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The Sunday NY Times (Oct. 2) has an article about the slow, incompetent recovery in TX  from Hurricane Ike – -which occurred 3 years ago!

Titled Extending the Miseries from the Storm, the article focuses on the slow process of providing housing aid, stemming in large measure from delays rather than assistance provided by state agencies. Some details from the article:

Delays are inevitable whenever a natural disaster causes widespread damage to homes and businesses. But housing advocates and local officials said a series of missteps by state leaders created an extraordinary backup in getting projects financed and approved, stalling work on thousands of homes.

State officials repeatedly changed the rules and guidelines that cities and counties had to follow after the local agencies had already processed applications, forcing residents to redo their applications and the cities and counties to reprocess them.

The state’s attempt to develop a new formula for allocating the second round of money to local jurisdictions caused a delay of months. The formula would have distributed money based on weather conditions instead of actual damage, was criticized by housing advocates as steering money away from minority areas and was ultimately rejected by federal housing officials.

In addition, those federal officials expressed concerns about the two state agencies that had overseen the program — the Department of Housing and Community Affairs and the Department of Rural Affairs. In a June report, federal officials found that the state housing agency had not developed written procedures for processing the applications it received from local jurisdictions. The report also found that the rural affairs agency had spent more money on administrative expenses than on actual work projects, spending 98 percent of its administrative money from the first round — $12.3 million — but only 17 percent of the money designated for projects.

“It’s taken us all an inordinate amount of time to get where we are, but we are now building houses and repairing houses,” said David Turkel, the director of the Harris County Community Services Department, which has completed 76 of 395 houses. “Had our department been dealing directly with HUD like we do on millions and millions of dollars every year, and not had to go through this state housing agency up in Austin, we would have been finished and have had all the homes repaired and built two years ago.”

Related articles

• Thousands still recovering from Hurricane Ike | abc13.com (texashousers.net)
• Fewer than 500 Texas homes repaired in three years since Hurricane Ike (texashousers.net)