NLIHC and eight other national housing and civil rights organizations sent a letter to HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge on March 16 urging HUD to comprehensively address a recent finding by the agency’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) that the Texas General Land Office’s (GLO) HUD-funded mitigation program discriminated against people of color. The letter requested that HUD also address three additional outstanding civil rights filings regarding Texas’s program. The agency is currently considering an Action Plan Amendment submitted by the Texas GLO that would modify the GLO’s program. Approval of this modification would allow the state agency to begin distributing funds. NLIHC and our partners urge HUD to reject this amendment on the grounds that the amendment fails to address the full extent of discrimination in the GLO’s disaster-mitigation program.
HUD’s civil rights determination was made in response to one of four complaints about the Texas GLO’s program filed with HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. The determination found that the state had discriminated against non-white communities in Southeast Texas when distributing over $2.1 billion in much-needed disaster mitigation funding, a portion of which was specifically dedicated to areas impacted by Hurricane Harvey. The funds in question were to be distributed through a GLO-established competition that penalized areas with larger overall and larger non-white populations and directed funds to rural counties with larger white populations. HUD’s determination that the Texas GLO’s program was discriminatory was the result of an administrative complaint filed in June 2021 by NLIHC partners Texas Housers and the Northeast Action Collective. NLIHC issued a statement following the announcement of HUD’s determination calling it a “historic decision.”
The Action Plan Amendment was drafted by the GLO before HUD announced its determination that the GLO’s program had violated the civil rights of people of color in Texas. The amendment would modify the program to ensure that funds are provided to Harris County, the largest jurisdiction in the area. Yet the amendment fails to address the discriminatory impact of the program on other communities in Southeast Texas that were harmed by the illegal decision to channel funding to more affluent communities.
“In light of this serious civil rights violation – and other pending civil rights complaints against the State of Texas and City of Houston on closely related disaster recovery issues – we strongly urge HUD to reject the State of Texas’s Action Plan Amendment and require Texas to first resolve the outstanding findings, before HUD approves the state’s action plan amendment or provides additional mitigation funding,” reads the letter. “The three pending civil rights complaints must be addressed comprehensively to ensure that critical disaster mitigation resources are distributed equitably.”
Read the letter at: https://bit.ly/3ikovGO
Read the announcement from Texas Housers at: https://bit.ly/3wh7HJ1
Read NLIHC’s statement at: https://bit.ly/3KN54me