REGIONAL REPORT
SOUTH CENTRAL
The Great Transition
and the Great Migration
HUD takes over for FEMA; 6,400 households
will have to leave temporary housing by May 31
BY DANA ENFINGER
AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • MARCH 2008
The big story in the South
Central region is that thousands
of 2005 hurricane
evacuees will enter the rental
market this spring in an environment
where finding an affordable
apartment is like striking gold.
It all starts with the transition of the
Federal Emergency Management Agency’s
(FEMA’s) rental subsidy program to the
Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD). FEMA has been
providing rental assistance to thousands of
households affected by Hurricanes Katrina
and Rita. HUD took over FEMA rental
payment for hurricane victims Dec. 1,
2007.
Under the FEMA-paid, HUD-administered
program, the Disaster
Housing Assistance Program (DHAP),
households will start to foot the bill for
their housing beginning March 1.
Program participants will pay a portion of
the cost, which will begin at $50 per
month and incrementally increase each
month thereafter until the program concludes
March 1, 2009. In many cases,
these individuals are living in market-rate
apartments. The goal is to get them to selfsufficiency;
however, concerns have been
raised about the transition.
“When the DHAP program started,
all the case managers were not even fully
trained and in place, and whether the kind
of case management that HUD is going to
provide really gets citizens to pre-storm
sustainability is questionable,” said Lisa
Woodruff-White, deputy secretary for the
Louisiana Department of Social Services.
Woodruff-White said her office met
with FEMA Administrator R. David
Paulison to discuss concerns with the program
in mid-January, and FEMA
promised her a meeting soon with HUD
staff to discuss the program.
Woodruff-White was seeking clarification
on how many people are eligible for
the assistance under the program.
“Because we don’t have good data
exchange between the federal government
and Louisiana, we aren’t sure where these
people are,” Woodruff-White said. “We
wanted [FEMA and HUD] to stop the
program until we know where these people
are. Many people may be eligible, and
we don’t want these people to be left out.
But FEMA said, ‘We can’t stop. We have to
get these people out of these trailers.’”
Push to close trailer sites
FEMA quietly began clearing out
trailer parks in New Orleans, with eviction
notices showing up on doors in mid-
October 2007. The eviction notices, which
came more than a year before the March 1,
2009, date that FEMA used when it said it
would discontinue its temporary housing
assistance programs, stated that residents
had 30 days to vacate.
At the end of last November, FEMA
announced it would close all temporary
trailer sites in Louisiana by May of this
year. The decision affects 6,500 households
living at more than 50 sites.
Here’s the catch about the DHAP: It
increases rents March 1 regardless of
when a resident enters the program. So a
resident living in a FEMA trailer in the
New Orleans Youth Study Center (a site
slated for closure April 30) won’t be paying
$50 for rent the first month that she is
transitioned to a market-rate unit. She
will have to pay $150 toward rent for May,
provided she is able to transition to an
apartment immediately. That amount
covers March and April rents too, since
the $50 increments began in March.
The second catch? Some landlords
who participated in the FEMA program
don’t like HUD’s rules. If landlords don’t
want to work with HUD, they can opt out
of the DHAP, forcing tenants to move.
HUD requires regular inspections and
specific maintenance and utilities service.
“[Under FEMA], all I needed to do
was report my earnings to the IRS. They
sent me a check every month, and it
worked great,” landlord Michael Myers
told The Times-Picayune.
Many evacuees affected by the program
live in apartments scattered primarily
throughout the South Central and
Southeast regions. Dallas-Fort Worth and
Houston are two major hubs for evacuees.
HUD has been unable to find 5,000
of nearly 29,000 households who are eligible
for rental assistance, which not only
raises concerns like Woodruff-White’s
about eligible families not getting help, but
also questions about whether FEMA paid
rent for apartments in which no one was
living. Payments go directly to landlords.
If a household left its apartment
without notifying FEMA, the agency has
no way to track them, FEMA spokesperson
Don Jacks told the Dallas Morning
News. He said FEMA had done everything
it could to ensure rent was paid for occupied
units.
As more people will soon be leaving
trailers, the need for more affordable
housing is more important than ever. Gulf
Opportunity Zone tax credits and lowincome
housing tax credits will only
address 12.9 percent of the state’s housing
recovery need, said Milton Bailey, president
of the Louisiana Housing Finance
Agency.
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