Kathryn Gaasch has worked to assist rural communities in western North Carolina for five years with the nonprofit support group MDC. But she found herself seeking assistance after Hurricane Helene tore across southern Appalachia in late September, dumping record rainfall and cutting residents off from water, electricity and contact with the outside world.
It was days until Gaasch was able to get a phone signal to call the Federal Emergency Management Agency. By then, she had learned that her quest for help was complicated because she was not a homeowner, but leased a basement apartment in a mountainside rental home. A FEMA representative told her that someone else at her address—as it turned out, an upstairs neighbor who had evacuated—already had applied for and received aid. FEMA only approves one aid request per household, Gaasch was told.
“That was the first time I cried, because she said we should have applied together,” Gaasch recalled. Eventually, she was able to get her landlords’ help in documenting her eligibility for emergency FEMA aid, but she knows that many renters were not so lucky.
“There is no clause or fine print that says, if you are renting or have roommates, this is how you need to navigate this process,” said Gaasch, the program director for MDC’s Rural Prosperity and Investment team. “And I will add that when you’re living a trauma, you’re not thinking straight. I’m a very well-resourced person and I have access to information, and even I just didn’t know what to do.”
It has long been recognized that renters have a much more difficult time than homeowners in getting approved for FEMA assistance. Often, they are required to show documentation that they simply don’t have access to—a formal lease or a declaration from the property owner—in order to receive emergency and housing aid that federal law makes available to disaster victims.
With Congress set to consider a $100 billion disaster aid bill before the end of the year, some Congressional Democrats are reviving a proposal to streamline the process of obtaining housing aid from FEMA. They hope the idea can gain traction at the end of a year when back-to-back hurricanes caused historic flooding on the East Coast, deadly tornadoes ravaged the Midwest and fast-moving wildfires leveled homes in the drought-scorched Southwest.
“Families from coast to coast have seen storms devastate their communities in recent months,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), lead sponsor of the Housing Survivors of Major Disasters Act, in an email. “The federal government should not be a roadblock to those families getting housing assistance.”
Chronic Problems for FEMA Applicants
The problem for renters began to get national attention after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017. Some 77,000 households in Puerto Rico were wrongfully denied FEMA assistance because they couldn’t document ownership of their residence, the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimated.
Ironically, those with the greatest resources appear to have the most success in obtaining FEMA aid. The nonprofit advocacy group Texas Housers found that after Hurricane Harvey in 2017, the denial rate for households that made $70,000 or more annually was only 10 percent, while nearly half of those who made less than $15,000 a year were refused aid.
A 2021 investigation by The Washington Post bolstered such findings, showing that FEMA was only approving 13 percent of applications for housing assistance, down from 63 percent in 2010—with Black families in the Deep South systematically denied aid, in part because of difficulties in proving ownership of their properties.
While FEMA took steps to make documentation easier after Hurricane Maria, those accommodations were applied unevenly and FEMA did not reconsider prior denials of assistance, according to Warren and other co-sponsors of the bill to address the problem.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) speaks during a Senate committee hearing on Jan. 11 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Kent Nishimura/Getty Images
Warren’s bill clarifies that federal housing aid is available not only to property owners but to anyone residing on a property in the area for which the major disaster was declared. The bill would expand the types of documentation that FEMA can use as proof of residence for establishing eligibility for disaster aid—including a driver’s license or state-issued identification card. In addition, FEMA would be required to create a new form that would allow applicants to self-certify their eligibility for assistance. The legislation would also give survivors of natural disasters since 2017 a 180-day window to reopen or appeal a determination on a past denied application for assistance.
FEMA officials have said they are committed to ensuring that all eligible survivors of a disaster receive the aid they are due under the law. But they say the agency is hampered because of a critical shortfall in the Disaster Relief Fund.
“Our agency’s mission is to help people before, during and after disasters—no matter who they are or where they live,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in a call with reporters in mid-November. “This is more crucial to the American people now than ever before. And we are quickly running out of the funding we need to support this mission.”
This story is funded by readers like you.Our nonprofit newsroom provides award-winning climate coverage free of charge and advertising. We rely on donations from readers like you to keep going. Please donate now to support our work.Donate Now
President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $100 billion in emergency disaster aid to address the aftermaths of Hurricanes Helene and Milton and to shore up FEMA’s resources.
Such a disaster aid bill could be a vehicle for legislation to streamline the bureaucratic process of applying for FEMA housing aid. But it is not clear that either additional funding or FEMA reform can make it through the lame-duck session before the holiday recess and the convening of the newly elected, Republican-controlled Congress on Jan. 3.
Pressure Bound to Increase
No matter what Congress decides to do, demands for emergency housing assistance are growing. Over the past 10 years, there have been on average 63 major disaster declarations per year, up 150 percent from the the first decade of FEMA’s existence, from 1979 to 1988, according to a new report by the Congressional Research Service.
Meanwhile, FEMA is sure to face additional pressure under Trump, who during his first term diverted agency funds to building immigration facilities near the Mexico border. Critics fear he may tap into FEMA funds again for his mass deportation plans. Trump’s choice to head the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees FEMA, is Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, who faced criticism in her state for a month-long delay in requesting a disaster declaration during historic flooding on the Big Sioux River this summer. South Dakota residents waited weeks for FEMA aid that their neighbors across the river in Iowa got quickly.
In North Carolina, Gaasch said she has gained a new appreciation for how important it is to have systems in place to protect and help community members equally.
“Disasters like this are relatively normal, but what makes them disastrous is our infrastructure,” Gaasch said. That includes not just roads and bridges, she said, but social infrastructure, like the FEMA program. “Disasters themselves maybe don’t discriminate, but our infrastructure does, which means that the people that have the least are also the ones that get hit the worst.”
About This Story
Perhaps you noticed: This story, like all the news we publish, is free to read. That’s because Inside Climate News is a 501c3 nonprofit organization. We do not charge a subscription fee, lock our news behind a paywall, or clutter our website with ads. We make our news on climate and the environment freely available to you and anyone who wants it.
That’s not all. We also share our news for free with scores of other media organizations around the country. Many of them can’t afford to do environmental journalism of their own. We’ve built bureaus from coast to coast to report local stories, collaborate with local newsrooms and co-publish articles so that this vital work is shared as widely as possible.
Two of us launched ICN in 2007. Six years later we earned a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting, and now we run the oldest and largest dedicated climate newsroom in the nation. We tell the story in all its complexity. We hold polluters accountable. We expose environmental injustice. We debunk misinformation. We scrutinize solutions and inspire action.
Donations from readers like you fund every aspect of what we do. If you don’t already, will you support our ongoing work, our reporting on the biggest crisis facing our planet, and help us reach even more readers in more places?
Please take a moment to make a tax-deductible donation. Every one of them makes a difference.
Thank you,
Marianne Lavelle
Reporter, Washington, D.C.
Marianne Lavelle is a reporter for Inside Climate News. She has covered environment, science, law, and business in Washington, D.C. for more than two decades. She has won the Polk Award, the Investigative Editors and Reporters Award, and numerous other honors. Lavelle spent four years as online energy news editor and writer at National Geographic. She spearheaded a project on climate lobbying for the nonprofit journalism organization, the Center for Public Integrity. She also has worked at U.S. News and World Report magazine and The National Law Journal. While there, she led the award-winning 1992 investigation, “Unequal Protection,” on the disparity in environmental law enforcement against polluters in minority and white communities. Lavelle received her master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and is a graduate of Villanova University.