Executive Summary
After Hurricane Harvey, the stakes were high for the City of Houston in correctly accounting for the full costs of the storm on the city’s housing. Between 2015 and Harvey in August 2017, Houston experienced five federally-declared flooding disasters, meaning that many Houstonians had yet to recover from previous storms when Harvey struck. The federal disaster recovery framework is based on a calculation of “unmet need” for housing and other factors. However, traditional methods of calculating this need are based on outdated metrics that exclude anyone who didn’t apply for, or receive, Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assistance after the storm. If Houston’s unmet need was chronically undercounted, then its recovery was also being chronically under-resourced.