Disaster Recovery

Home Repairs Halted, Homeownership Delayed and Public Projects Stalled as HUD’s VIHFA Suspension Ripples Across USVI

ST. CROIX — For one elderly St. Croix resident, nearly nine years of waiting after Hurricane Maria had finally appeared to be nearing an end. Her home was damaged during the devastating 2017 storm, and she had spent years in the V.I. Housing Finance Authority's EnVIsion Tomorrow program waiting for repairs. When the Consortium visited her this week, she had reached the point where preparations were being made for her to leave the house so construction could begin. Then the process stopped. The woman was informed that the work could not move forward because of the federal funding restrictions resulting from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's suspension of VIHFA. After years of waiting for the territory's flagship hurricane housing-recovery program to reach her home, the federal action against the agency administering that recovery had placed another obstacle between her and repairs. Her experience is increasingly being repeated in different forms across the Virgin...