Understanding the Pace of HUD’s Disaster Housing Recovery Efforts

ABSTRACT

Disaster-affected communities often describe national recovery aid as delayed. Yet local governments increasingly rely on the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR)—the primary, federal long-term recovery program. This article describes completion times for housing activities across 88 CDBG-DR grants from FY2005 to FY2015; the grants’ housing activities took an average of 3.8 years from declaration to completion, although acceleration occurred over the study years. The authors also identify qualitative contributors to delay, including grant administration type, grantees’ capacity, and CDBG-DR rules, and quantitatively assess their contributions to delays. Although local capacity is a critical qualitative factor, ultimately, CDBG-DR’s lack of permanent statutory authority within the national emergency framework contributes to local governments’ inability to standardize recovery goals and implementation, which, in turn, leads to recovery lags.

KEYWORDS:

• natural disasters
• disaster recovery
• disaster response
• housing recovery
• CDBG

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the following Urban Institute colleagues who worked on the data collection and early draft versions of the study on which this article is based: Dr. Brandi Gilbert, Dr. Brett Theodos, Dr. Christina Plerhoples Stacy, Rebecca Daniels, Somala Diby, Tanaya Srini, and Wilton Oliver. The authors also acknowledge the many anonymous staff, consultants, and affiliated professionals at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and its state and local grantees who provided time and information. The work that provided the basis for this publication was supported by funding under an award with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The substance and findings of the work are dedicated to the public. The authors are solely responsible for the accuracy of the statements and interpretations contained in this publication. Such interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views of the government.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Personal communication from CDBG-DR grantee technical assistance provider, July 27, 2017.

2. For public access to the Disaster Recovery Grant Reporting data, please reference HUDExchange (2021).   

3. The DRGR system is primarily used by grantees to access funds and report performance and by HUD to review grant-funded activities, prepare reports, and monitor compliance. More information and data extracts are available at https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/drgr/

4. The FEMA housing archive contains aggregated, non-PII data generated by FEMA’s Enterprise Coordination & Information Management (ECIM) reporting team describing the number of applicants and severity of damage at the county and ZIP-code levels. More information and downloadable data are available at https://www.fema.gov/media-library/assets/documents/30714

5. CDBG-DR regulation uses the term activity to refer, more granularly, to individual projects as identified by the grantee whose performance status is self-reported to HUD.

6. We elected to use 90% as a proxy for grant or activity completion because the last expenditure can often be small and lag many months beyond when the bulk of the spending and its related activity occurred. In some instances, the DRGR data show expenditures occurring prior to the HUD award date reported in the grantee’s action plan. In those instances, rather than counting the period between award and expenditure as negative time, we assume an award date during the quarter prior to the first expenditure. Further, CDBG-DR grantees can incur certain eligible expenses prior to the HUD award. Some grantees reported these expenses in DRGR when they were actually incurred, whereas others reported them by the earliest date of funds draw.

7. Accelerated failure time models have many similarities to hazard models that estimate the effects of covariates on the probability of an event occurring. Because this study is focused on the length of time to activity completion, rather than the probability of completion at any given time, we preferred to use the accelerated failure time model over a hazard model. However, it is important to note that the estimates obtained from Weibull and exponentially accelerated failure time and hazard models are equivalent; that is, estimates can be converted from one form to another postestimation.

8. We calculated averages across activities, weighted by each activity’s total expenditure, to reduce the potential for smaller activities that are not representative of the bulk of the disaster recovery assistance to skew the results. For example, to determine an average of three activities with estimated values of $1 million, $3 million, and $10 million, we weighted the average by treating the activity of $3 million as if it were three activities and the $10 million activity as if it were 10 activities.

9. A 1-hour focus group was conducted with national HUD CDBG-DR leadership and staff (not including regional and field staff) on January 4, 2017, at HUD headquarters. Structured interview questions included those on factors that lead to rebuilding delays at every stage in the CDBG-DR implementation sequence, specifically disaster recovery. HUD staff also provided notes from a July 2016 CDBG-DR grantee stakeholder discussion regarding proposed revisions to CDBG-DR program requirements.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Notes on contributors

Carlos Martín

Carlos Martín is a senior fellow in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where he leads research on the physical quality of housing and communities.

Daniel Teles

Daniel Teles is a research associate in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, where he specializes in applied microeconomic policy analysis. His research examines the effects of public policy on local communities.

Nicole DuBois

Nicole DuBois is a research analyst in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute.