. 70431, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2016-10-12/pdf/2016-24626.pdf (accessed June 24, 2020).
7 Inspections may also allow FEMA to determine residence ownership (See FEMA’s IHPUG, 34).
8 This insight was obtained through informal interviews we conducted with several individuals who worked as field inspectors for the IA Program after Hurricane María.
9 The data set used is the “Individual Assistance Housing Registrants Large Disasters—V1.” This file can be found at https://www.fema.gov/api/open/v1/IndividualAssistanceHousingRegistrantsLargeDisasters.csv
10 The difficulty lies in the fact that the data are not personally identifiable and do not come with a unique identifier for each IA application. Also, observations where FEMA did not conduct an inspection do not include complete data and their geographic location specificity is limited. This makes it hard to differentiate duplicates across different IA applications that were registered in the same census block and were not inspected. For these reasons, only duplicates for inspected and assisted applicants that shared identical entries across all variables were removed.
11 We used the unique census block group identifier to tie it to its corresponding Federal Information Processing System code to determine the correct municipality for each observation.
12 A total of 73,202 observations pertaining to Hurricane María in Puerto Rico were removed from the original data set.
13 The data from the Office of the Commissioner of Insurance were provided upon the researchers’ request. The summary report’s date is June 30, 2021.
14 Geographic vulnerability stems from underlying conditions that might exacerbate vulnerability, given the location of the housing unit. Because we included a measure of exposure to the hurricane's trajectory and eye walls, we considered it important to incorporate a proxy measure of neighborhood infrastructure and housing quality.
15 The data clearly demonstrate multiple deviations from the administrative guidelines. For example, numerous nonprimary homes were inspected and some noninspected homes received monetary assistance from the IA Program.
16 We used the term pending housing needs and not unmet needs because the latter is
an official term used in relation to HUD's CDBG-DR funds, and refers to those needs that have gone unaddressed after federal and private funds have been disbursed.
17 Publicly available data for the best-track estimates for storm events can be accessed on the National Hurricane Center website: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/index.php?season=2017&basin=atl
18 The eye diameter of Hurricane María was measured at approximately 28 nautical miles (roughly equal to 51 km) right before making landfall in Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. María’s maximum wind speeds, when its center crossed the southeast of the island, were near 250 km/h, which is very close to category 5 status. Wind speeds decreased once the system interacted with the landmass, and when the hurricane’s center left the northwest end of the island, maximum wind speeds were estimated to be 175 km/h. More information can be found here: https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/data/tcr/AL152017_Maria.pdf
19 According to the Individuals and Households Program Unified Guidance: “If the listed documentation is unavailable, as a last resort, FEMA may accept a written statement from the applicant indicating how long they lived in the disaster-damaged residence prior to the Presidential disaster declaration. The statement must also include an explanation of the circumstances that prevent standard occupancy verification (e.g., insular areas, islands, tribal lands)” (Ibid., 16).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Deepak Lamba-Nieves
Deepak Lamba-Nieves is the Research Director & Churchill G. Carey, Jr. Chair in Economic Development Research at the Center for a New Economy. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Planning. He completed a PhD in urban and regional studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP).
Raúl Santiago-Bartolomei
Raúl Santiago-Bartolomei is an assistant professor at the University of Puerto Rico’s Graduate School of Planning. He has a PhD in urban planning and development from the University of Southern California (USC).