Disaster Recovery Shouldn’t Start Over
When the United States’ Accountability Office (GAO) looked at why some states rebuilt homes faster than others after the 2017 hurricanes, one finding stood out: The two states spending recovery money the fastest, Texas and Florida, had more recent experience running federal disaster housing programs. Those states weren't more generous and didn't have smaller caseloads. They had done this kind of work recently.
Few officials in disaster recovery talk about this, and governments keep acting against it. Experience is the single most valuable asset in a recovery. That includes the staff who know the federal rules, the case management systems that already work, and the case managers who already know which families are still waiting and why. Too often, governments let all of that disappear between storms or partway through a recovery.
The federal program makes this harder. Disaster housing money flows through Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery funds. The program has never been made permanent, so HUD issues new rules with each appropriation. There have been more than 80 Federal Register notices since 2001. A HUD-commissioned study found that housing recovery takes 4.7 years on average, partly because the rules change from one disaster to the next. A 2019 HUD-funded study cited by GAO found that all but one grantee struggled to build a grant management system, and those struggles delayed their programs.
If Washington makes every recovery start from scratch, state and local governments shouldn't add to the problem.
The U.S. Virgin Islands shows what happens when capacity breaks down. Nearly nine years after Irma and Maria, contractors in the territory's housing repair program said this year that millions in unpaid invoices had forced work stoppages and left homeowners waiting. The territory's own recovery director acknowledged that the program "has had many issues in the past with payments, with overall processing." Contracting had become complicated enough that in 2023 the territory hired an outside law firm just to manage it.
Compare that with Lee County, Florida. Four years after Hurricane Ian, the county is still running its housing recovery with the teams it hired for the job. The county kept one firm, Hunt, Guillot & Associates, on program implementation and staffing. When its housing program manager, HORNE, merged into BDO late last year, the county updated the company name on the contract and kept the program going. This spring, Lee County renewed the housing contract for another year under its original terms. The program never had to stop and restart, and families never had to wait while a new team learned their cases from scratch.
That approach should be more common. Every time a recovery program changes hands, through staff turnover, a reorganization, or a new contract, something gets lost: case files, data systems, working knowledge of federal rules, and relationships with the families still waiting. Those families rarely see that cost, but they're the ones who pay it
Continuity shouldn't mean a blank check. Since 2022, GAO has urged HUD to require grantees to track how long applications sit at each step of the process, and that priority recommendation was still open this July. Governments should demand that data from every team they hire and use it to judge results. Programs that are getting families home should be allowed to keep going, and programs that aren't should change course.
The default should change, too. Too often, a recovery program's progress is lost to a deadline, a reorganization, or a change in leadership. Each of those moments should be a time to measure results and protect whatever is working. When the next storm hits, the communities that have kept their experienced teams will recover fastest.