A Texas state program to allocate federal aid for rebuilding after Hurricane Harvey unfairly overlooks Houston’s Black and Hispanic neighborhoods after it designed a competition-based application process that favoured smaller, predominantly white counties, community advocates say.
The result is that many affected communities are stll waiting for aid, five years after the hurricane hit.
“The state agency split the competition in two,” Grist writes, paraphrasing a letter from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Half the funds were reserved for counties that the federal government had identified as hardest hit by Harvey—where Black and Hispanic residents were most likely to live—while the other half went to more rural, inland counties included on the state’s expanded list, which tended to be whiter.”
