Lucio Vasquez/Houston Public Media
Houston City Council Member Letitia Plummer on Wednesday delayed a contentious plan from Mayor John Whitmire’s administration outlining spending priorities for $315 million in federal disaster recovery funds.
The funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) came after federally declared weather disasters in 2024. Despite finding about $230 million in needed home repairs and other housing needs related to damage from the storms, the plan allocates only $50 million towards housing.
Plummer told Houston Public Media she delayed the item to allow for “an opportunity to have some more conversations with the stakeholders.” She also said she plans to introduce an amendment to increase the amount of money allocated towards home repairs, but declined to share any specifics.
“There are many people in the city of Houston that should not be caught up with the bureaucracy of what we deal with. They need to get their houses repaired,” Plummer said.
The plan was subject to public comment in June, including at three community meetings. All of them were held virtually, two of them during the workday. The proposal also went through the city’s budget committee instead of the housing committee, marking a break with the city’s previous approach to HUD disaster recovery funds.
The original plan would have allocated no money towards housing. After pushback from housing committee chair Tiffany Thomas and housing advocates, the administration increased the amount to $50 million. Thomas told Houston Public Media the increase still fails to meet the demand.
“The fact that HUD federal dollars that have historically come to the housing committee were bypassed to go to (the budget committee) signaled to me as chair that there was no intention of production of housing inventory, that this plan was already baked by the administration,” Thomas said. “And frankly, if it was not for my firm dissent and the public outcry, I don’t think we would have received $50 million.”
Instead, the bulk of the funding would flow towards the administration’s Power Protection Initiative, which calls for the installation of back-up power generators at more than 100 city-owned sites. Officials with the administration argued prolonged power outages in the aftermath of Hurricane Beryl exposed gaps in the city’s resiliency.
“I think it’s a fair argument, and I do think that we should invest in our public facilities,” Thomas said. “However, after I charge my phone or my oxygen tank for three days at a multipurpose center, and I return to my home with a tree on the roof, what about me? And so, I think that that’s the short-sightedness of the plan allocation.”
The plan would split up the $315 million into $151 million for power generators, $50 million for home repairs, about $41 million for debris removal programs, $41 million towards services for homeless people, and $15 million towards public safety and emergency response initiatives.
Even with the federal funding, the power protection initiative would remain about $80 million short of its $230 million price tag.
Thomas already had an amendment on the table Wednesday that would increase the amount for home repairs to $100 million at the expense of the power protection initiative. Thomas said there was no coordination with Plummer, and she plans to stand by her amendment regardless of what Plummer introduces next week.
Council member Fred Flickinger said, “It seems to me like there’s 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 for things like generation for our emergency services that benefit the entire city.”
In addition to the $50 million for home repairs from the current pool of recovery funds, Whitmire’s deputy chief of staff Steven David said, the administration is channeling recovery dollars from previous disasters towards housing, including $20 million for down payment assistance related to Hurricane Harvey recovery as well as $40 million for home repair tied to Winter Storm Uri.
“When we talk about $50 million narrowly looking at (2024 funding), it is an incomplete view of the amount of money that is going right now towards housing,” David said. “It also doesn’t account for the larger infrastructure that we have put in place to make sure that affordability is a driving theme in being able to live in a home or own a home in the city of Houston.”
The administration is confident the plan would be approved by the federal government. In June, U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner said HUD under President Donald Trump is giving local municipalities more leeway to decide how to spend recovery funds because local leaders “know your needs better than any bureaucrat 100, 1,000 miles away in D.C.”
Zoe Middleton, associate policy director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was among the advocates who pushed back on the initial lack of funding for housing needs. She argued that $50 million still isn’t enough.
“You’ll see people continuing to live in unrepaired homes or under-repaired homes,” Middleton said. “You’ll see them go into debt to try and finance some level of repairs, and you’ll see over time, like this reputation that Houston has for being relatively affordable for a large city, start to evaporate as the existing affordable housing stock bears the brunt of extreme weather.”
The proposal will be considered by the city council next week.
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