Student Corner: How North Carolina has used Community Development Block Grants to Fund Disaster Recovery Programs

This post is Part 2 of a two-part series explaining how Community Development Block Grants for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) are administered in North Carolina and how they’ve been used to help rebuild communities affected by Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Florence. In October 2016, Hurricane Matthew made landfall in North Carolina, bringing up to 18 inches of rainfall and setting record level floods in 17 counties. In the aftermath of the storm, over 77,000 households applied for assistance from FEMA, and over 300,000 businesses were either physically or economically impacted. The first part of this series documented how federal disaster recovery funds are administered by the state, and how they’ll be used to address the damage caused by Hurricane Florence in 2018. This post will demonstrate ways CDBG-DR funds have been used in the past to recover from Hurricane Matthew. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) allocated two installments of $198,553,000 and $37,976,000 to North Carolina to address the short- and long-term needs of communities impacted by Matthew. Of that amount, 80% is reserved for the most heavily impacted counties: Robeson, Cumberland, Edgecombe, and Wayne. Category Allocation Percent of Total Administration $11,826,450 5% Planning $11,826,450 5% Housing $112,863,832 48% Buyout and Acquisition $25,000,000 11% Small Rental $18,204,756 8% Multi-Family $23,204,756 10% Public Housing Authority $9,959,517 4% Small Business Recovery $3,760,000 2% Community Recovery $19,883,239 8% TOTAL $236,529,000 100% According to the CDBG-DR action plan published by the NC Office of Resiliency – which manages and monitors projects funded by CDBG-DR – 76% of program funds are used for [...]

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