Climate Change Displaces Residents of Affordable Housing Units

A recent editorial from Bloomberg Media asserts storms and flooding are damaging or destroying a growing share of the nation's 1.1 million public housing units. These homes and structures are getting replaced slowly or not at all, forcing the people who lived in them to leave their neighborhoods and often their cities. Harriet Tregoning, director of community planning and development for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was quoted as stating, "This is an issue that HUD and public housing authorities across the country are going to have to face."

The article goes on to explain that HUD awarded $1 billion to states and cities in January for protecting private homes and infrastructure against climate change, including relocating a town in Louisiana. But HUD  doesn’t have a plan for protecting the country's public housing from that threat. Even when FEMA recently mandated that states must adopt the newest versions of the International Building Codes, it did not include a plan to make sure new buildings are verifiably built to a higher standard in order to release disaster funding.

 

NRMCA believes that resilience starts with mitigating disaster through resilient construction. To that end, our Build with Strength program is wholly committed to increasing this nation's resilience not only through a strong foundation in the newest versions of building codes, but also through our advocacy and education offerings.