WASHINGTON – U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson today announced an additional $178.5 million to help hard-hit areas in several states recover from severe flooding that occurred in 2015 and 2016.
The grants announced today are provided through HUD’s Community Development Block Grant – Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) Program. Combined with CDBG-DR grants already allocated, HUD’s investment to these areas totals nearly $947 million.
“Clearly, there are hard-hit communities in these states that need more help to recover from the devastating floods they experienced over the past two years,” said Secretary Carson. “Today, we make another investment in the future of these communities and to help our neighbors in need.”
CDBG-Disaster Recovery grants support a wide variety of activities including housing redevelopment, business assistance and infrastructure repair. State and local governments in West Virginia, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida will target these grants in “the most impacted” areas. CDBG-DR allocations are based upon a statutory formula that measures the unmet costs to repair seriously damaged properties and infrastructure in the counties determined to be most impacted.
Read more about the methodology used to determine allocations for 2016 disasters.
Read more about the methodology used to determine allocations for 2015 disasters.
HUD is releasing the following disaster recovery funds:
|
2016 Disasters
|
|
Grantee
|
Allocation
|
Combined Allocations to date
|
| State of Florida |
$57,530,000
|
$117,937,000
|
| State of West Virginia |
$42,383,000
|
$149,875,000
|
| State of North Carolina |
$31,862,000 |
$236,529,000 |
| State of South Carolina |
$27,769,000 |
$95,086,000 |
| State of Texas |
$9,785,000
|
$238,895,000
|
|
2015 Disasters
|
|
Grantee
|
Allocation
|
Combined Allocations to date
|
| State of Texas |
$8,233,000
|
$74,568,000
|
| San Marcos, TX |
$978,000
|
$ 33,794,000
|
|
TOTAL
|
$178,540,000
|
$946,684,000
|
Background
On May 5th, President Trump signed the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2017, which included $400 million to support recovery from major disasters in 2015 and later. To determine these disaster recovery allocations, the Act requires HUD to analyze the most currently available data of the unmet costs to repair seriously damaged properties and infrastructure in the most-impacted counties. To date, HUD provided $343 million in disaster recovery under this Appropriations Act, which directs HUD to allocate the remaining funds ($57 million) at a future date to areas that experience disasters meeting the ‘most impacted’ threshold HUD announced last January.
Following major disasters in 2015 and 2016, Congress, through four supplemental spending measures (including the Act described above), appropriated a combined $3 billion through CDBG-DR. The State of Louisiana is the largest single grantee, receiving a total of $1.7 billion in recovery funds to address the long-term recovery following last year’s flooding in Baton Rouge and surrounding parishes. Read HUD’s news release for details of these prior allocations.