This is our third and final blog post reviewing the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force report Rebuilding Strategy, Stronger Communities, A Resilient Region released last week. Today we critique the report through the lens of community engagement and impacted communities.

The Task Force, chaired by HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan, compiled disaster recovery and rebuilding recommendations from two dozen federal agencies and departments to help prepare for future weather-related disasters.

Our previous posts were about the Task Force’s recommendations on transparency and regional economic development and community development.

Community Engagement and Impacted Communities

We are pleased to see the report’s numerous mentions of capacity building and community engagement in Sandy-impacted communities. However, we still would have hoped for requirements, not just recommendations for how local officials should incorporate democratic planning procedures into rebuilding efforts and how a community can best influence the allocation of Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). The New York Rising Community Reconstruction Program, cited in the report as an example of community engagement in the rebuilding process, may be a worthwhile starting point, but more needs to be done if the Task Force’s goal for community engagement is to be met.  For example:

• The Task Force’s recommendation for expanding and reinforcing existing workforce and training programs for impacted communities is good. Yet, unless there is significant collaboration and improvement with the notoriously underfunded and confusing landscape of workforce development in New York City this could be difficult to make happen. A good point of reference for improving the system can be found in Re-Envisioning the New York City Workforce System, released in March.

• Simply encouraging officials to comply “to the greatest extent feasible” with HUD’s Section 3 provision (Section 3 requires beneficiaries of HUD funding to make best faith efforts that funds benefit low-income communities through job opportunities or training) does not improve the existing employment situation for people that need work, or in the case of New York, address the spotty record of implementation at agencies like  the New York City Housing Authority.

A case in point regarding capacity building: The Bloomberg Administration held numerous meetings in Sandy-affected communities via the Special Initiative for Rebuilding and Resiliency (SIRR) project that subsequently released a report to help guide the rebuilding after the end of the mayor’s Administration this year. According to the city, SIRR held more than 24 briefings with elected officials and community-based organizations officials and ten meetings to “solicit input on resiliency priorities.” While these meetings may have been well intentioned, they were insufficient to have been the foundation for the city’s plan to allocate CDBG grants. As mentioned in our earlier post, community engagement shouldn’t be seen as slowing down the allocation of funds, but instead considered as a partnership to ensure funds get to New Yorkers impacted by the storm. Joan Byron of the Pratt Center summed up Mayor Bloomberg and the SIRR report best in this quote in The New York Times:

“His [Bloomberg’s] response to Sandy at the human level was appalling,” said Joan Byron, an urban planner who is director of policy at the Pratt Center for Community Development. “But the infrastructure stuff is brilliant.”

This brings us back to the need for broad community engagement to ensure disaster relief funds are allocated at the human level. And the best way to do that is for HUD to expect stronger engagement policies. Absent this, we are greatly worried that billions of dollars in disaster aid will bypass those that need it most.

A good place for HUD to start would be to expand the requirement for localities to provide more than seven-day write-in comment periods for submitting or amending Partial Actions Plans. It’s unfair to expect communities to analyze and respond on a short time frame about how local officials should spend billions of dollars. Without a stronger signal or outright requirement for additional time, (which is also being urged by groups in New Jersey) we will continue to see instances like last month, when the Bloomberg Administration failed to broadly publicize its comment period for an amendment to the city’s first plan to allocate CDBG funds. And if past disasters nationwide are any indication, Action Plans are regularly amended, (the majority of 9/11 CDBG grants to New York were amended or revised) creating many missed opportunities for the public.

Many low and moderate-income communities had long standing inequality issues before the Hurricane and that were then exacerbated. In order for resiliency efforts to move forward efficiently, local officials must better communicate with their constituents. The old adage about there being a silver lining holds profoundly true after Sandy: Federal officials have a chance to diversify the type of stakeholders who will be at decision-making tables around the region as neighborhoods rebuild in the face of climate change. The long-existing processes of allocating CDBG funds that too often excludes hard hit communities should have been more clearly addressed by the Task Force.

Thanks to GJNY’s Research Analyst Elizabeth Bird

This is our second of three blog posts reviewing the federal Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force report released earlier this week. Our first blog was on the report’s recommendations related to transparency. We also provided examples of where we believe the Task Force should have used its influence to require cities and states to agree to abide by the recommendations, especially those that would enhance democratic planning principles and benefit low and moderate-income communities.

For our second blog, we focus on economic development and community needs.

Regional Economic Development & Community Needs

We were thrilled to see the Task Force’s report reference regional coordination. Competition between cities and states has gotten out of control in recent years, with billions of unaccountable economic development dollars often used to shuffle jobs around regions rather than create new ones. Considering how New York allocated hundreds of millions of dollars in disaster aid after the attacks of September 11, 2001 to large financial and real estate interests in Lower Manhattan, fearing they would move, a bona fide conversation directed from the White House about thoughtful approaches to regional economic development planning is long overdue.

Additionally, the emphasis on how impacted communities can assist small businesses is another welcome change from policies implemented after 9/11. At that time, a disproportionate amount of the assistance from New York State went to boutique law firms and bond trading firms under the guise of aid to small business, a New York Times analysis found.

We are encouraged by the report’s recommendations that small businesses receive assistance with resiliency planning and that more types of small business that be made eligible for SBA loans, and in a wider range of loan amounts. Also helpful is the call for more flexibility for community-based intermediary lenders. However, the New York City Economic Development Corporation, which is expected to allocate a significant portion of CDBG-DR funds for business resiliency and rebuilding, is lacking transparency on its existing non-CDBG disaster relief aid for area businesses. This lack of transparency is a bad precedent for company-specific disaster aid.

There is a passing mention of tax-exempt bond financing in the report, while we suspect the potential for Sandy related private activity bonds can be an important tool to leverage affordable housing and other capital projects that have broad community benefits. If those bonds or other tax benefits become available, they should be used to promote truly affordable housing in the region and focus on the needs of working families and low-income communities. Lacking a requirement to do so, there is little to prevent what occurred after 9/11, when Liberty Bonds were used to build luxury housing, helping to establish Lower Manhattan as one of the region’s hottest and priciest neighborhoods.

The report accurately describes the region’s housing market as challenging. Many neighborhoods in the area, especially in New York City, are experiencing an affordability crisis and the New York City Housing Authority was ill-prepared for the storm. The loss of housing stock due to the hurricane was a double whammy as low vacancies meant there were limited places for displaced New Yorkers to go even temporarily. The report outlines several programs that could help repair homes and recommends that various agencies work with the private sector, including the philanthropic sector, to preserve and develop affordable housing.

Aside from affordability, the housing situation also faces environmental problems such as mold.   Not uncommon after disasters like Hurricane Sandy, mold is a problem for thousands of households in New York City but policies on how to fix the problem have not been effective, as the report implies. The recommendation that federal agencies streamline how to deal with “indoor air pollutants” is a welcome one.

An issue environmental justice advocates are particularly concerned about is that low-income neighborhoods and communities of color that have historically borne the brunt of hazardous waste dumping may have suffered additional damage as a result of  Sandy’s storm surge. The Environmental Protection Agency’s “Plan EJ 2014” cited in the report is expected to provide various tools for community engagement and inclusive planning procedures. The Sandy Regional Assembly has been organizing and advocating for policies and capital projects to protect residents and workers from hazardous exposures in the event of severe weather, and create jobs for residents, as part of the rebuilding process.

We are pleased there’s no mention of using disaster aid to build market rate housing, yet there is also nothing in the report that will prevent this from happening. The Bloomberg Administration has done little to help the city’s middle class and working poor; its policies that displace small businesses combined with a proliferation of low-wage jobs have led to a dramatic increase in disparity. The administration continues stubbornly down the same economic development path after Sandy with recently proposed programs like the “Neighborhood Game Changer” causing anxiety in some communities.

The Task Force acknowledges the immense impact Hurricane Sandy had on our region. However, as mentioned in our first post, the report leaves too much responsibility on already struggling neighborhoods to push for its implementation and not enough of a mandate to local officials.

Thanks to GJNY’s Research Analyst, Elizabeth Bird