‘Rapido’ model used after Ike could accelerate disaster recovery
When President Donald Trump visited Austin a few days after Hurricane Harvey struck Texas, one of the drivers in his motorcade was Pete Phillips, a senior deputy director in the state’s General Land Office.
Phillips had maneuvered his way into the assignment so that he could hand-deliver a letter to members of Trump’s Cabinet documenting the federal funds needed to begin recovery. The plan, Phillips said Thursday, helped speed up the allocation of $7.4 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds, a down payment on addressing unmet needs now estimated at about $60 billion.
“We weaseled our way into that motorcade,” Phillips said. “It was probably a bit unorthodox.”
Inventive thinking is certainly in order when it comes to disaster recovery in Texas, which typically features years of delays in getting long-term federal recovery funds to people who need them. Some Texans were still waiting last year for grants to repair or replace houses damaged by Hurricanes Ike and Dolly eight years earlier.
Several state officials bemoaned this sluggish process during a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee this week: “It’s a painstaking process. Everyone is frustrated by it,” George P. Bush, the state’s land commissioner, said.
Yet a better system exists, at least in theory. A 2010 agreement between the state and two Austinbased nonprofits laid out a model to get low-income Texans into homes within months, rather than years, after a natural disaster.
The so-called rapid rehousing program, known as Rapido, was created in 2013 by a coalition of nonprofits and Texas A&M University’s Hazard Reduction and Recovery Center. Through a pilot project, 20 families affected by Hurricane Dolly in the Rio Grande Valley got new homes based on the model.
“It changed my life completely,” said Esperanza P. Avalos, 73, who lives in one of the Rapido houses.
Her home in Brownsville was flooded and shifted off its cinder-block piers as a result of Dolly, but Avalos and her family continued to live there — they had no alternative — until the new Rapido home was built.
Despite the obvious benefits, bills that would have expanded and codified the Rapido program stalled in the Texas House after passing the Senate in three consecutive legislative sessions.
‘Faster, better, cheaper’
The bills died in the final days of each session “for mysterious reasons,” said John Henneberger, the co-director of the Texas Low-Income Housing Information Service, who helped to develop the program. “It’s very frustrating for people who have seen that there is a faster, better, cheaper way to do disaster recovery.”
Rapido features a temporary-to-permanent strategy for building homes for disaster victims, taking into account the incremental nature of funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The family moves into a modular core that is gradually expanded by building pre-designed additions as more funds become available.
Rapido also calls for having policies and plans for distributing the federal funds — resolving key questions such as who qualifies for help and how to apportion money between renters and owners — in place before a disaster. Political fights and turf battles have added years to the process after recent disasters such as Ike and Dolly.
But officials in the General Land Office, which has the main responsibility for disaster recovery in Texas, are not convinced the Rapido approach is the best solution. Its biggest liability is that the modular design limits recipients’ choices, said the agency’s Phillips.
“Would you want someone choosing your house for you?” he asked.
Wins ‘genius grant’
Heather LaGrone, a deputy director in the land office, said contractors can build a conventional “stickbuilt” house in about the same amount of time — a few weeks — it takes to build a Rapido house. The problem is the delays in steps leading up to construction, she said.
Notwithstanding the land office’s reservations, Rapido is a proven, cost-effective way to get disaster-stricken families into high-quality homes quickly. Henneberger, who helped to facilitate the agreement that led to Rapido, won a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” award in 2014 for his disaster recovery work. With that kind of track record, this concept should be part of the discussion as Texas struggles to recover from Harvey.