[Senate Hearing 111-86]
[From the U.S. Government Printing Office]
S. Hrg. 111-86
A NEW WAY HOME: FINDINGS FROM THE
DISASTER RECOVERY SUBCOMMITTEE SPECIAL
REPORT AND WORKING WITH THE NEW
ADMINISTRATION ON A WAY FORWARD
=======================================================================
HEARING
before the
AD HOC SUBCOMMITTEE ON DISASTER RECOVERY
of the
COMMITTEE ON
HOMELAND SECURITY AND
GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
UNITED STATES SENATE
ONE HUNDRED ELEVENTH CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
__________
MARCH 18, 2009
__________
Available via http://www.gpoaccess.gov/congress/index.html
Printed for the use of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs
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COMMITTEE ON HOMELAND SECURITY AND GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS
JOSEPH I. LIEBERMAN, Connecticut, Chairman
CARL LEVIN, Michigan SUSAN M. COLLINS, Maine
DANIEL K. AKAKA, Hawaii TOM COBURN, Oklahoma
THOMAS R. CARPER, Delaware JOHN McCAIN, Arizona
MARK PRYOR, Arkansas GEORGE V. VOINOVICH, Ohio
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana JOHN ENSIGN, Nevada
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
JON TESTER, Montana
ROLAND W. BURRIS, Illinois
MICHAEL F. BENNET, Colorado
Michael L. Alexander, Staff Director
Brandon L. Milhorn, Minority Staff Director and Chief Counsel
Trina Driessnack Tyrer, Chief Clerk
AD HOC SUBCOMMITTEE ON DISASTER RECOVERY
MARY L. LANDRIEU, Louisiana, Chairman
CLAIRE McCASKILL, Missouri LINDSEY GRAHAM, South Carolina
ROLAND W. BURRIS, Illinois
Donny Williams, Staff Director
Andy Olson, Minority Staff Director
Kelsey Stroud, Chief Clerk
C O N T E N T S
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Opening statements:
Page
Senator Landrieu............................................. 1
Senator Graham............................................... 4
WITNESSES
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Nancy Ward, Acting Administrator, Federal Emergency Management
Agency, U.S. Department of Homeland Security................... 5
Nelson R. Bregon, General Deputy Assistant Secretary, Office of
Community Planning and Development, U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development, accompanied by Milan Ozdinek, Deputy
Assistant Secretary, Office of Public Housing and Voucher
Programs....................................................... 10
Karen Paup, Co-Director, Texas Low Income Housing Information
Service........................................................ 17
Krystal Williams, Executive Director, Louisiana Housing Alliance. 19
Sheila Crowley, MSW, Ph.D., President, National Low Income
Housing Coalition.............................................. 20
Reilly Morse, Senior Attorney, Katrina Recovery Office,
Mississippi Center for Justice................................. 22
Alphabetical List of Witnesses
Bregon, Nelson R.:
Testimony.................................................... 10
Prepared statement........................................... 36
Crowley, Sheila, Ph.D.:
Testimony.................................................... 20
Prepared statement with attachments.......................... 91
Morse, Reilly:
Testimony.................................................... 22
Prepared statement........................................... 102
Paup, Karen:
Testimony.................................................... 17
Prepared statement with attachments.......................... 39
Ward, Nancy:
Testimony.................................................... 5
Prepared statement........................................... 27
Williams, Krystal:
Testimony.................................................... 19
Prepared statement........................................... 86
APPENDIX
Letter dated April 8, 2009 and prepared statement from Equity and
Inclusion Campaign Housing Working Group....................... 111
Questions and responses submitted for the Record from:
Ms. Paup..................................................... 118
Mr. Bregon................................................... 146
Ms. Ward..................................................... 150
A NEW WAY HOME: FINDINGS FROM THE
DISASTER RECOVERY SUBCOMMITTEE
SPECIAL REPORT AND WORKING WITH THE
NEW ADMINISTRATION ON A WAY FORWARD
----------
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 18, 2009
U.S. Senate,
Ad Hoc Subcommittee on Disaster Recovery,
of the Committee on Homeland Security
and Governmental Affairs,
Washington, DC.
The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 3:39 p.m., in
room SD-342, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Mary
Landrieu, Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding.
Present: Senators Landrieu and Graham.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR LANDRIEU
Senator Landrieu. The Subcommittee for Disaster Recovery
will come to order.
Let me begin by welcoming our witnesses, both our first
panel and our second, and begin by apologizing for the lateness
of the start. It was unavoidable. We had four stacked, 10-
minute votes on the floor. That was scheduled this morning. Of
course, this hearing was scheduled weeks ago, so I really
apologize.
Our Ranking Member, Senator Graham, will be with us
momentarily, and we voted as early as we could so we could get
started.
Let me welcome you both and because of this late start, I
would like to do my opening statement, then recognize our
Ranking Member. I understand, Ms. Ward, you have a plane to
catch later to actually head down to the Gulf Coast area in
Louisiana, so we most certainly do not want you to miss your
plane. We are happy for the attention and focus.
So I think what we will do is we will go right to opening
statements, and, Mr. Bregon, if you do not mind, we will do
questions first, and then come back to our HUD witness, and we
will try to expedite this.
And my Ranking Member is joining me. I just told them,
Senator, that we were delayed unavoidably because of four
stacked votes, and it would have been impossible for us to come
back and forth between each one. So we made the decision
together to start as soon as we could after the series of
votes.
I am going to start with an opening statement, and then we
will go forward with this hearing.
Today, of course, we have come to have our first hearing
finalizing a 9-month investigation of the many problems
associated with the Federal Government's response to the great
housing need created by not just the storms, Hurricanes Rita
and Katrina; not just in Louisiana, but Mississippi, to some
degree Alabama, and Texas; but also the failed response to the
catastrophic flooding that exacerbated an already terrible
situation. And this is the report. I want to say that my
Ranking Member was not the Ranking Member when this report
started, so I want to thank him for his cooperation with this
hearing. He, of course, has reviewed--and his staff--this
report and will have his own comments.
But I want to begin before my formal remarks by saying this
is not an ``I got you'' hearing, but this is a hearing to
suggest that there are some startling findings that have been a
result of this report. And it is to lay the groundwork for a
better response for the future, and that is what we remain
hopeful for as we move forward.
I would like to begin with one story, but this could be a
thousand stories of people in the Gulf region who found
themselves at their wits' end after this storm and our failed
response. This is Dr. Catchings, a college professor from
Biloxi, Mississippi, who wanted to rent to families who needed
housing because of the hurricanes. She owned four rental houses
there and rents to low-income families with children. FEMA's
red tape stopped Dr. Catchings from renting to hurricane
survivors she wanted to help. She accepted State loans for
repairs she needed to do after Hurricane Katrina. Later, she
was told that this meant she could not rent to hurricane
survivors who were getting help from FEMA or from HUD because
this would be what the Federal Government called ``duplication
of benefits.'' Worse still, Dr. Catchings was originally told
that accepting State loans would not prevent her from renting
to hurricane survivors.
So what was the result of the government's rule? A landlord
who had houses before the storm, who wanted to repair them to
put survivors in after the storm, to get people out of trailers
and into houses, was told that this was against the rules.
Two rental apartments sat empty, which could have been
homes to these families who needed homes after the hurricanes.
These letters are in the thousands. They are in Senator
Cochran's office. They are in my office. They are in Senator
Vitter's office, our congressional delegation.
So, today, we only had time to tell one story, but this
report could tell thousands of stories about the failed
response. We need to improve.
Hurricanes Rita and Katrina and the manmade catastrophic
flood that followed have been well documented and were
horrific. But it was magnified exponentially when survivors
registered for FEMA's Disaster Housing Programs.
Last month, the Subcommittee concluded a 9-month
investigation into Federal Disaster Housing Programs and our
Nation's failed response. The report details that the prior
Administration's efforts in large measure were dysfunctional
and wasteful. Housing response contributed actually to making
the disaster even worse.
In this flood, more than 1.2 million homes were damaged,
far outstripping any disaster of its kind in recent memory.
While the storms ravaged the Gulf Coast nearly 4 years ago,
which will be 4 years this August, thousands remain without
permanent housing and thousands more are still rebuilding their
homes and are still waiting for either Federal assistance,
State assistance, local assistance, or some nonprofit to come
to their aid.
This report is a comparison analysis of what went wrong. It
is also a blueprint for how this current Administration can now
fix the Federal response. We reviewed more than 100,000 pages
of documents. The staff met with 70 housing officials, traveled
to the impacted areas numerous times.
After this exhaustive investigation, we are left with the
overarching conclusion that, after spending $15 billion on
housing programs, much of it was spent inadequately, unsafely,
on short-term housing like trailers and mobile homes; even more
than after six pieces of legislation were introduced to attempt
to fix it and numerous public hearings, FEMA still remains
unprepared to this day to adequately provide--or HUD, for that
matter--catastrophic housing, in the event of a catastrophic
disaster.
First, we found--and I am going to go through these as
quickly as I can in the next 2 minutes. FEMA in 2002--now this
is prior to the current Administration at the table. In 2002,
their own internal documents demonstrated that they were not
prepared. This is clear from this report.
Second, it seems as though at some point early after the
storms, which is indicated in here, FEMA rejected HUD's
overtures to try to step in and help, recognizing, I guess, on
HUD's part that FEMA was just not equipped to handle--they are
not a housing agency. HUD was. They thought they could help.
Those efforts were rejected. This was a tragic decision, as
this report concludes.
Third, this issue that resulted from ``purchase trailers
until I say `Stop' ''--which is the testimony of one of these
officials that was asked what their policy was, and that was
the dictate in the testimony, ``Purchase trailers until I say
`Stop' ''--is curious to me because what we also discovered was
if trailers were supposed to be the answer, either mobile homes
or travel trailers--remember, travel trailers at 16 feet by 8
feet--it is curious as to how that could be the plan if 300,000
people or 400,000 families needed shelter, since we only
manufacture 12,000 a month in the United States of America. So
we would have had to tap almost 100 percent of the market and
still at that rate would have taken months to get the trailers
to put people in. There was no back-up plan, which is very
concerning.
Fourth, trailers are expensive. According to a DHS
Inspector General, the total cost of providing a single trailer
for 18 months was $59,150 on the low end. Installing a much
larger mobile home trailer was over $100,000. What is
disturbing is hundreds, if not thousands, Mr. Bregon and Ms.
Ward, of these trailers are sitting in places like Hope,
Arkansas, and throughout the country now rotting away, unable
to be used for the next disaster, and money spent and wasted in
that way.
And, finally, it seems as though the lawyers with FEMA
continue to make very narrow interpretations of legal
authority, resulting in very inflexible rules and decisions
that led us to this. So we say, as usual, here we can blame the
lawyers as well. We think they had authority, but they chose
not to use it. We want to find out why.
Hundreds of thousands of people may have unjustifiably been
denied housing assistance. These are not just low-income
families but middle-income families that we believe were denied
any assistance because of very strict rules and regulations--
not because of strict rules and regulations but strict
interpretation of the Stafford Act.
So the recommendations are as follows: Allow a rental
repair program that makes sense for FEMA to begin repairing in
a catastrophe like this the rental units available for people
to live in. HUD should take the lead, in our opinion. Explore
using military repair teams. Create additional authority with
flexibility, hopefully with common sense, driven by
intelligence. Reforming the institutions is imperative.
Improving and simplifying processes and, obviously, this report
leads us to the conclusion that we must very soon have a plan,
either a FEMA plan or a HUD plan or a combination plan.
As I have said--and I will conclude with this--my Ranking
Member is familiar with hurricanes. They happen in his
territory as well. But one day, an earthquake is going to hit
Memphis or a tsunami is going to hit Seattle or a major
hurricane is going to hit Long Island, like it did in 1938 when
the population was much less, and let this Senator say clearly:
A plan to put people in travel trailers and mobile homes in
Times Square or in Long Island will not work. It did not work
well in New Orleans in the Gulf Coast. It is not going to work
in North Carolina or South Carolina. We need a smart,
intelligent plan that recognizes the dimensions and scale and
nuances and characteristics of a catastrophic disaster.
So I am committed, as Chairman of this Subcommittee, with
the able help of my Ranking Member, to continue to get to the
bottom of what happened, not so much for the purposes of
wasting a lot of time blaming, but to lay a foundation for a
future blueprint and development.
Senator Graham, I will turn it over to you for a comment.
OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR GRAHAM
Senator Graham. Well, very briefly, the work you have put
into this has been extraordinary. I was not on the Subcommittee
before, so I have a lot of catching up to do. But you can tell
from the report that you have paid a lot of time and attention
to this.
The fact that no one was prepared for a million displaced
families is not shocking. Four years later, I think we probably
should have made more progress. And you are right, the next
disaster is right around the corner. I hope it is never like
this again, but learn from our mistakes and try to get squared
away for future events. And I look forward to being part of the
Subcommittee, and this is something that Republicans and
Democrats should come together pretty quickly on because when
one of these storms hits or a catastrophe hits, no one asks
your party affiliation, and that is the attitude I am going to
have working with Senator Landrieu.
Senator Landrieu. Thank you, Senator. I look forward to
working with you. We have been together on many different
efforts, and I think this one will be successful as well.
Let me now turn it over to Ms. Ward, and thank you very
much again for your patience.
TESTIMONY OF NANCY WARD,\1\ ACTING ADMINISTRATOR, FEDERAL
EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT AGENCY, U.S. DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND
SECURITY
Ms. Ward. Thank you, and good afternoon, Senator Landrieu
and Ranking Member Graham. It is a privilege to appear before
you today on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security and
the Federal Emergency Management Agency. As always, we
appreciate your interest in and continued support of the
challenging field of disaster recovery--specifically, disaster
housing.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Ward appears in the Appendix on
page 27.
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Let me first acknowledge right from the start, Senator,
that I commend you on a thorough report, and after reviewing
your findings and your recommendations as they are
characterized in the report, I can say there is very little, if
anything, I disagree with. You have outlined the problems. We
acknowledge that there have been problems. And your
recommendations are valid and ones that I see great opportunity
in working with you on.
The report recognizes what we, FEMA, and all of our housing
partners have continuously reiterated, which is that one of the
most challenging aspects of the recovery process is disaster
housing, and how those challenges intensify and increase in a
catastrophic event. Many of your recommendations are addressed
by and reflected in the National Disaster Housing Strategy, so
I know we have a common vision on what needs to be
accomplished.
I truly believe that this issue will not be solved until a
national dialogue on disaster housing happens in this country,
and that discussion must include all stakeholders. In a
catastrophic event, we have learned that no single entity is
capable of meeting all of the needs of housing, and it is
foolish to continue to move forward under that premise. I
believe the National Disaster Housing Strategy is the basis for
this discussion. It is itself a fluid document meant to set
universal frameworks that ensure a common set of principles
allowing all housing stakeholders the necessary tools to create
a concrete implementation plan. This strategy defines and
outlines the intersection and interaction of Federal, State,
and local roles, responsibilities, resources, and options.
Further, and perhaps most importantly, this strategy recognizes
and reinforces the need for all parties to plan and
operationally prepare to play a much greater role in disaster
housing.
The launching point for the National Disaster Housing
Strategy is the establishment of the Joint Housing Task Force.
The task force is currently being organized and will engage and
interact with all key stakeholders to not only initiate the
national dialogue, but establish the deliberate planning
framework to provide States, tribes, and local governments the
support they need to become engaged partners.
Let me also say that while the housing strategy is a good
basis to start, it is not the panacea for all housing
challenges. By bringing together State, local, and tribal
partners to the table, other Federal agencies into the national
discussion, and seeking expertise and ideas from the private
sector, we will leave no stone unturned to seeking solutions.
And we can only achieve this consensus when the dialogue starts
at the beginning with everyone's ideas and thoughts integrated
into one comprehensive plan.
Secretary Napolitano has already made her commitment to
improving intergovernmental coordination. Almost immediately
upon being confirmed, she issued Action Directives on improving
ties with State and local governments. The strategy echoes this
philosophy by highlighting the roles and responsibilities of
State and local governments, the need for closer collaboration,
and the encouragement of State-led housing task forces to
ensure that State and local governments are empowered and take
the lead in determining the best and appropriate housing
options to meet the needs of the residents of their States. And
the Federal Government has a responsibility and must assist
them in getting there.
To emphasize the Secretary's importance regarding this
issue, 2 weeks ago she and Secretary Donovan of HUD, as you
know, traveled to the Gulf Coast to assess outstanding recovery
needs and also collaborated on the extension of disaster to the
residents affected by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Secretary
Napolitano is committed to and has made strong efforts already
to partner with HUD and to explore opportunities to support the
Federal disaster housing mission. We hope to better align our
roles and responsibilities as you have outlined, with FEMA
focusing on the immediate and emergency needs of disaster
victims, such as sheltering and interim housing, and HUD taking
the lead in providing the expertise for long-term housing.
Senator we both know how important it is to get this right
for the American people. Secretary Napolitano wants to get it
right. President Obama's new nominee to FEMA, Craig Fugate,
will be an extraordinary leader in this area to get it right,
and together we will take your work and your recommendations
and move forward in a collective way forward to get it right.
Thank you.
Senator Landrieu. Thank you. I so appreciate those
comments, and let me get right into my questions, but I failed
in the introduction of you, which you most certainly deserve,
Ms. Ward, to say that you have been a long-time employee of
FEMA. Your career is very notable, your experience is
impressive, and I know the confidence that the new Secretary
had in you when she sent you down to New Orleans upon the
change in Administration to oversee or to give a report back as
to how our situation could be improved based on your long
experiences, I think it was, in District 9 out in California.
You mentioned the new FEMA Director nominee, and I am
looking forward to getting to know him better, but from what I
have spoken to, the professionals in the area seem to be very
impressed with his experience coming, I think, out of the
Florida district, because that is what the people of the Gulf
Coast are looking for, is just solid, experienced, qualified
leadership that can take a very tough situation and make it
better.
I would be remiss, however, if I did not begin by asking
you about the problems at the Transitional Recovery Office in
the Gulf Coast. I know it is not the subject of this, but we
notified your staff that I would be asking our question because
it is of such interest to the people that I represent.
Can you please give us a brief update about your review of
the New Orleans office? The charges that have been made by
employees there are very serious in terms of sexual harassment
and other issues, as well as some general dysfunction of the
way the office is being operated. I know that the report is not
finalized, but I must ask you to give a comment about where we
are and what some of the changes could potentially be.
Ms. Ward. Senator, I would be happy to. As you know, I was
sent to the Gulf to spend 5 or 6 days down there after the
stories of the allegations on the office broke, and I did
several things by going down there. I not only held all-hands
meetings at our facility, each of our facilities, I also just
walked around myself personally to each and every floor and
cubicle of the offices that we have down in Louisiana--the
three main ones, anyway. And you are absolutely right. I was
deeply concerned about some of the allegations, the fear, quite
honestly, of people coming forward to make allegations or to
complain, provide themselves with EEO counseling.
What we have done, as you know, is we did an initial
climate survey, and I heard loud and clear from the employees
there during the all-hands meetings that--not everybody got to
be heard. We only did a sampling of about 10 percent of the
people. So as of yesterday, we did an all-employee, online
survey to all the employees so that they could provide their
responses and their ideas, their concerns. We did it online
even though it was done outside of the Louisiana offices, in
offices here in Washington, DC, and the information is
confidential and will be compiled separately. In addition to
that, we have identified training that we will be conducting, a
series of training, quite honestly, not only for staff but for
line managers as well.
There are several formal complaints that are going through
their due process. I have to say, though, Senator, I know that
there was--and you and I spoke about the initial allegations of
30 complaints against one employee. That is not true. I am not
really sure where those numbers came from or what they were
derived from. As I offered to you previously, if you have that
information, I would gladly take and review it in the context
of the entire report.
But, nonetheless, it was disturbing to walk into an
environment that is under FEMA leadership and to see the kinds
of concerns that employees had about their general work
environment.
So we are making several recommendations to the Secretary
about work environment issues--training, communications, the
expanded survey. We are also making several organizational
structure recommendations to the Secretary, and we hope to have
those and be able to brief her within the next week. But I am
headed back down there to do more of the same, walking around
and providing staff another opportunity to meet with me
personally.
Senator Landrieu. Well, thank you. I think it is very
important for that exercise to continue because the people that
this office is attempting to serve are very interested in how
this office is functioning. If there was ever a FEMA office
that needed to function well, in tip-top shape, given the
challenges that it has been tasked with, it would be this one.
Ms. Ward. Absolutely.
Senator Landrieu. And it is so disturbing to find out that
not only are we not in tip-top shape, we could potentially be
the worst FEMA-run office. We do not know. But it has been very
disappointing. And so that is what I am hoping to see, some
real change, and the people that I represent want to see real
change.
I was happy to see this cooperative endeavor reached pretty
quickly in the early part of the Administration between FEMA
and HUD. I know HUD will testify to this as well, but could you
elaborate in some more detail about why you all came to that
conclusion, what is the essence of it, and what can we expect
to see because of this collaborative arrangement?
And let me for the record also say--I think those in the
room may know, but for those listening--to my knowledge, it
might have been the first time that actually two Secretaries
came together, both Secretary Napolitano and Secretary Donovan,
and I did not even have to ask them to do it, which was
wonderful. It signaled to me a real basic understanding that
this catastrophe is going to have to be a multi-faceted
approach from a variety of different Federal agencies, as well
as the State and private sector entities. But could you comment
about this cooperative agreement?
Ms. Ward. Well, I will speak for FEMA. I have been here in
Washington, Senator, working on the transition since September,
and I would have to say that the collaborativeness of both HUD
and FEMA, since I have been here, has been extraordinary. What
I think solidified that was the two Secretaries coming together
and to jointly feel that a real change needed to happen, not
just in Washington, but on the ground in what was happening
with the emerging programs and what we could do to support each
other in a much more collaborative way. That is my take since I
have been here since September.
I think the staff has always been collaborative. I think,
though, that we now have two Secretaries that are--their
expectations and their commitment to what has happened and
trying to change the future is very strong.
Senator Landrieu. And can you comment again on this Joint
Housing Task Force? Who is chairing it? Is it staffed, I am
assuming, with professional staffers from a variety of
different agencies? Would you comment more about that?
Ms. Ward. Yes. Currently, Senator, we have an acting
executive director, and, quite frankly, it is a long-time FEMA
employee, a Federal coordinating officer right now, only
because we did not want to wait. But we have not selected an
executive director purposely to allow the new administrator,
Administrator Fugate, to be able to select someone that shared
his vision, the Secretary's vision, because this person reports
directly to the office of the administrator. And we felt that
it was important based on Mr. Fugate's--or whoever was coming
in--we figured they would have expansive experience. But we
held off purposely before we hired an executive director.
We are in the process of hiring permanent staff. We also
have members from HUD, the VA, USDA, and the American Red
Cross.
Senator Landrieu. OK. Let me just ask something about this
rental repair program. Do you know how many units have been
repaired by FEMA under the pilot program that FEMA has
established currently? Do you know that number?
Ms. Ward. I think from the pilots that we have done, there
have been 36 in Texas and 12 in Iowa. Our report to Congress is
due by the end of this month, to be quite honest, and we are
hoping to see this as a permanent option for FEMA.
Senator Landrieu. Well, I would hope so because you can
imagine how heart-wrenching--that is really a good word--it is
to me to have really pressed so hard from a policy perspective
to have a rental repair program adopted, and only to be told
that it was not necessary; and then when we did get one, to
basically say it would only be prospective, not for Hurricanes
Katrina, Rita, or Wilma. So the Gulf Coast residents were
completely shut out of that. I am hoping that the new
Administration will revisit that given the billions of dollars
that have been wasted on temporary, inappropriate, and unsafe
housing when money could have been so much better spent
actually repairing the hundreds of historic structures that
might have been damaged but not completely destroyed from
Galveston to Mobile, and what has been lost, lost
opportunities, is just going to be very hard to ever really get
a handle on. But I would hope that the new Administration would
think that there is some better way than just, again, the
trailer option for housing people.
I have asked you about the task force. I have asked you
about the roles.
Let me just ask one thing about case management because
this is something that is right now with the extension of DHAP.
We have a plan for several thousand people. I want to make it
perfectly clear for the record that there are low-income
families in this group, but there are also working families
that are low-income, working families that have some modest
means. Also, based on HUD's analysis, about a third of this
group of 31,000 families were prior homeowners who are now
homeless homeowners. These are not chronic homeless. These were
homeowners that are now homeless because of the dysfunction of
this system.
How are we getting a handle on the case management issues
here. And I am going to ask HUD the same question, but, Ms.
Ward, if you would comment about this.
Ms. Ward. Well, I will just say that HUD does this very
well, but FEMA is evaluating four different types of programs,
either grants to States to help them with case management,
working with HUD in their DHAP, also working with HHS in their
Aid to Facilities and Children case management program as well.
So we agree with you, Senator, that it is not just
assistance via money or a voucher for a rental property. It is
case management wrap-around services for these folks. It is a
compendium of support and assistance that needs to be done, and
we could not agree with you more on that.
Senator Landrieu. OK. Thank you very much. Ms. Ward, you
have been very generous with your time. I appreciate it. And
why don't we go now to the HUD testimony, and please feel free
to step out when you need to. We understand, and we will have
many more hearings that we will expect you to be there the
whole time, but we understand today was a special situation.
Mr. Bregon.
TESTIMONY OF NELSON R. BREGON,\1\ GENERAL DEPUTY ASSISTANT
SECRETARY, OFFICE OF COMMUNITY PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT, U.S.
DEPARTMENT OF HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT, ACCOMPANIED BY
MILAN OZDINEK, DEPUTY ASSISTANT SECRETARY, OFFICE OF PUBLIC
HOUSING AND VOUCHER PROGRAMS
Mr. Bregon. Thank you, Senator Landrieu and Members of the
Subcommittee, for hearing my testimony here today. My name is
Nelson Bregon, and I am the General Deputy Assistant Secretary
for the Office of Community Planning and Development at HUD. It
is an honor to come before you today to discuss the
Subcommittee's Special Report, ``Far From Home: Deficiencies in
Federal Disaster Housing Assistance after Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita.''
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\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Bregon appears in the Appendix on
page 36.
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First of all, I would like to commend you, Senator
Landrieu, your Committee, your membership, including previous
Members of this Committee, and your entire staff for putting
together this wonderful report. With new leadership in the
White House and new Secretaries and their staff in place across
the Administration, we are re-evaluating and re-examining the
role that Federal agencies play in Federal disaster housing
assistance. A new Administration always ushers the opportunity
to take a fresh look at the way government does business, and
in regards to Federal disaster preparedness, this is an
opportunity that we must not waste.
Under the leadership of the new HUD Secretary Shaun
Donovan, we welcome the opportunity to fully consider and
discuss with our Federal partners the Special Report and the
National Disaster Housing Strategy, which was issued by the
previous Administration. It is clear that the report highlights
interagency issues to address and legislative proposals to
consider. We look forward to working with our partners on both
Capitol Hill and in other Federal agencies, particularly FEMA,
to resolve these issues and become effective leaders, as well
as partners, in disaster recovery.
At the direction of the President and in coordination with
the Subcommittee, Secretary Donovan joined with the Department
of Homeland Security Secretary Napolitano to recently visit the
communities in Louisiana and throughout the Gulf Coast. The
visit was both enlightening and confirmative. The Secretary,
through discussions with local leaders and housing advocates,
learned that while some progress has been made, still more must
be done. He noted several times during his visit and since
returning that he is personally committed to HUD's learning
from and improving on its experience from Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita.
It is in that spirit that I would now like to briefly
discuss some of the issues from the Special Report that HUD is
focusing on. HUD is considering a broad range of policy issues,
from its role in recovery to strategic partnerships in
providing long-term housing. Overall, the issues raised in the
Special Report are consistent with our internal examination of
agency-wide policies and practices that is being instituted by
Secretary Donovan.
HUD will be the center of governmental reform and renewal
in this Administration. As Secretary Donovan has been stating
publicly, we will invest at an unprecedented level in research
and evaluation, and we will hold ourselves accountable to the
highest standards. We strive to be results oriented, so we can
quickly learn from any missed opportunities and change. We will
revitalize our policy development and research organization,
and we will form broad partnerships with foundations,
universities, stakeholders, and State and local agencies on the
ground.
Last, I would like to say that change takes time, and at
the present, HUD is fully committed and engaged in reviewing
the issues detailed in the Special Report.
I again just want to thank you, Senator Landrieu, and the
Subcommittee for your time today, and I am happy to take any
questions that you may have. Thank you.
Senator Landrieu. Thank you, Mr. Bregon, and I do have
several. Let me say I do understand and the whole country
understands the tremendous challenges that HUD has before it
with the unprecedented housing crisis now engulfing the Nation.
And we recognize that the Gulf Coast is not the only area of
the country in crisis. But as I have said, while some actions
of financial markets and some irresponsible behavior of many
Americans have foreclosed their homes, or had their homes
foreclosed on, many of the people that I represent engaged in
none of that behavior, and Mother Nature and the Corps of
Engineers, when their levees failed, foreclosed on their homes.
And while I have often taken to the floor of the Senate and
explained that while having 10 percent of your homes in a
county, for instance, foreclosed on, 1 out of every 10, or 7
percent--and those are the high ranges in the counties in
Nevada and California--there is no county--or in our case,
parish, but no county in America that has the vacancy rate, the
uninhabitable--the numbers of homes that are uninhabitable
except to contrast with what is still the case in St. Bernard
Parish, in large parts of Orleans Parish, some parts of
Jefferson Parish, Cameron Parish, some counties in the coastal
areas of Texas, and the counties in Mississippi.
In St. Bernard's case, every single home except for five
out of 26,000 people was destroyed. Every single one. And I was
just there last week with your Secretary, and I still get
emotional going through St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th
Ward and in parts of Lakeview, 4 years later, to watch people
struggle to save their single most important asset to them,
financially and emotionally, caught in a system that totally
failed them in so many ways.
So I hope that you will communicate to the Secretary that
while we are very sensitive to the foreclosure issues and what
Americans need around the country to save their own homes,
there is still a huge problem for people in the Gulf Coast
area. And unless some of these laws coming out of the Banking
Committee are changed in terms of terminology to recognize
these needs of homeowners in the Gulf Coast, we will then have
the most unfortunate situation, spending billions of dollars,
and still not help them since the first couple billion we spent
went in such inappropriate ways, and now these billions coming
past us only seem to be helpful if you fail to pay your
mortgage because you got in financial difficulty, not if you
lost your job because of the storm or lost your home because of
the storm, etc.
So if you could take that one message back that one size
does not fit all, there are different needs in different parts
of the country, and we remain still in desperate need of
adequate housing.
So let me ask you if you believe--or let me say, Is it the
position of this new Administration that HUD should take the
lead role in housing in a catastrophic situation? And if that
is the policy, why?
Mr. Bregon. Madam Chairman, the Secretary, with his vast
knowledge of housing by being, first of all, a Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Multi-Family with the Department of Housing and
Urban Development under the Clinton Administration, and more
recently the Housing Commissioner in New York City, knows
exactly how to deal with large-scale issues as they relate to
housing.
In discussions with him, as we give him recommendations, he
feels that the Department of Housing and Urban Development is
the agency that has the knowledge and the infrastructure in
place to undertake this kind of assignment or mission, if you
will.
One of the concerns that we have at this point, Madam
Chairman, is that although we have the infrastructure and we
have the knowledge, in many instances if this is a large-scale
undertaking, we would need the resources, not only the
financial resources but the human resources as well, and the
legislative authority, to undertake some of the programs that
we would like to for long-term housing recovery.
As you have so well stated, the attorneys in other agencies
perhaps have interpreted the Stafford Act too narrowly,
preventing agencies from doing things that we feel as career
Federal employees that we could have done. So once I feel that
and the recommendation to the Secretary, which he is in
agreement at this point, is that if we are given the authority
and the financial resources, yes, we are the agency that can do
it, can do it well, and can do it quickly.
Senator Landrieu. Do you have any estimate of what those
resources might be at this point?
Mr. Bregon. Madam Chairman, I think that it all depends on
the extent of the disaster. I think we have some preliminary
estimates of what it would take to create an office that will
focus on disaster, not only recovery but prevention as well,
preparedness. We have some estimates that we could share with
you.
Senator Landrieu. OK. I would hope that you could get that
information as soon as you can to this Subcommittee so that we
can communicate that to our broad Committee, and also get the
information to the appropriators, which is very important.
But I have to play a little bit of the devil's advocate
here, if you will forgive me for this, because I know there is
a new HUD, and we certainly desperately need one. But in this
disaster, this pie chart will show that basically FEMA assisted
99 percent of the people for housing; HUD assisted less than 1
percent. So there were 718,000 people that FEMA assisted in
some shape, form, or fashion. That could be from sheltering all
the way to temporary rental assistance, hotel, vouchers of
various kinds, etc. And HUD assisted 1 percent. So making this
pie chart blue as opposed to red is going to take a serious
change.
On the second point--and I think the second panel will
speak to this even more directly than I can--some people would
say that of the 1 percent that HUD was supposed to take care
of, it did not work out so well for that 1 percent in terms of
the public housing, particularly.
So it is quite a challenge to think about the kinds of
housing and the kinds of families that are served, ranging from
your homeless population that was on the street before the
flood waters were there, and were there after, to your disabled
community, to your senior citizens that rent, to your senior
citizens that were homeowners but unable to do any repairs
because physically they just cannot do that, to your young
couples, young couples with children--I mean, on and on--public
housing folks, regular folks, all sorts of different kinds of
situations. And it is very difficult to really from my
perspective appreciate that none of the agencies up here seemed
to have a grasp of those special needs of all of those
communities and treat them with dignity and respect that they
deserved. And, again, not just a handout, but a hand-up based
on the fact that most of these families, whether they were
poor, wealthy, or middle class, were willing to do a lot for
themselves, but just never could get their footing or never
could get the right rules and regulations to really help them
to get back. And we do not even want to go into the faulty
system of insurance or the holes that existed for those
families that did have insurance.
And remember for the record that in our State and in
Mississippi and Texas, you were not required to have insurance
unless you had a mortgage. So you have the horrible situation
of people who had paid off their mortgage, who owned their
homes outright, who had sacrificed their whole life to make
those payments and had equity in their home for their
retirement or their children or their grandchildren to be the
first to go to college in their families--all of those dreams
are gone. So this is a significant piece of this recovery
because it is not just the house but it is the general wealth
of a community that is in large measure--or was--in their
homes.
Let me just see if there is one more question here. Can you
comment from your perspective on this rental repair program and
what HUD is thinking about in terms of its usefulness as we go
forward so we can think about something other than trailers,
but rental repairs in the community affected as well as maybe
vouchers and communities like Houston or Atlanta or Dallas in
our case that might work for a population temporarily
displaced?
Mr. Bregon. We feel that the rental rehab program is a very
important component in revitalizing a community, especially as
we look at long-term recovery. We have models of programs that
have been funded with the CDBG supplemental appropriations,
either administered by the Louisiana recovery agencies or in
Texas or in Mississippi by the Mississippi Development
Authority there. And we fully understand some of the concerns
that you have raised about what some agencies feel is perhaps a
duplication of benefits when they rehab a unit with FEMA monies
and then perhaps a tenant wants to use a voucher or some kind
of other subsidized program to rent that unit.
We in HUD are of the opinion that we do not consider that a
duplication of benefits. Under our CDBG program, the CDBG
program can be used for tenant-based rental assistance, the
same thing with Road Home. And I think again that was an
interpretation by some attorneys that was too narrow and too
strict.
So those are the things that we have to look at and, again,
engaging in conversations with our other Federal agencies early
on to look at those policies and determine what are the right
policies to implement to make these programs effective.
Senator Landrieu. OK. Two more questions, and then we will
move to our second panel. Are you aware of one of the legal
interpretations that we cite in here that required homeowners
that received Road Home grants through the Community
Development Block Grant fund that HUD runs--when they received
their Road Home payment--now this is true of Louisiana. I am
not sure this is true of Mississippi, but it may be. But in
Louisiana, when they received their Road Home grant--which the
average grant was $67,000, up to a maximum of $150,000--that
the lawyers required those homeowners to pay in full their
small business loan back, which to me defeats the whole purpose
of the grant.
Are you aware of that situation? And is there something
that you could potentially do to correct it.
Mr. Bregon. The CDBG supplemental appropriations were
distributed by formula to the five affected States, and
Louisiana received approximately around $10 billion of the
total $20 billion that were appropriated. The State of
Louisiana developed the Road Home program and administered the
Road Home program, and they did it as a compensation program,
unlike other States. Texas, for instance, instituted a
rehabilitation program, and that was the flexibility that the
legislation and the program provided to the State.
There was early interpretation--and you are correct--that
they felt that even unpaid taxes had SBA loans to be prepaid
before the net grant would be given to the homeowners, and
those were decisions that were made at the local level by the
Louisiana Redevelopment Authority and the company that they
hired to administer that program, CFI.
Senator Landrieu. OK. Well, they are not here to testify,
but I am going to have them respond in writing to that because
they were under the impression that this was required at the
Federal level. And I asked time and time again for relief.
I just cannot tell you how upsetting it is to homeowners
who were literally washed out of their homes, in many cases
their relatives drowning on the way out, to receive finally a
grant after 8 months of $75,000 to begin to repair a home that
was valued at $350,000 and nothing is left, to be told that
before they could get their hands on any of that money, they
had to pay off in full their SBA loan that they took out to
start their business again so that they could hire back not
just themselves but their neighbors or people that they
employed to go back to an area that had no one there because
they thought it was important for them as Americans to get back
to work. They were told by their Federal Government they had to
pay that loan back. And then they had to pay the taxes in full
to the entities--not the taxes, the mortgages to the mortgage
companies, and so basically they might have gotten the net of
$20,000 and stood in front of their house with $20,000 in hand
and their entire house destroyed. And for some reason, the Bush
Administration and the people that ran the show up until a few
months ago could never understand the problem with that. So I
hope you will take back to this new President that message, and
to Secretary Donovan, that I have some inkling they might
understand that and see what they can do to fix it.
The Secretary was with me at this hearing. We were at a
roundtable in New Orleans, and we were talking about the DHAP
Housing Choice Program, and this issue came up in our questions
and answers. Right now, I understand it is a little
complicated, but there is a law that requires HUD to count the
greater of the actual income derived from all net assets or
percentage of the value of such assets based on current
passbook savings rates--let us just assume--I know they may be
0, but let us assume they are 2 percent--if the asset is not
being rented out.
The bottom line of this is this provision would seem to
make sense because we do not want to give vouchers to people
that have significant assets. But in our case, if a family
still owns a lot with a slab, which is in large measure what
exists in many parts of St. Bernard and Lower 9th Ward, that is
valued at $10,000, if you applied a passbook account rate to
that, a family of four that made $22,000 a year would actually
receive a voucher. But if we have to take the asset, which is a
slab in a lot, no market, hard to get a value, but it is being
applied, it discounts them from a voucher.
So do you understand the dilemma that some families are in
that were homeowners--not homeless people, but homeowners. Not
that it is wrong to help homeless people, but these homeowners
who had invested in a home, and at the time of their greatest
need, where they just need a voucher to keep them off the
street that they have never been on, they are disqualified
because of the value of a slab.
Now, the Secretary was alarmed--he should be--when we heard
this. Do you have any indication that we might fix this and
how?
Mr. Bregon. Madam Chairman, it is my understanding that we
are looking at that, but if you will allow me, I have with me
Milan Ozdinek, who is the expert on that matter, and I would
like to perhaps----
Senator Landrieu. Yes, if he would come forward, I would
appreciate it.
Mr. Bregon. Thank you.
Senator Landrieu. Would you introduce yourself for the
record, please?
Mr. Ozdinek. Certainly. Good afternoon, Madam Chairman. My
name is Milan Ozdinek. I am the Deputy Assistant Secretary for
the Office of Public Housing and Voucher Programs, and am
principally responsible for the DHAP program and the follow-on,
the Transitional Close-out Housing Program, which we announced
recently with Secretary Donovan.
I believe this is fixed. There could have been some
confusion during your visit with the Secretary to New Orleans.
I met this morning with Karen Cato-Turner and Dwayne Muhammad,
who is the Section 8 director. A family at $22,000 a year that
owns a slab valued at $10,000, or $15,000, or even $20,000 a
year should not by law or regulation be preempted from getting
a voucher. We ensured this morning through Dwayne Muhammad and
his staff that they have all been trained. Anyone calling or
coming into the DHAP center that owns a property, whether it is
a slab or a property, will have----
Senator Landrieu. And it is uninhabitable.
Mr. Ozdinek. Uninhabitable. In the example--and we would be
more than happy to give you some examples for you and your
staff to show you what the net impact would be on a de minimis
value of a piece of property. But in the example that you gave,
Madam Chairman, the value of that property, when incorporated
with the income that the family has, would be negligible and
would affect their rent just barely on the margins.
So, in fact, the $15,000 property would be considered as an
asset and would be valued at the passbook rate of 1 percent or,
as you said, 2 percent, annualized, and then taking 30 percent
of that, divided by 12, that would be the amount that would be
added to rent. We have families in the Section 8 program that
do own property and still have Housing Choice voucher
certificates.
Senator Landrieu. OK, because remember--and I will conclude
with this--that while the Section 8 program was developed, it
was not developed with victims or survivors of catastrophe in
mind. It was developed under normal housing circumstances. What
I am trying to communicate here is nothing about this is
normal, and we need to have some flexibility or some
modifications so that when these disasters happen, you take
your normal government programs, but apply a screen of what a
real disaster is like and make your programs work for that.
That has not been done in the last 4 years. I am very hopeful
that will be done, and if the law is not flexible enough to
allow you to do it, I would hope you would write it down, send
it to me, and we will change the law because it has to be fixed
for people that find themselves in these situations.
I think that ends my questions for this panel, and we will
move to the second panel. They have been very patient, and we
will move through this pretty quickly. Thank you very much.
I know you all are on tight time frames, so we are going to
go right into this. And because of schedules as well, we are
going to start with Karen Paup, Co-Director of the Texas Low
Income Housing Information Service, and then Krystal Williams,
Executive Director of the Louisiana Housing Alliance; third,
Sheila Crowley, President and CEO of the National Low Income
Housing Coalition; and Reilly Morse, Senior Authority for the
Mississippi Center for Justice.
All of you have been very active in this whole area of
housing assistance for people in a variety of different
circumstances. We are looking forward to hearing your
testimony, and because of the time, let us go to Ms. Paup,
starting with you, if we can take 2 or 3 minutes for an opening
statement and then questions.
TESTIMONY OF KAREN PAUP,\1\ CO-DIRECTOR, TEXAS LOW INCOME
HOUSING INFORMATION SERVICE
Ms. Paup. Thank you, Madam Chairman and Subcommittee
Members. My name is Karen Paup, and I work as Co-Director of
the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service, a nonprofit
research, information, and advocacy organization in Austin,
Texas.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Paup with attachments appears in
the Appendix on page 39.
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For over two decades, I have worked with low-income people,
lenders, government, and nonprofits to help deliver solutions,
model solutions, for housing the poor in my State. Since
Hurricane Katrina, my organization has been engaged on a daily
basis with hurricane housing issues. Community leaders,
advocates, and hurricane survivors with whom I work would
uniformly embrace the findings and recommendations in your
Subcommittee report.
The testimony of Sheila Crowley and Reilly Morse speaks to
solutions for low-income renters, so I am going to focus my
comments today on long-time homeowners, and I have done so more
extensively in my written comments.
The core of the problem is this: Disaster housing programs
are designed to assist moderate-income homeowners. They have
insurance, and the disaster program makes up the gap, a narrow
gap. Low-income homeowners are in a different situation, and in
Texas, we have many extremely low-income homeowners who have
been affected by the hurricanes that struck our State. Many
were elderly, many were disabled, many were also extremely low-
income working families who paid off their mortgages, as you
noted earlier, Senator, or who built their houses themselves or
who inherited the houses. And FEMA mostly offered them
emergency shelter and rental assistance and pushed them to get
out of that assistance, instead of coming up with a plan for
how they would recover their homes.
I have four changes to recommend in the Federal housing
disaster programs.
First, implement the strike team concept. Fund these more
extensive repairs by tapping some of the funds that would
otherwise be used for temporary housing. In other words, spend
the funds to replace the roofs, fix the sheetrock, get the
family back in the home quickly, and avoid long-term temporary
re-housing and its costs.
Two, establish funding and support for a more coordinated
relationship with faith-based and nonprofit organizations. We
have seen that they have been a major part of our response, and
with more coordination, they could be a greater part of the
response.
Three, recognize the special needs of the elderly and
people with disabilities among the poor in the wake of a
disaster.
And, last, implement a case management system, as
recommended in your report, whereby a single individual serves
as a point of contact from emergency shelter until the
household is completely, permanently re-housed. The caseworker
needs to understand the family's economic situation, their
housing needs, and their housing construction process in the
case of homeowners. The caseworker would work to determine the
best recovery option for the family. If that is to repair the
house, then the caseworker would help with work write-ups and
cost estimates and hiring a reliable contractor, and then help
through the construction of the repair work. If the approach is
a replacement home, the caseworker would help to get the family
into a reconstruction program or a program that offered
alternative housing from fabricated housing construction
companies.
In the case of elderly households or persons with
disabilities, the counselor would offer the option of a
permanent Section 8 housing voucher and to assist the family in
finding an appropriate rental unit where they could use their
voucher.
For all other households, the counselor would assist with
the transition to a State-assisted long-term recovery program,
including temporary housing until they are complete in that
reconstruction program with the State. And details of the
family's housing needs should be provided to the States so that
the States can properly budget for serving the housing needs of
the families in this category.
I thank the Subcommittee for this opportunity to testify,
and I would be happy to answer questions or to bring you back
written answers if need be. Thank you.
Senator Landrieu. Thank you, I really appreciate that, Ms.
Paup. Let me ask you, because I know you may have to slip out:
When you speak about serving your low-income families, at what
level of income, approximately, do you consider low? Are we
dealing with families of $10,000 and less, $20,000 and less,
$25,000 or $30,000? What is your cut-off?
Ms. Paup. Extremely low-income families would be people on
minimum Social Security benefits, so elderly people with small
Social Security checks, they would be mostly below $10,000;
people who have minimum wage jobs, so they are maybe below
$15,000; and then people who are little better off than those,
who are below $20,000.
Senator Landrieu. I think you raise a very important point
which programs do not seem to really recognize that many of
those families, which was very true of parts of the Lower 9th
Ward, because these homes had been inherited, many family
members, but still, families without a lot of current income.
I agree with you also about using nonprofits as partners. I
find several of them to be outstanding. Could you mention one
or two models or one or two particular programs that you have
seen operate in your area that you could recommend for review
or a model that you think works better than others? Is there
anything that comes to your mind that you would like to share
with our Subcommittee?
Ms. Paup. There is a coalition of faith-based organizations
in southeast Texas that has been particularly active in Port
Arthur and Beaumont, in that area, to help families rebuild
their houses. And church volunteers come from around the
country and Canada to conduct repairs over a fair period of
time, and they have done some pretty substantial repairs.
Senator Landrieu. Do you know how many homes they have
actually repaired?
Ms. Paup. I can get you a written figure on that. I cannot
quote off my head, and I do not want to give you the wrong
information.
Senator Landrieu. Well, if you could, that would be
helpful, because this Subcommittee will be looking for models
that work, that are effective, and scalable. And we have some
in mind, but any of you that might have some suggestions, we
would most certainly appreciate it.
We will go to Ms. Williams next. Thank you.
TESTIMONY OF KRYSTAL WILLIAMS,\1\ EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, LOUISIANA
HOUSING ALLIANCE
Ms. Williams. Thank you, Madam Chairman and Members of the
Subcommittee. My name is Krystal Williams, Executive Director
of the Louisiana Housing Alliance. We are the only statewide,
nonprofit, policy advocacy organization regarding housing in
Louisiana.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Williams appears in the Appendix
on page 86.
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The findings of the report can be undoubtedly supported by
many State and local agencies and nonprofit organizations,
especially the effectiveness of Federal public assistance funds
should not be dependent on which particular State they are
allocated to, to the dependency of Federal agencies upon local
government; and, second, FEMA's post-disaster housing
assistance programs were not designed to address the needs of
the severely low income.
The responsibility of program implementation of Federal
funds fell heavily upon State and local agencies that were
beyond the capability to respond effectively. They lacked case
management to properly implement programs and administer
assistance. Deadlines and numerous expirations of Disaster
Vouchers and Temporary Housing Assistance continue to threaten
families served by FEMA and DHAP assistance programs with
eviction and homelessness.
Many private developers participating in the small rental
program under the Louisiana Recovery Authority built affordable
rental units after Hurricane Katrina, but are still waiting on
reimbursements, and while families and individuals receiving
assistance are still waiting to transition into homes. Also, of
the 1,271 FEMA trailer sites that exist in Orleans Parish, half
of the homeowners living there have just begun to fix their
homes, and the other half have not even started.
According to the Long Term Recovery Initiative Program of
the United Way for Greater New Orleans, there is a great need
for Federal funding for case management. Most nonprofit
organizations in this area have hundreds, if not thousands, of
clients that have not yet been assisted. The greatest fear is
that these clients will be left with no one to help navigate
them through the process once agencies no longer have long-term
recovery case management programs due to lack of funding. These
clients, especially those with FEMA housing, will ultimately
end up homeless or living in uncomfortable conditions.
Federal public assistance must be uniform across the Gulf
Coast, not heavily reliant upon State and local government
agencies to direct recovery in their time of suffering. This
will help guarantee that the missions of FEMA and HUD will be
successfully accomplished by providing stronger oversight and
public assistance.
Recently, from across the Gulf Coast Region, housing
advocates convened in Washington, DC, with national partners to
discuss disaster recovery. From that meeting, problems were
identified and recommendations for improvement were made to
FEMA and HUD, and they include as follows:
Move FEMA outside of the jurisdiction of the Department of
Homeland Security to again become an independent, Cabinet-level
agency; devise an effective National Disaster Housing Strategy;
articulate clear structure for implementation; ensure that the
60-day extension of direct housing does not expire without a
concrete plan to transition current residents into permanent
homes; revise the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief Act to
protect against future disasters; and structure funding sources
to address the most vulnerable needs quickly. And in my
testimony, I included a more extensive explanation of these
recommendations.
Senator Landrieu. Thank you, Ms. Williams.
For now, I am going to go right to Ms. Crowley.
TESTIMONY OF SHEILA CROWLEY, MSW, PH.D.,\1\ PRESIDENT, NATIONAL
LOW INCOME HOUSING COALITION
Ms. Crowley. Thank you very much, Senator Landrieu. I am
pleased to have the opportunity to testify today, and let me
start by thanking you for this report, for initiating this
investigation, and for producing a report of this caliber.
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\1\ The prepared statement of Ms. Crowley with attachments appears
in the Appendix on page 91.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The report affirms for hundreds of thousands of people who
experienced what was an incoherent housing assistance response
to the hurricanes that what they went through really was a
failure of the government and not something that they were
doing wrong.
What the report does not say explicitly, but what is clear
to anyone who chooses to see, is that the people who received
the shoddiest treatment were, by and large, poor, aged,
disabled, and/or black.
My written testimony comments on the report's
recommendations, and I want to just take a moment to emphasize
a few key points here.
First, one of the most serious flaws in the Hurricane
Katrina housing response was the disconnect between the
temporary housing programs and the housing recovery strategy.
And so any approach to disaster housing recovery should be more
holistic, in which the temporary housing and the permanent
housing needs are addressed in a coordinated fashion, much as
Ms. Paup described. It certainly would be more effective, more
humane, and a lot less costly. The bifurcation of these two
functions--the temporary housing assistance to the Federal
Government and the housing recovery to the State government--
simply did not work.
Two, just as the private rental housing stock needs to be
repaired quickly, so does the HUD-assisted stock. HUD has yet
to do a full accounting of the HUD-assisted units that were
damaged or destroyed and clearly has no idea what happened to
many of the tenants who were living in those homes. HUD must
ensure that all HUD-assisted properties are: One, properly
insured and, two, that there are resources there to repair and
reoccupy these properties right after a disaster. It was absurd
that, in the case of Hurricane Katrina, the public housing
agencies and private owners of HUD-assisted properties and
private owners of HUD-assisted properties had to compete with
other developers for the low-income housing tax credits and the
CDBG dollars allocated to the States in order to repair
federally assisted properties. That was a Federal function, and
it should not have been left to the States to come up with that
money.
Third point, many, and perhaps tens of thousands, of
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita evacuees were erroneously or
wrongfully denied or terminated from FEMA rental assistance.
There just can be no doubt about that. And we really recommend
that we go back and try to make those people whole as much as
possible. We recommend that the Department of Homeland Security
Inspector General or another appropriate Federal official
undertake a case-by-case analysis and that we go back over that
and figure out really what happened to people and what
assistance they are entitled to.
Fourth point, as has been described very well, one of the
most serious flaws of the Hurricane Katrina housing response
was the chaotic manner in which evacuees received information
or received mis-information about services and programs to
which they were entitled. Part of the blame lies in how the
disaster relief was structured, but blame must also be
attributed to the unskilled and untrained workforce that FEMA
deployed in order to be able to deliver those services, which
your report very clearly outlines. Even the assertive and
articulate clients had difficulty navigating that service
system.
The report recommends better use of case managers in
disaster response, especially for vulnerable people. A case
management system to assist people who are displaced by
disaster from their homes should be community based. You should
not be calling a toll-free number and talking to a different
person every single time. You should have a human being that
you relate to, much as Ms. Paup described. A case manager, by
definition, is one person working with one family.
We recommend consideration of assigning this responsibility
to the public housing agencies. Now, go, ``Oh, my God,'' but
public housing--there are 3,500 public housing agencies. They
serve local jurisdictions. They have a direct funding and
accountability relationship with HUD. If we could design a
system by which public housing agencies were the key agency in
each community that would have to be responsible for housing
needs during a disaster, both temporary and permanent, and have
a core of caseworkers that they could call upon, not working
for the agency at that point but people from faith-based,
nonprofit, people who were trained to do this and who could be
called up, just like you call up the National Guard in a
disaster, call up this corps of caseworkers to take on this
function, who would know all the programs and know how to
navigate all those systems. HUD would need a lot more money to
do that. Of course, we would not want HUD to be left doing that
without the proper resources.
And then, finally, I think that it is important to note,
despite all the complaints that we have had about the way the
programs were designed and the problems with the response, that
just as Hurricane Katrina exposed extreme poverty in the United
States, it also exposed the acute shortage of rental homes for
the lowest-income people in our country. There are 9 million
extremely low-income renter households--that is, people with
incomes under 30 percent of area median income or less--and
there are only 6.2 million rental homes that rent at prices
that they can afford. Our analysis of the 2007 American
Community Survey data shows us that for every 100 extremely
low-income renter households in the United States, there are
only 38 rental homes that they can afford, that are available
and affordable to them. So there is a very serious gap, and we
have given you a lot of data from our analysis.
So when HUD develops the National Housing Stock Plan that
is called for in the report, it will become clear that there
are serious housing stock deficiencies. The affordable rental
housing shortage is a longstanding structural problem that
affects millions of low-income Americans every day. It also is
a structural impediment to a viable National Disaster Housing
Strategy.
There has to be physical places for people to live. We do
not have enough physical places for poor people to live in the
United States.
So let me close by saying that the purpose of the National
Housing Trust Fund that was established by Congress last year
is to correct the structural deficit in the housing stock for
the lowest-income people. We are now seeking sufficient funding
for the National Housing Trust Fund that we will be able to
produce and preserve $1.5 million rental homes over the next 10
years, and I would submit that a National Disaster Housing
Strategy would depend upon that kind of renewed commitment to
housing the poor in the United States. Thank you.
Senator Landrieu. Very good, Ms. Crowley. Mr. Morse.
TESTIMONY OF REILLY MORSE,\1\ SENIOR ATTORNEY, KATRINA RECOVERY
OFFICE, MISSISSIPPI CENTER FOR JUSTICE
Mr. Morse. Thank you for this in-depth report and for this
invitation to testify. Most of all, thank you for confirming
what tens of thousands of displaced and traumatized clients
already knew who sought assistance from the Mississippi Center
for Justice and similar organizations across the region. They
were not the problem. Our government mismanaged the Nation's
worst housing catastrophe, erroneously denied assistance to
many thousands of people, and it required extensive, time-
consuming, and costly legal intervention to begin to correct
the government's mistakes. So some lawyers, Madam Chairman,
were part of the solution.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
\1\ The prepared statement of Mr. Morse appears in the Appendix on
page 102.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
The recommendations of this report would complete the task
for future disasters, but there remains unfinished business in
the Gulf region, particularly for renters. We welcome the call
to establish a standing rental repair program and expedited
repair sweep teams. In Mississippi, Hurricane Katrina damaged
over 62,000 rental units, almost half of which were single-
family rentals with less than major damage. The figures were
orders of magnitude higher in Louisiana, but they point to the
fact that repairing existing rentals is faster, more cost-
effective, healthier, and more humane than trailers, and it
will also produce a quicker response than we currently struggle
with in the CDBG-funded programs.
Like in Louisiana, Mississippi's CDBG-funded small rental
repair program is slow to put products online, slow to put
restored units online. The public housing repair program,
likewise funded by CDBG and tax credits, also has failed to
timely restore badly needed, very low-income rental units for
our poorest residents. We invite consideration of any
additional means to close the gaps, including retroactivity
provisions to increase assistance for post-Katrina housing
needs today, such as some of the matters you raised earlier:
Retroactive provisions for Section 9(k) or for the pilot rental
repair program.
Your report also touches on the alternative housing pilot
program, and as Ms. Crowley mentioned, there needs to be
coordination between the temporary and the permanent housing
programs. This was a $400 million experiment to allow FEMA to
evaluate new alternatives for housing disaster victims. In
Mississippi, this program funded 3,000 Mississippi cottage with
larger living space, greater wind resistance than FEMA
trailers, and they were also capable of being converted into
permanent housing. Well, in Mississippi we are fighting local
jurisdictions that are trying to prevent them from coming in,
characterizing them as ``no better than the Katrina trailers,''
even though there are substantial differences. But the time
delay associated with that is eating up the time that is
available for FEMA to cover the cost of permanently placing
these units, and so the opportunity for some of the hardest-to-
house people--and this is across the region; this will be as
true for Louisiana as it is for Mississippi--the opportunity to
use this pilot program successfully and provide FEMA a success
rests with FEMA deciding to extend the deadline for using this
money to permanently place them. And so we would ask you to
invite FEMA to extend the deadline for the permanent conversion
of these cottages to December 31--it is now set to expire in a
couple of months--so these people can realize an important
opportunity and FEMA can have a fully successful pilot program.
This report critiques the Stafford Act and explains all of
these conflicts over policy interpretation and agency roles
that help public interest lawyers understand the chaos we and
our clients faced with FEMA. We welcome these recommendations
for change, and those are covered in more detail in my written
remarks, so I will pass those.
We also want to take a moment to recognize and be grateful
for the change in the rules on the duplication of benefits that
was referred to by Dr. Catchings, who is someone who came to
the center early on, along with several other people with this
same problem, and we are grateful that problem was solved.
In conclusion, Madam Chairman, I would like to speak as a
third-generation Mississippi lawyer. We understand nothing in
these catastrophes is normal. My parents went through the 1947
hurricane. My parents and I went through Hurricanes Camille and
Katrina. No one should ever doubt the gratitude of those of us
who are displaced by these storms. But no one should ever
refrain from requiring a comprehensive accounting or a reform
of what went wrong and how to fix it, which is what we have
seen here, and we are grateful to you for a high-quality and
in-depth critique and set of recommendations and urge you to
carry them into action.
Thank you.
Senator Landrieu. Thank you very much, Mr. Morse. And let
me apologize for getting all the lawyers aggravated because
there are some very excellent lawyers that helped, including
the two that helped to write this report. So I stand corrected,
and we are grateful to all the lawyers that have helped so many
of our people in the Gulf Coast.
Let me ask two questions because time is really pressing us
to close. Ms. Crowley, when you talk about the housing trust
fund, which I am also optimistic can be designed in a way, how
would you suggest that while we expand the opportunity for
rental for low-income families--which is a great need that you
have amply described and the evidence is really indisputable.
How do we create rental programs that actually give people an
opportunity to become homeowners? Which I think for many, it is
still a real dream to move from, a lifetime of renting to an
opportunity for homeownership, even with low income. Are there
any models that you have seen that have worked? Or what are
some of your suggestions?
Ms. Crowley. Well, I think we now have seen plenty of
models that did not work, which has caused this horrible
meltdown--I am sorry--this rush to all sorts of exotic products
to try to get people who did not have the resources to become
homeowners and that has led to the subprime crisis.
It is a question we often get asked because we are
generally advocates for an improved rental housing system, and
people want to know about what the next step is.
My very strong belief is that the best homeownership
program for a low-income person is the development of a stable
rental housing stock where the family can afford--you can
afford the rent; you can live there stably; you can develop a
credit history. You are not being forced to move from place to
place. Your kids are able to stay in the same school. You can
maintain employment. People who are very poor who are moving
from one rental place to the next do not have that kind of
stability.
So housing stability should be our first goal for people,
and once you have housing stability, when you have created the
kind of rental housing stock that people can live in and be
proud of and can take care of, then people have the chance to
do things like save for a downpayment, do all the things that
lead to the ability to become a homeowner.
But there is no magic step that anybody has to take. It is
really a matter of having the resources to be able to get into
a home and maintain it. And that requires sufficient income. It
also requires that people have a sense about what homeownership
is going to require.
So the counseling programs we have I think are very good,
and one of the things that is clear, when all the dust will
settle on the subprime crisis, is that the people who went
through really good homeownership counseling programs, through
Federal agencies, federally funded agencies, the Neighborhood
Reinvestment Corporation, NeighborWorks America, all of those
kinds of places, they did fine because they were well prepared
to be able to move into their homes, and they did not get
caught up in these crazy kinds of mortgages.
But for many people, that is not the case, and they are
going to need to be able to do well in rental housing until
their incomes improve.
Senator Landrieu. Well, I asked you that question because I
really do believe that while we do need to stabilize the rental
market and expand it, we should always have an opportunity or a
pathway to homeownership, and there are models out there that
have worked. Habitat for Humanity is one that impresses me
everywhere I go, including in my own home State. There are
counseling organizations--the New Orleans Foundation that
started 25 years ago that has a default rate a fraction of what
the regular commercial default rate is, even though they are
serving families with incomes under $16,000.
I think our government, if it wanted to, could look and
find models that actually work and do both at the same time.
Ms. Crowley. Oh, I agree.
Senator Landrieu. Expand your rental and expand
opportunities for people to create equity, not the least of
which is a program some of us have been trying to get in place,
an IDEA, basically an IRA for poor people where the government
matches, allowing you to save for a downpayment for a home or
save for an investment in a business, and to continue to
believe that, if given the opportunity, most Americans are
able--some are not because of serious mental or emotional or
sometimes physical--in some cases not able, but most people, if
given the chance, can really begin to move themselves firmly
into the middle class.
Ms. Crowley. Senator, one of the programs that gets very
little publicity but has worked for some people is a program
that HUD runs called the Family Self-Sufficiency Program, and
it is for people who are receiving Federal housing assistance
through public housing or vouchers. And they have to be
working, and they have to agree to participate in a variety of
services, programs, educational programs. But they actually put
money away, and that money is matched. Their rents do not go up
during that time, and after a 5-year period, they have a chunk
of money to use to start a business or buy a house.
So we do have those kinds of things. They have to be well
funded and they have to be carefully structured, and the
clients have to be people that we can do the kind of work with
that will get them there. But you are right, there are models.
Senator Landrieu. OK. And let me just add, is there anybody
that wants to make a 30-second close or feels like something
they need to say needs to go on the record before we close out?
I am sorry. I can only recognize those that are at the table,
but I will speak with you privately afterwards.
Mr. Morse.
Mr. Morse. Let me offer one other possible model that
occurs in North Gulfport. It is a community land trust in which
the organization owns the land, buys up distressed land, small
lots in communities that have demographics almost identical, if
not worse in some instances, to the 9th Ward. Houses are placed
on them through various subsidized means. The trust sells the
house to the occupant, has a long-term lease to the property;
when the house is resold, the occupant realizes part of the
appreciation, the land trust keeps part of the appreciation,
and there is an ongoing generational affordability built into
that stream. It is a smaller-scale project. It is so far
successful. But with greater support, I think it could become a
model for communities that have to find ways to creatively
layer financing and to also hold onto and build back the
integrity of communities at risk of blight.
Senator Landrieu. Thank you, Mr. Morse. Ms. Paup.
Ms. Paup. I would like to mention another model in Texas.
We modeled a program after USDA's Self-Help Mortgage Program
where the State offers 0-percent mortgages. We call it the
``Bootstrap Program,'' and it is a self-help program that
started in South Texas, in Colonias, where people have very few
resources, but they are willing to build their homes. And the
prices of those homes are very modest because they build a very
modest home, but it is a means to homeownership for extremely
low-income Texans.
Senator Landrieu. Thank you. If there are any other models
that come to your mind, please submit them, because as I said,
this report is as much an indictment of what went wrong as a
blueprint to move forward, and we want to get your best
suggestions.
As I close, let me especially thank the chief counsel
Charlie Martel, who is here, who led this investigation with
Donny Williams, our Staff Director; our Senior Investigative
Counsel, Alan Kahn; our Professional Staff, Amanda Fox; Ben
Billings, who is a Professional Staff with the Subcommittee;
and Kelsey Stroud, who is the Clerk. This group behind me did a
wonderful job. They worked very hard under very difficult
circumstances, conducted hundreds and hundreds of interviews to
produce this report that, again, we hope will serve as a
foundation to improve the lives of so many in the Gulf Coast
and reach out to people around the country and potentially even
have an impact internationally as other communities and nations
struggle to response to these catastrophic disasters.
The hearing is concluded. Thank you very much.
[Whereupon, at 5:11 p.m., the Subcommittee was adjourned.]
A P P E N D I X
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