Harvey recovery cost staggering
Texas is facing a critical shortage of manufactured housing and the cost of even the most basic units to temporarily house the thousands of Texans displaced by Harvey can cost as much as $140,000, Land Commissioner George P. Bush told a legislative panel on Monday.
“It is almost becoming as expensive to get a manufactured house as it is to build a home,” Bush told the House Urban Affairs Committee.
The Urban Affairs panel and the House Appropriations Committee held hearings in nearby ballrooms at a hotel on campus to get an assessment on what is being done and how much it might cost to rebuild the Texas Coast after the worst natural disaster to strike the region in memory.
Bush, a first-term Republican, was tapped by Gov. Greg Abbott to coordinate the statefederal response aimed at meeting the immediate need for housing. The land office is acting as the liaison between local officials and the Federal Emergency Management Administration to determine how best to either get people back into their homes or into alter- native accommodations.
The bottom line, Bush said, is that it could take from seven months to two-and-a-half years to get people permanently situated.
“A lot of people are going to make a lot of money in manufactured housing,” Bush said.
The units, he said, are typically about 430 square feet with one or two bedrooms and a kitchen.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, a former member of the Texas House, told the Appropriations Committee that the cost of coping with Harvey’s destruction will be stratospheric.
He said 27 trillion gallons of rain fell on Houston and surrounding communities in a matter of hours after the storm that crashed the Coastal Bend with Category 4 winds turned up the Gulf Coast. The cost of hauling away the mountains of debris from thousands of flooded homes and businesses will reach $260 million.
Fortunately, he added, the federal government will pick up
90% of the tab.
The cost of rebuilding the government-owned buildings in the Houston area will reach about $175 million, Turner said. The city’s insurance tops out at
$100 million, he added.