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.