10 Years After Hurricane Ike, Millions In Affordable Housing Funding For Houston Still Unspent

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After Hurricane Ike sent as much as 15 feet of water surging into parts of Harris County and affected nearly 250,000 homes, the area received hundreds of millions of dollars from HUD for housing-related projects. That included more than $200 million to repair and build new apartment complexes across the region.

And just as that money started to flow, prominent members of the Obama administration had begun pushing for better enforcement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — in particular, the need to undo the racial segregation in housing that the federal government had enabled for decades through redlining and discriminatory lending practices. (The administration passed new rules in 2015 to do just that.)

Gunsolley’s agency ended up in the crosshairs. He had originally planned to build several affordable housing projects in predominantly poor and minority areas, but state and federal agencies blocked nearly all of them after fair housing advocates argued they would only serve to perpetuate segregation.


A map from a 2013 study shows some of the distressed neighborhoods where the Houston Housing Authority hoped to use Ike recovery dollars. Most of the agency's plans were blocked, except for a 154-unit apartment complex in Independence Heights.

Gunsolley then tried twice to build apartments in wealthier areas. But community opposition and politics killed both of those efforts, too; residents said they worried about more traffic, overcrowded schools, decreasing property values and crime if subsidized apartments went up in their neighborhoods. In a final attempt to use the rest of the money, the housing authority had been quietly working to buy an existing apartment complex in the well-off Briar Forest neighborhood in West Houston, with hopes to turn about 300 of its units into affordable housing. A week before the deal was set to close, Hurricane Harvey hit and destroyed the complex’s first floor.

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https://www.texastribune.org/2018/03/29/houston-texas-affordable-housing-hurricane-ike-harvey/