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A home being raised as part of the New York City Build it Back Hurricane Sandy Disaster Recovery Program, which IBTS provided architectural services for.

For the first time ever, in February 2018 the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced a disaster recovery funding set aside specifically for mitigation and resilience efforts. With the passage of this groundbreaking $16 billion set aside, communities can now apply federal disaster recovery funding towards preventative efforts that strengthen their ability to respond to and recover from disasters and lead to a quicker, less costly recovery.

Communities responding to and recovering from natural disasters already use federal government funding and assistance from organizations like HUD, FEMA, and the Small Business Administration (SBA). The mitigation and resilience funding was included as part of HUD’s $28 billion Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) allocation awarded to states, local governments, and territories that sustained damages from natural disasters in the years of 2015, 2016 and 2017.

The guidelines for the funding – which specify the disaster recovery, mitigation and resilience activities that the funding can be applied to – have not been released yet, but are expected to be issued sometime between October and December 2018. IBTS expects the mitigation and resilience funding to go toward the cost of activities such as:

• Home buyouts
• Home elevations
• Infrastructure construction and repair (such as drainage and roadway improvements, hardening publically owned buildings, etc.)
• Housing redevelopment
• Economic revitalization

Once the guidelines for HUD’s mitigation funding are released, IBTS will assist local governments in identifying mitigation and resilience projects that will qualify for this funding and have the greatest benefit to strengthening the community. This funding presents an important opportunity for county leaders and city managers to make their communities more resilient toward acute and chronic events by taking the right steps.

Some of the states and territories that are eligible for this funding include: California, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Texas, Louisiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, South Carolina, Puerto Rico, and U.S. Virgin Islands.

Because CDBG-DR must be appropriated by Congress before HUD issues a Notice of Allocation in the Federal Register, the passage of this mitigation and resilience funding also gives an indication that federal lawmakers are open to exploring mitigation and resilience strategies to lessen damage from future natural hazards. Likewise, HUD has also recognized the importance of promoting a policy of mitigation and resilience by providing a substantial amount of direct funding toward these activities. The mitigation and resilience funding were part of the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018.

This shift in federal lawmakers’ priorities towards implementing mitigation and resilience policies represents an important step towards mitigating the increasing severity and costs incurred by major natural disasters over the past two decades. For example, Hurricane Katrina, which hit New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 2005, caused an estimated 1,833 deaths and $125 billion in economic costs (in 2005 dollars). In 2012, Hurricane Sandy caused at least 159 deaths and damaged more than 650,000 homes and hundreds of thousands of businesses in several Northeast cities. In 2017, the U.S. was hit by a string of natural disasters, which included California wildfires as well as three major hurricanes – Harvey, Irma, and Maria. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the damages caused by the 16 separate billion-dollar weather events in the U.S. in 2017 was $306.2 billion.

To read more about IBTS’s disaster management services, click here. IBTS also offers a suite of resilience consulting services; contact us to learn more. 

Related legislation

Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018, H.R. 1892, SEC. 20606, Feb. 9, 2018