Houston City Council has approved a plan that would allocate $314 million in federal funding for disaster recovery efforts from two recent extreme weather disasters during an Aug. 13 meeting.

The plan will allocate $100 million toward housing repairs. This comes after weeks of back-and-forth on whether the plan’s housing program should receive a funding increase.

The details

The $314 million comes from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to support long-term recovery efforts following major disasters such as Hurricane Beryl and the 2024 derecho, according to the agenda item.

The plan will include allocating parts of the federal funding to needs such as public facilities, the city's homeless population and housing, including:

• $100 million for resilience measures to be added to public facilities to provide backup power during disasters
• $100 million for housing programs, specifically $50 million for multifamily housing and $50 million for single-family housing
• $41 million for the city's $70 million homeless initiative
• $15 million for emergency response and public safety programs to purchase emergency vehicles such as ambulances and high-water vehicles

The project's first draft did not allocate any funds toward housing, despite the original draft finding that over $229 million is needed for housing repair, reconstruction and personal property loss.

The decision to leave out housing costs by Mayor John Whitmire’s administration was met with backlash from Houston residents, many of whom commented during numerous public hearings throughout June.

Whitmire announced June 17 during a City Council public comment session that $50 million of the federal funding would be reallocated toward housing.

Council member Tiffany Thomas, who also chairs the Housing and Affordability Committee, put forward an amendment that redirected $50 million from the backup generator program to the housing program, which would further increase the housing program to $100 million

Quote of note

The disaster recovery plan and amendment ultimately passed 12-3, with council members Amy Peck, Fred Flickinger and Mary Nan Huffman voting against the amendment and council members Abbie Kamin and Twila Carter absent.

Thomas said this is a win for all of Houston and that it better equips the city for future extreme weather events.

“What we have passed today allows us to be very responsible,” Thomas said. “If we experience another storm, we’re already staged to remove the debris from your neighborhoods. We’re already staged to make sure we have a rapid response to remove the trees blocking neighborhoods. We are already proactive to cut the vegetation from the electrical wires to make sure we can mitigate and reduce harm and danger in neighborhoods.”

Alice Liu, a member of local activist group Northeast Action Collective, said that although $100 million isn’t enough to address the numerous Houston residents and communities who are still facing housing problems after weather events, directing more money to housing shows the city is recognizing the “need, struggle and violence of not being able to find a home for you, your family and your kids.”“The Northeast Action Collective is made up of flood survivors, mothers and children who have really had their lives upended by not being able to ever recover and repair their homes from the multiple disasters we faced over the last decade,” Liu said. “We’ve lived through multiple billion-dollar disasters in the last few years, but as Tiffany Thomas said, this is absolutely the first step that we wanted to see.”

Flickinger said he hopes the plan’s housing program is limited to home repairs damaged by the specific weather events. In previous meetings, Flickinger said funding should be prioritized for programs that benefit the city as a whole.

“Not only do we have a problem spending the money in a timely manner, apparently we’ve got issues in doing a quality manner as well,” Flickinger said during the July 23 City Council meeting. “It seems to me there are really two schools of thought here. One is, we can give repair assistance to a finite number of people, or we can spend the money on things like generators for our emergency services that benefit the entire city.”

Next steps

Now approved, HUD is expected to review and approve the plan by Oct. 3, according to previous Community Impact reporting.