Reps. Espaillat and González-Colón Reintroduce the Housing Victims Of Major Disasters Act

WASHINGTON, DC – This National Preparedness Month, Representatives Adriano Espaillat (D-NY-13) and Jenniffer González-Colón (R-PR) reintroduced the Housing Victims of Major Disasters Act to codify Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) policies that advance equity for disaster survivors by accepting a broader range of homeownership and occupancy documentation.

The Espaillat- González-Colón legislation aims to eliminate barriers that survivors of natural disasters, such as hurricanes and tornadoes, face when seeking desperately needed housing assistance.

“As climate change accelerates, natural disasters continue to devastate communities across the United States and are especially hard on historically underserved and environmentally vulnerable communities,” said Espaillat. “Natural disasters displaced over 320,000 people in the California wildfires, 250,000 people in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina, and we continue to track those displaced by Hurricane Idalia. Our bill would help these families by guaranteeing that multiple different methods for proving ownership are accepted, such as a real estate property tax receipt or a mortgage payment. I am proud to join my colleague across the aisle, Rep. González-Colón, in ensuring equitable access to survivor aid– a non-partisan issue.”

“In disaster response, governments must show empathy, sensibility, and efficiency. Even when you have property documents, in an emergency, these may be lost or not accessible after a major emergency. In the aftermath of Hurricane María, on top of their great losses, people in Puerto Rico suffered the anxiety of seeing needed federal aid be denied for lack of documentation. We must ensure this doesn’t happen again, in Puerto Rico or any U.S. jurisdiction. This bill will provide greater flexibility for disaster victims to prove ownership of or residence in a property and access the help they need after a natural disaster more easily. Having succeeded in having FEMA address some of these concerns administratively, I am proud to join my colleague Rep. Espaillat in reintroducing the Housing Victims of Major Disasters Act to make this Law and ensure this relief in disaster responses across the nation,” said Rep. González-Colón.

The Housing Victims of Major Disasters Act was first introduced in the 115th Congress after Hurricane Maria ravished Puerto Rico, leaving hundreds of thousands of families unhoused and in despair. Of the nearly 1.2 million applications for help that the FEMA had received in Puerto Rico, roughly 60 percent were ruled ineligible for Individual Assistance (IA) grants, largely because they lacked proper titles to prove ownership. In many communities in Puerto Rico, over half of all houses have been passed down through informal deeds, leading to those who live in the home not having formal documentation that proves that it is theirs, regardless of how long they’ve lived there.

Recognizing this grave inequity in Puerto Rico and other disproportionately underserved communities, FEMA announced in September 2021 that they were updating their IA policies to accept additional forms of documentation to verify occupancy and ownership requirements to improve access to disaster assistance. This bill will codify FEMA’s policy so that the law ensures equal access to housing assistance for all survivors of major disasters.

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