The New York Times has an interesting JavaScript interface to a photo-rich article on the current state of hurricane-damaged houses in Puerto Rico (title: “On Hurricane Maria Anniversary, Puerto Rico Is Still in Ruins”).
Punta Santiago’s story underscores how, even after years of responding to devastating storms, the federal government struggles to help get people back in functioning homes after a natural disaster. Residents told stories of FEMA claims denied and their appeals frustrated. Federal grants helped a bit but were not nearly enough to pay for repairs.
FEMA’s work in Puerto Rico was the longest sustained domestic airborne food and water mission in the nation’s history. The agency has never distributed more food or installed more generators.
And its effort to get people back in their homes was massive, too: The $1.6 billion the agency allocated for direct emergency home repairs will be one of the largest housing programs the federal government has ever attempted. FEMA spent another $1.4 billion on grants to homeowners to repair or rebuild their homes and help them pay for temporary lodging.
FEMA’s housing help was slow in arriving, plagued by bureaucratic delays and regulations that failed to take into account the hundreds of thousands in Puerto Rico who had no clear title to their properties.
Time and again, people asked for help in getting the most basic kinds of repairs — for missing roofs, collapsed walls, dangerous mold, soaked belongings — then waited for months and often did not get enough to even start the process.
But in neighborhoods where residents live on meager pensions and disability checks, there were gutted kitchens and electrical wires running randomly along unfinished walls.
Perhaps we could infer from this only that a Big Government run by Donald Trump is not the answer to extreme weather events, but how much could the Trump Administration have touched or changed the 38-year-old FEMA (created by Jimmy carter in an April 1, 1979 executive order, about six months before his presidency was derailed by Iranians taking U.S. Embassy staff hostage).
As the mainland U.S. labor participation rate falls (see “Book Review: The Redistribution Recession“) and more American residents (citizens, documented and undocumented immigrants, refugees, etc.) rely on welfare, the mainland will increasingly resemble Puerto Rico. Most of the U.S. can’t be reached by hurricanes, but supposedly the climate is becoming more extreme and therefore we can have extreme weather events in more parts of the U.S.
The U.S. is terrible at building and maintaining infrastructure and projects run by our government can cost 5-6X more than when a European government builds something (see New Yorker). Should we try to come up with a strategy for weather event recovery that deploys a FEMA-sized budget, but doesn’t depend on government-supervised rebuilding?
Also, if FEMA is giving money to property owners then necessarily it is increasinig income inequality. Property owners are already wealthier than the median.
Some ideas:
- Instead of giving people with jobs $X to rebuild a damaged house, why not give them $X that they have the option to use to move to a part of the country with a high demand for labor and get set up there? So that people don’t get caught up in the bureaucratic delays that have apparently plagued Puerto Rico, streamline the process so that people can get the cash regardless of home ownership status (i.e., they have to prove only that they lived in the weather-tricken region).
- For those who are on welfare, streamline the process of transferring to the welfare system (housing, health care, food stamps, TANF cash, etc.) in a different region of the U.S. where housing is available.
Readers: Can we infer from the failure that FEMA as currently conceived can’t deliver what Americans expect? If so, how should their mission be reconceived?
Related:
- “Can Puerto Rico be a laboratory for the future of the rest of the U.S.?” (2015, before the hurricane hit)
>> Big Government is not the answer to extreme weather events?
This is a really interesting and deep observation coming a hundred years after the Bolshevik revolution. Perhaps, we have better computers or something…
Giving money to locals in a place like Puerto Rico is like flushing it down the toilet. Better to pay six times the cost. Or maybe we should just subcontract it to European governments? But they’d still have to deal with Puerto Ricans. I’ll think you’ll find that it’s the people and the culture that is to blame. Yeah, you can do things better in Europe, but try as you might, projects never seem to work out in Latin America or Africa.