The Diva wants to share this personal assessment she received recently re the severe problems encountered with federal housing programs after a disaster. It is written by a trusted person with practical knowledge of the recovery process, including recent experience after Hurricane Sandy. For obvious reasons, the author does not want to be identified.

I appreciate the author’s candor and value these observations because they help to explain the problems behind the scenes. In the past year I have posted dozens of articles about the problems and slow progress with housing recovery post-Sandy. Now I have a better understanding of the reasons. Some key points from the email:

Having lived for 15+ years with the fragmented, uncoordinated array of programs that are the federal de-facto policy for major disaster home repair, I think to may be time to begin thinking of a better way.

Owners of disaster damaged homes now get their repair assistance from a variety of sources such as:

• 1. FEMA-funded Shelter and Temporary Essential Power (STEP) pilot program direct essential repair services
• 2. National Flood Insurance Program settlements for
  a. Repair/reconstruction and
  b. Increased cost of compliance with flood-safe zoning
• 3. FEMA Individual and Households Program (IHP) repair or replacement grants (up to about $31,000)
• 4. State supplements to IHP – sometimes statutory (CA) usually ad hoc, per disaster.
• 5. Small Business Administration Disaster Household Repair loans including
  a. Up to $200,000 for repair or reconstruction
  b. Up to $20,000 additional for mitigation
  c. Up to $200,000 additional to recast previous debt.
• 6. FEMA-Sate Hazard Mitigation Grant program when targeted to home repair or acquisition
• 7. HUD Community Development Block Grants – DR – usually a result of Congressional supplementary funding, through programs devised by state or local grantee governments.
• 8. FEMA Funded Disaster Case management services to help household navigate and manage these and non-governmental solutions.

I dream of ONE all-encompassing federal disaster home repair program to take the place of the disconnected array of processes we now force people to struggle and suffer through.

I wonder if a single system might not deliver more complete, timely, customer-friendly and dramatically less costly home recovery after disaster.

The most politically and popularly appealing thought might be the elimination of the national flood insurance program to be replaced with a much more elegant system of risk management/financing and repair assistance.

One single, integrated program could incentivize mitigation, speed repair, increase loaning where appropriate (thereby decreasing grants), and consolidate multiple, unwieldy, constituency-maddening, uncoordinated, multi-governmental administration into a single application and fulfillment process with a named applicant assistant responsible for every complex application.

How crazy is this? Crazier than the great governments of NY, NJ, and NYC, all having had $100s of millions for home repair approved for over a year, but still unable to deliver virtually $ to applicants waiting since last Fall? Almost 20,000 applicants are waiting in NYC.

We saw this in Louisiana and assumed it was a capacity problem. In Texas, politics was assumed to be the cause of failure. But all three of these Sandy high-capacity governments can’t be the problem. It’s got to be the system of asking state/local governments to devise (for their first time) a disaster home repair program off a blank sheet of paper beginning months after the disaster happens. It’s too difficult.

Finally, the author asked me what I thought and if I knew of anyone else who is thinking this way?

I am not qualified to offer comments or suggestions, and I do not know of anyone engaged in research in this area. I invite comments and welcome information from anyone who has tackled this topic.

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UPDATE: Please see the comment by James Fossett that follows this posting. The link to his article is well worth highlighting. See his article titled Let’s Stop Improvising Disaster Recovery.