The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development confirmed on Wednesday that Texas officials unfairly gave out $1 billion in Hurricane Harvey help in 2021 to people based on their race and national origin.
The case has been sent to the Department of Justice because the state General Land Office has shown a “sustained unwillingness” to fix the unfair treatment on its own. HUD says this is against the Fair Housing Act.
As of Wednesday, Christina Lewis, Region VI director of the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, wrote in a letter to GLO and the two community groups that first filed the complaint that more facts were found by HUD investigators since their preliminary finding of discrimination in 2022. This only strengthened their conclusion.
“GLO… focused mitigation resources in communities that benefited smaller populations of rural White Texans over communities of urban Black and Hispanic Texans,” Lewis said. “This was especially true for communities closer to the coast that are more likely to flood during hurricanes and other natural disasters.”
Dawn Buckingham, the commissioner of land, said the move was just a stunt by “political activists embedded in HUD by the Biden Administration.”
In a statement, Buckingham said, “The truth is that the HUD-approved plan overwhelmingly helped minorities and there was simply no discrimination.” “No other state has done a better job than Texas of helping communities and residents recover from disasters and reduce their effects on the environment.”
Buckingham said that the Justice Department had turned down “fake claims” from HUD in the past because they were not based on facts. Her spokesperson said she was talking about a letter from 2023 in which U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke sent a referral from the housing office back to HUD so that they could look into it further.
Two neighborhood groups, Texas Housers and Northeast move Collective, praised HUD’s move on Thursday. They said in a statement that the results “confirmed what communities of color in Texas have long suspected.” They asked the Justice Department to make Texas follow federal anti-discrimination rules since the state had broken a deal it made with the Housing Department on its own.
The question is how the federal government says Texas wasted some of the $4.3 billion it got from Congress in 2019 to help with disaster recovery.
In 2021, when George P. Bush was Commissioner of the General Land Office, the office gave away a $1 billion chunk of money through a game it set up for local governments. But the program didn’t give any money to the governments of Houston or Harris County, even though Harris County had the most deaths and property damage from the storm.
An investigation by the Houston Chronicle found that the help went to counties in the middle of the state that were less damaged by the storm than to counties along the coast that were hit the hardest. The newspaper also found that the land office took money from coastal areas that the state thought were most likely to be hit by natural disasters and gave it to areas in the middle of the state that were less likely to be hit by disasters.
Politicians from both parties in Houston were very angry, so Bush called off a second funding competition and said he would give $750 million straight to Harris County instead. But that didn’t make all of his enemies happy.
As soon as possible, HUD began its own probe. The agency’s 2022 report confirmed what the Chronicle had found. It said that the unfair distribution of funds “discriminated on the basis of race and national origin” and “substantially and predictably disadvantaged minority residents, with particularly disparate outcomes for Black residents.”
The land office changed its mind about how to give out a second $1.2 billion chunk. But an investigation by the Texas Tribune found that that also sent more help to white counties in the middle of the state that were less likely to be hit by natural disasters.
Thursday, people asked Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo for comments, but they did not reply.
It’s not clear what the Justice Department might do now that President Trump, who is friends with Abbott, is coming back to office next week. A request for comment was sent to Trump’s transition team, but they did not reply.
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