‘A good step forward’ on road to Harvey recovery
Bush, Turner reach deal on doling out millions in repair funds
Mayor Sylvester Turner and Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush have resolved their battle for control of Houston’s Hurricane Harvey home repair program, capping a monthslong feud that went all the way to the Texas Supreme Court.
Under a new plan that still must be approved by the Houston City Council and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, state officials would oversee the city’s largest recovery program, a more than $400 million effort to repair or replace single-family homes damaged in the storm. Turner’s housing department would retain $835 million to administer the remaining programs, including one devoted to repairing and constructing affordable multifamily housing projects.
City Council will consider the new plan at its Feb. 3 meeting, Houston Housing Department Director Tom McCasland told the council housing committee Tuesday. The Texas General Land Office, which oversees Texas’ Harvey recovery, also must submit the agreement to federal housing
officials, who will have 45 days to approve it.
“This is a good step forward,” McCasland said. “It brings us back into the position we should be in with the state as our partner, as opposed to being in an adversarial position with them.”
The agreement comes two years after Houston launched its Harvey recovery effort, which initially was based on a plan approved by City Council in June 2018. City officials since have come under frequent criticism for the pace of the single-family repair program, and by last March had begun repairs on just 59 homes and reimbursed 44 homeowners for out-of-pocket expenses.
The following month, Bush informed Turner he would ask federal officials for control over the city’s $1.28 billion in recovery grant funds, arguing his agency could pick up the pace. In a letter to the mayor, Bush also offered to let the city “negotiate the possible retention” of most of its programs as long as it first relinquished control of the funds. GLO officials later made clear they intended only to take control of the single-family program, similar to an agreement they worked out with Harris County.
By the end of December, the city had finished reconstructing or rehabilitating 164 single-family homes and sent out 119 reimbursement checks. On Friday, the GLO announced the end of its own reimbursement program for Harvey-damaged homes across 48 counties outside Harris County. Agency officials said the GLO had sent $86 million in reimbursements to 2,961 Texans, and earlier in the week had rebuilt its 2,500th home — a disparity city officials say is partly due to the GLO slowwalking city paperwork, a charge agency officials deny.
Turner fought the takeover in court, but the Texas Supreme Court last August effectively gave the GLO the green light to commandeer the program. HUD approved the takeover in October, at which point Bush gave the city a month to wrap up its recovery programs. Days before the deadline, city and state officials agreed to delay the takeover until they finalized the new deal.
In the end, state officials are set to take over about $440 million from the city, most of which will be spent on repairing or reconstructing damaged single-family homes. The General Land Office also is taking control of a portion of the city’s program dedicated to building new homes for low-income Harvey victims in less floodprone
areas.
The city, meanwhile, will retain control of its program to buy out and demolish repeatedly flooded homes, along with one for repairing or building new rental properties of up to seven units.
The city also will receive an additional $10 million to run its homebuyer assistance program, which provides down payments and other financial aid for Harvey victims to buy new homes. And the city will keep $72 million from
its single-family program to wrap up existing projects.
Ben Hirsch, an organizer and policy advocate for West Street Recovery, a disaster recovery organization, said city and state officials should have resolved their differences long ago, though he said it was hard to assign blame to any one person or government entity.
“Ultimately, Harvey was a huge disaster, and the response hasn’t been adequate for low-income, especially Black and brown, homeowners,”
Hirsch said. “There’s no way to soberly look at the situation and say, ‘The system did a good job.’”
Still, Hirsch said he views it as a positive outcome that the city will retain its multifamily rental program, which GLO officials acknowledge has been successfully run.
“They get to keep the thing that they believe will be the most impactful in reducing the housing crunch in the city in the long run,” Hirsch said.
The new agreement also will include benchmarks for each recovery program that the city must periodically meet to retain control of the funds, GLO spokeswoman Brittany Eck said, noting that the prior deal also included targets but did not explicitly require the city to meet them to keep the grant money.
The agency did not have a list of the new benchmarks available Tuesday. McCasland told council members the city remains on track to finish its programs by August 2024, even though the federally set deadline has been pushed back to August 2025.
In the meantime, GLO officials are freeing up $648 million of the city’s new Harvey budget to be spent until federal officials approve
the plan, allowing city housing officials to continue running their existing programs. The city is not expected to spend nearly that much money before receiving federal approval, however.
McCasland said he also planned to ask federal housing officials to extend the deadline for homeowners to apply for reimbursements to cover out-of-pocket expenses on their Harvey-damaged homes. The GLO announced in December it would free up another $10 million for reimbursements, but the Dec. 31 deadline for applications since has passed.
Housing officials also will ask City Council to approve about $1 million in revenue from Houston’s tax increment reinvestment zones to cover the cost of building an additional bedroom for 54 rebuilt Harvey-damaged homes. Houston and Harris County in 2019 asked the GLO for waivers that would exempt them from the agency’s rule barring local governments from using federal Harvey recovery funds to rebuild a home with more bedrooms than the number of people living there, but the agency denied the request, fearing Texas would face the risk of an audit by HUD.