Harvey survivors must take priority
Political wrangling doesn’t help thousands who remain displaced or in damaged homes.
The city blames the state. The state’s General Land Office says the City of Houston has done so poorly administering its Harvey homeowner assistance program that it has no choice but to take over the $400 million in federal funds.
While they fight, thousands of Houston residents — some still waving the blue tarp distress flag on their roofs — wait for help years over due.
While they fight, while Mayor Sylvester Turner and Land Commissioner George P. Bush exchange barbed correspondence and sound bites, 58-year-old Mark Anthony Rubiois sleeping in what was once his living room.
Shortly after the disaster, he got $3,800 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, most of which he used to elevate his Southeast Houston home. He was then told he qualified for an emergency repair program administered by the state. Contractors showed up, tore up his kitchen and bathroom, he says, but found that the repairs needed would go beyond the $20,000 covered.
Rubio says his GLO case manager told him to instead apply to another program that funded up to $60,000 per home. He was denied, he appealed, and received $1,800. He used most of it for roof repair and was left with a choice: kitchen or bathroom?
He put a blanket over the kitchen door and pulled out the toilet and tub from the debris left by the contractors. That was two years ago. Weary of eating fast food, his health flagging, he moved his stove and refrigerator into the living room. He washes dishes in his tub.
“I’m going day-by-day, hour-to-hour, but I got closer to God over all this,” Rubio told the editorial board. “I couldn’t count on man.”
Where was the city during all of this? As far as he could tell, nowhere.
“At least the GLO returned my calls,” he said.
City officials readily admit that its program got off to a rough start. With federal funds available by early 2019, things looked promising. By August, the city’s Harvey housing recovery chief was gone and only 15 homes had seen any work. Even with a refocused effort, the latest program report shows repairs have begun on 59 homes and 44 homeowners have been reimbursed.
Meanwhile, as of last week, the state can point to completed work on 1,227 homes in 48 counties affected by Harvey outside Harris County and 2,657 approved applications.
It is that disparity that led Harris County to agree to give up its own homeowner assistance program to the GLO, Josh Stuckey, interim director of the county’s Community Services Department, told the editorial board.
The county is in worse shape than the city, having started no construction at all — a failure that Stuckey, who began his role in February, attributes to a botched roll out by the contractor originally processing applications and the county’s own inability to scale up to meet the program’s complex demands.
The GLO’s administration of the federal aid program that did some limited repair work on 10,000 homes after Harvey gave it a head start on working with contractors and a large applicant list.
“Seeing that momentum and seeing how well they do it, it just makes sense that if they’re wanting to come and do it in Harris County, that’s probably the best thing for constituents,” Stuckey said.
The city sees it differently.
Tom McCasland, head of the Houston Housing and Community Development Department, said delays are partly the result of the city prioritizing the most vulnerable low-income applicants, many elderly, whose cases take longer to process. Those folks, he says, would lose out on the limited pool of funding if the state took over.
“I would gladly step back from this, except for the fact that the folks who were left behind in Ike will be left behind here if the GLO runs this program the way they’ve run it in the balance of the state,” he told the editorial board Friday.
Not so, says the GLO, whose spokeswoman Brittany Eck points out that the federal government requires 70 percent of all funds to benefit low-to-moderate income individuals, and that so far 80 percent of their applicants fall under that category.
Turner said the city will take “all necessary legal steps” to keep control of the funds and railed against what he called a hostile takeover and state threats to wrest away all of Houston’s Harvey housing programs.
City officials maintain the GLO — which must approve any application for repair funds as part of its federal contract — has acted in bad faith, in part by forcing Houston to jump through hoops it doesn’t require of its own staff.
“The GLO’s lack of capacity for reviewing our files, their ongoing technical issues, their failure to provide clear and consistent guidance for what they needed up front, and their slow-walking of many of the other documents required for our recovery programs contributed to the delay Commissioner Bush now uses to attempt to strip the city of its funding,” Turner said in a statement, calling Bush’s decision “politics.”
GLO’s contention that it is only acting in the best interest of Harvey victims is hard to accept given its track record, and how similar its threats track with Gov. Greg Abbott’s attacks on local control.
GLO also has a clear advantage as both player and referee in processing and approving applications, making direct comparisons to performance of local agencies unfair.
The federal funding contract with
HUD has a completion date of 2024. We believe, given the city’s recent progress, it could ramp up to meet its deadline. The question here isn’t simply who can help the most Houstonians the fastest, but who will ensure that in our haste, we don’t leave the neediest in the dust.
The best way forward is for Houston and the state to work together. The city’s delay is flatly unacceptable, but so is the state’s excessive red tape. Bush and the GLO should let Houston administer funds under clear guidance and the same rules it sets for itself. Going forward, the city should be honest about how many cases it can truly handle.
People should come before any bureaucratic spat or political tit for tat. Figure it out, leaders.
No one — not Bush, not Turner, nor any heavy hand over at the governor’s office — should ask Houstonians to stay patient when residents such as Rubio are cooking in the living room and bracing for the next storm.