In late 2024, as part of a bipartisan funding bill, Congress authorized $110 billion in disaster recovery funds across federal agencies. Following Congress’ appropriation, The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced how their $12 billion tranche of disaster recovery funding would be divided among disaster-impacted communities at the city, county, and state levels. This funding, known as Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery or CDBG-DR is intended to be flexible and allow recipients to design programs that respond to the local post-disaster needs. Usually CDBG-DR programs fall into one of three categories: housing, infrastructure repair, or economic revitalization.
Disasters and the complicated process of recovering from them can deepen pre-existing inequality—a study of FEMA disaster aid on a county level found that awards exacerbated the racial wealth gap. The longer communities must wait for disaster funds to flow, the greater the financial and emotional strain on households.
Now that CDBG-DR funds have been allocated, there’s an enormous opportunity across 23 states and one territory not just to rebuild, but to create more equitable and resilient communities in the face of growing risk.
What climate leaders and program administrators can do
Following years of pressure by disaster survivors and advocates, HUD recently changed its program requirements to make disaster recovery more equitable. As cities, counties, and states that received CDBG-DR allocations create their required action plans to submit to the federal government, they should keep in mind the following recommendations alongside input from disaster survivors.
Stick to 70%
Federal rules around CDBG-DR funding require that 70% of funds be spent on activities that benefit low-to-moderate income households who find it harder to recover from increasingly severe and frequent disasters. Recipients of CDBG-DR funds can request to have that threshold lowered to 51%. An audit of CDBG-DR programs from 2001-2019 found that 137 of 193 grantees reviewed had reduced their requirement to 51%. At a time when more and more Americans are experiencing damage and displacement from extreme weather as a pocketbook issue, it’s critical that public officials, from local governments all the way up to HUD staff, honor the 70% requirement.
Dovetail and accommodate to deepen impact
Disasters don’t occur in a vacuum—those that struggle to access long-term recovery assistance are often facing multiple challenges, something program administrators acknowledge, but find difficult to address. In order to design and implement impactful long-term recovery, investments should be made in accommodations that ensure equitable access to recovery resources like providing transportation and home visit options for mobility-impaired residents and ensuring language accessible program materials.
In addition to providing accommodations, administrators should also dovetail disaster recovery applications with trusted local programs that already reach vulnerable populations to deepen impact. A key challenge when homes are damaged or lost during a disaster is to ensure that eligibility requirements are inclusive and don’t worsen disparities.
Take for example, the residents of heirs’ properties—where homes are passed down through generations without legal title. Heirs’ property is a common practice in Black communities born out of discrimination by lending institutions and the government and can make navigating disaster recovery programs especially difficult.
Following years of advocacy, including a lawsuit by disaster survivors in North Carolina, the federal government now requires programs to allow for alternate means of demonstrating ownership. After identifying heirs’ properties through disaster recovery efforts, survivors could be “funneled” into legal clinics to resolve their title issues and safeguard family wealth. Administrative pipelines between disaster programs and other services for populations that struggle to access aid hold enormous potential to improve public health outcomes and advance economic and racial justice.
Remember renters
Across the country, more people rent their homes than ever before. Despite a long-term trend in increased rentership and heightened political urgency around the affordable housing crisis, renters receive less initial disaster aid compared with homeowners. In the days and weeks after a disaster, renters may face dubious evictions and illegal price gouging when trying to secure alternative housing.
While long-term recovery programs can’t prevent these costly and stressful experiences, they can be designed to be more responsive to renters’ needs. This might look like increasing the supply of meaningfully affordable housing by deepening subsidies for new development, repairing or providing resilience upgrades to existing affordable housing without pricing out tenants, preserving long-term affordability by transferring rental properties into a community land trust, or investing in legal services for renters.
A drop in the resilience bucket
CDBG-DR funds will not meet all the resilience or housing needs of disaster-impacted communities. Other parts of the $110 billion disaster spending package passed will address different types of recovery efforts—from improving water systems to repairing public facilities and supporting agricultural recovery.
Still, this funding is a drop in the bucket. Communities across the country deserve proactive and equitable investment in the face of growing climate risk and an affordable housing crisis. Until there’s the political will to make those life-saving investments—and to curb emissions to limit how much worse fossil-fueled climate disasters get—every drop in the resilience bucket counts and should be invested in ways that have the most equitable impact.