In January 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) awarded $4 billion in Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funding to Florida to help meet unmet recovery needs from 2023 and 2024 storms. Yet despite the scale of the recovery crisis and the availability of federal funds — with damages from both Helene and Milton alone exceeding $100 billion — the Florida Department of Commerce has refused to establish a Homeowner Reimbursement Program. This is a proven recovery tool implemented by other states and four Florida counties, all of which have used their CDBG-DR funds to help residents recover costs for repairs that they had no choice but to make.
This decision leaves thousands of disaster survivors — predominantly low-income homeowners stretched across 47 Florida counties — without support for the repair costs they’ve already shouldered in the absence of timely government assistance.
Reimbursement Programs Are Allowed — and Sorely Needed
HUD’s Universal Notice for CDBG-DR funding is clear: grantees (states and localities) are explicitly allowed to reimburse disaster-impacted homeowners for eligible expenses incurred after the incident date of a qualifying disaster1. Activities like demolition, rehabilitation, and reconstruction of single-family homes are eligible for reimbursement; five of the twelve Florida jurisdictions awarded funding in January have set up homeowner reimbursement programs. Pasco and Volusia Counties established the most generous reimbursement programs, allocating up to 34 percent of total funding for homeowner reimbursements.
And yet, despite this allowance — and even though states like Texas (Hurricane Harvey), Oklahoma (2019 floods), and North Carolina (Hurricane Matthew) have also implemented such programs — at this time, Florida Commerce is not offering reimbursement options for individual homeowners impacted by the 2023 and 2024 storms. However, Florida Commerce will administer the Housing Repair and Replacement Program (HRRP) to directly assist homeowners whose properties have sustained damage during the 2023 and 2024 storms. Florida Commerce’s HRRP program will hire contractors to directly manage and complete the construction process for impacted homeowners. Applicants cannot receive funding directly or select their own contractors either.
This policy failure causes further harm to families who did everything they could do: they took out loans, dipped into savings, or borrowed from relatives to make their homes livable again. Now, instead of being supported, they’re left saddled with debt, while the state delays recovery for years through slow repair programs outsourced to private contractors. The state was audited for its Hurricane Irma housing repair program, and the audit revealed lapses in oversight that allowed contractors to siphon money out of the system. The state has up to six years to spend the funding from this CDBG-DR allocation, and it can take years for impacted homeowners and renters to begin to see any relief.
Disaster Recovery in Florida is Too Slow, Too Complex, and Deeply Inequitable
The disaster recovery system in the U.S. is fragmented, opaque, and often far too slow to meet the needs of survivors. Unlike FEMA’s Individuals and Households Program (IHP), which is permanently authorized and replenishable by Congress, the CDBG-DR program is not permanently authorized — which means funding must be appropriated by Congress again after each disaster. CDBG-DR is appropriated to address estimated unmet disaster recovery needs following the deployment of Public Assistance, Individual Assistance, as well as insurance claims and losses. Even after HUD allocates the money, the process requires drafting an action plan, obtaining federal approval, developing program guidelines, and procuring contractors.
Congress approved the CDBG-DR funds in December 2024, and HUD allocated them to grantees in January 2025. But Hurricane Idalia struck Florida’s Nature Coast back on August 30, 2023—meaning survivors waited over 15 months before learning that recovery funding would even be made available at all. Oftentimes, delaying repairs leads to further damage, driving up repair costs and worsening the situation. Eligible homeowners should not be penalized when they had no possible way of knowing this support was coming.
In the meantime, families face impossible choices. As one example, Gainesville residents Edgar and Zoraida, whose manufactured home was destroyed by a fallen tree during Hurricane Helene, had to raise funds on GoFundMe and turn to high-interest credit cards to cover $40,000 in repairs. They received just $13,600 from FEMA — barely a third of what they needed. Now, like thousands of others, they are living under the weight of debt that could have been reimbursed if Florida had taken a different policy route.
What Florida Should Do
Florida Commerce still has time to revise its Action Plan and establish a Homeowner Reimbursement Program for residents impacted by Hurricane Idalia, Hurricane Helene, Hurricane Debby, Hurricane Milton, and the North Florida Tornadoes. There is no legal or regulatory barrier preventing the state from doing so. The state can amend its Action Plan as many times as it would like, and it should follow the lead of Pasco, Volusia, and the other counties that have established reimbursement programs.
Here’s what a better policy plan would look like:
- A Reimbursement Pathway for Homeowners who paid out-of-pocket for eligible repairs, modeled on any of the five pre-existing programs set up by Florida jurisdictions.
- Jurisdictions must take proactive responsibility for clear communication and outreach in this context, making recovery programs widely visible and accessible. Many disaster survivors describe the recovery process as the “disaster after the disaster” — marked by denials, endless bureaucracy, delays, and limited access to small amounts of aid. With so few resources available, survivors cannot be expected to navigate complex systems on their own. Most jurisdictions that implemented reimbursement programs conducted their own unmet needs surveys during the Action Plan development process, clearly identifying reimbursement as a significant need. In contrast, the state of Florida failed to conduct its own unmet needs survey, leaving critical gaps in understanding and outreach.
- Accountability for Recovery Contractors is critical to ensure funds are spent on actual repairs—not on inflated overhead and profit margins. A 2024 audit by HUD’s Office of Inspector General flagged these issues in Irma recovery contracts, revealing that Florida Commerce had awarded contracts with combined profit and overhead rates as high as 65 percent. As a result of the audit, Florida was forced to return funds to the federal government—money that should have gone to disaster survivors in urgent need. Furthermore, Florida Commerce then refused to audit the rest of its contracts, leaving open the possibility that even more unreasonable profit was siphoned out of the disaster recovery system. At least one of these contracts had just one bid, meaning there was no market competition. Several local news outlets have investigated shoddy Irma repair work completed by Rebuild Florida contractors (10 Tampa Bay completed four investigations here, here, here, and here, along with First Coast News). IEM International Inc. received the largest contract with Irma repair funds — $252 million (47 percent of funds) — working across dozens of counties and engaging numerous subcontractors to complete rehabilitation and reconstruction projects.
- Priority Procurement for Local Small Businesses and Nonprofit Vendors provides incentives to local economies, increases quality control, and reduces overall project costs. Building local capacities for disaster response and long-term recovery is beneficial not only to local businesses, but also to the community at large. The state relies predominantly on large, out-of-state vendors to manage housing repair programs, when it could be working with locally-based housing redevelopers, like local Rebuilding Together organizations, that stick around after the repairs are completed, boost local economies, and provide higher return-on-investment. Rebuilding Together’s work, for example, has a strong reputation locally and, as an independent, locally-run organization, its economic activity stimulates greater local spending. According to the Institute for Local Self-Reliance and the American Independent Business Alliance, $100 spent at local independent businesses generates an additional $45 of local spending, compared to just $14 for out-of-state national businesses.
Florida Commerce and other CDBG-DR grantees must take action. Families who acted swiftly to rebuild their homes should not be penalized for it. Florida’s $4 billion recovery package should be a turning point, not another missed opportunity.
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Notes
1The Common Application, Waivers, and Alternative Requirements for Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery Grantees: The Universal Notice (“Universal Notice”), as incorporated by the Allocation Announcement Notice for these funds, specifically states that “grantees may reimburse disaster-impacted beneficiaries based on the pre-application costs incurred by the beneficiary for completing an activity that is eligible for reimbursement . . . subject to the requirements established in section III.B.14.b.” (III.E.1) Costs incurred for the “rehabilitation, demolition, and reconstruction of single family . . . buildings . . . owned by private individuals” are eligible for reimbursement. (III.B.14.b)
