Disaster response Monday mix

As always, the new National Low Income Housing Coalition Memo to Members is worth reading. Today's earlier item here on the HUD Fair Market Rents announcement already quotes its analysis. Other highlights include notes of past and upcoming conference calls on nuts and bolts of the disaster housing programs. NLIHC's main site is to post materials from this past Friday's conference call, in which four high-level HUD officials "presented HUD’s current plan and future proposed actions, and answered questions from the field." Guidance in this section of the Memo includes advice on where to complain. At the very top of the memo: a complaint that

...the Bush Administration has offered up a bifurcated approach in which some displaced people are in the FEMA program, other displaced people are in a brand new HUD program, and a lot of people will not fit into either program. A report from Atlanta last Friday illustrates the pitfalls of this plan. An evacuee had been rejected as eligible for FEMA assistance and FEMA referred her to the Atlanta Housing Authority for help. But she did not fit the criteria for the HUD program, so she was out of luck.

Also included: legislative news too extensive to summarize -- best to just read what they have -- and the shape HUD is proposing for President Bush's "urban homesteading" proposal, more analysis of last week's KDHAP webcast and PIH notices, and a handful of reports on urban housing inequality.

Otherwise noteworthy:

- The Washington Post on whether political will exists to rebuild the Ninth Ward of New Orleans. The suggestion being that it probably doesn't.
- Via the NLIHC Housing Policy Responses page, I seem to have missed the Dept. of Labor affirmative action disaster exemption, posted way back on Sep. 9.
- The Florida Housing Finance Corporation has an especially nice-looking searchable database of units available to Katrina evacuees.

[IMPORTANT UPDATE: HUD has established its own registry site for vacant units in HUD-insured and HUD-assisted housing at www.katrinahudhousing.org/hud/owners/. A corresponding vacant unit search page is at www.katrinahudhousing.org/hud/housing/index.cfm . This site does not appear to be widely publicized as yet. (Thanks to the Novogradac Web site for this item.)... meanwhile FEMA has given another whirl to publicizing the existing vacant unit registry site, www.dhronline.org, which is working with the hurricanehousing.net site (see below).]