by Brianna Crandall — November 1, 2013—One year after Hurricane Sandy devastated coastal communities in the Northeast, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) allocated on October 28 a combined $5 billion through a second round of recovery funds to five states and New York City. Provided through HUD’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) Program, these recovery funds will assist impacted communities to meet remaining housing, economic development and infrastructure needs.
Last February, one week after President Obama signed into law the Disaster Relief Appropriations Act of 2013, HUD allocated $5.4 billion to assist communities located in the most impacted areas. This second round of funding is intended to support remaining unmet recovery needs that continue to confront these communities one year after the storm.
The grants to help families, businesses and communities get back on their feet and increase resiliency for the future are going to New York City and the states of New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Maryland and Rhode Island, the same entities that received the first Sandy allocation.
HUD allocates CDBG-Disaster Recovery funds based on the best available data from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the Small Business Administration disaster loan programs, the Department of Transportation, and the Army Corps of Engineers to identify the areas of greatest need in the region impacted by Hurricane Sandy. These allocations will be published in the Federal Register in the coming weeks along with criteria for their use.
In this second Sandy allocation, grantees will be required to identify unmet needs for housing, economic development and infrastructure, and may use this allocation to address those unmet needs. Grantees will be required to incorporate a risk assessment in their planning efforts to ensure long-term resilience.
Each grantee must update its impacts and needs assessments and conduct a comprehensive risk assessment in order to inform infrastructure investments. The risk assessment must include climate change impacts, account for changes in development patterns and populations, address how CDBG-DR funds will address those impacts and changes and associated risks, identify and incorporate resilience performance standards, and meet other related requirements.
