Wednesday evening Katrina miscellany

First of all, the HUD Katrina page has added two items. One, interestingly, is HUD's housing discrimination hotline number: 1-800-669-9777/1-800-927-9275 (TTY). The other item -- a much beefier one -- is HUD's new "Disaster Relief Toolkit for Faith-based and Community Service Providers," which in fact looks useful to all varieties of public and private service providers. This "Toolkit" isn't just one page: several links in the right-hand sidebar lead to further pages that appear to be newly created.

For tax credit housing providers -- faith-based, community-based, or otherwise -- possibly the most interesting message within the "Toolkit" is the brief central paragraph on the "Register Your Resources" page, which reads:

If your organization can be of assistance in the relief effort, please register at the National Emergency Resource Registry, or SWERN if you have multiple housing properties available. If you have single properties available, register at Disaster Housing Resources.

The revision date on this page is yesterday -- 9/13/05 -- so the paragraph appears to be recently drafted. It supports the still-tentative but increasingly persuasive theory that landlords who have small-scale resources to offer, such as a single vacant apartment, can be helpful by listing their resources both at SWERN and with other housing match efforts. (We still have inquiries pending on the question of what else landlords should do after they register their vacant units at SWERN.) The "Disaster Housing Resources" link given in this paragraph leads to the same registry page that is also linked from www.hurricanehousing.net.

The other "Toolkit" pages contain more progress reports than guidance for prospective action, and some of the specific guidance has already been posted elsewhere -- but there are new items too. Notably, the "Local HUD Offices" page provides field office contacts in the disaster areas; the "Office of Public and Indian Housing" page interestingly links to the July-issued PIH 2005-18, which includes advice for local housing authorities on applying for extra disaster-related administrative fees; the "Office of Housing" page notes, "All [Sec.] 202 recipient organizations can participate in helping locate and relocate eligible elderly persons and families into 202 projects on a temporary or a permanent basis." Pages captioned "Assistance for FBCO's Offering Aid" and "Organizations Offering Aid" provide contact links for a large selection of private charities, predominantly but not exclusively Christian. Several of the pages link to an electronic suggestion box, fbcokatrinarelief@hud.gov, and call for recommendations of other organizations not yet listed.

Further Katrina updates:

- The Novogradac folks have spotted a proposal by the Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition for changes in the law of housing tax credits and tax-exempt multifamily bonds that it contends could benefit disaster victims.

- New resources at the Novogradac Katrina page include legislative updates and useful disaster recovery information from the Mortgage Bankers Association of America: there's a general disaster resource page here and specific mortgage relief information over here.

- The IRS today said it had 2,743 telephone operators helping FEMA today and hoped to have 5,000 by Friday.

- Per an IRS press release, IR-2005-103, probably soon to appear here, the IRS is giving Katrina relief workers until Jan. 3 to file taxes due this fall, under more or less the same terms as disaster victims themselves. Presumably there'll be further guidance on the definition of a "relief worker." For now we've got this: "Eligible relief workers are those assisting in the disaster area. This includes people affiliated with recognized government or philanthropic organizations and others."