Feds refer Texas’ Harvey funding discrimination case to Justice Department

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Texas officials discriminated against residents based on race and national origin in distributing $1 billion in Hurricane Harvey aid in 2021, the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development affirmed on Wednesday.

Since the state General Land Office has shown a “sustained unwillingness” to voluntarily correct the unequal treatment, which HUD contends violates the Fair Housing Act, the agency has referred the case to the Department of Justice.

Additional fact-finding by HUD investigators since their preliminary finding of discrimination in 2022 only reinforced that conclusion, Christina Lewis, Region VI director of the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, wrote Wednesday in a letter to GLO and two community groups who originally filed the complaint.

“GLO… focused Mitigation resources in communities that benefited smaller populations of rural White Texans over communities of urban Black and Hispanic Texans, particularly those closer to the coast and more prone to flooding from hurricanes and other natural disasters,” Lewis said.

Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham dismissed the move as a stunt by "political activists embedded in HUD by the Biden Administration."

"The fact is, the HUD-approved plan overwhelmingly benefited minorities and there simply was no discrimination," Buckingham said in a statement. "No other state has performed as efficiently and effectively as Texas in providing disaster recovery and mitigation funding to communities and residents."

Buckingham said the Justice Department previously rejected "fake claims" from HUD because they lacked substance. Her spokesperson said she was referring to a 2023 letter in which the U.S. Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke returned a referral from the housing agency to HUD for further investigation.

The two community groups, Texas Housers and Northeast Action Collective, on Thursday praised HUD’s action and said in a statement that the findings “confirmed what communities of color in Texas have long suspected.” They called on the Justice Department to force Texas to comply with federal discrimination laws since the state had bucked a voluntary agreement with the housing department.

At issue is how the federal government says Texas misspent some of the $4.3 billion in disaster recovery aid it received from Congress in 2019.

The General Land Office in 2021, under then-Commissioner George P. Bush, distributed a $1 billion tranche via a funding competition it designed for local governments. But the governments of Houston and Harris County received $0 from the contest, despite the county having the most deaths and property damage from the storm.

A Houston Chronicle investigation found the aid disproportionately went to inland counties with less damage from the storm than coastal ones hit hardest. The newspaper also found the land office steered money away from coastal communities the state measured were at highest risk of natural disasters and toward inland ones with a lower disaster risk.

Under pressure from irate Houston politicians of both parties, Bush canceled a planned second funding competition and announced plans to award $750 million directly to Harris County. But that did not satisfy all his critics.

HUD soon launched its own investigation. The agency’s conclusions, released in 2022, confirmed the Chronicle’s findings and said the unfair doling out of funds “discriminated on the basis of race and national origin” and “substantially and predictably disadvantaged minority residents, with particularly disparate outcomes for Black residents.”

The land office revised its plan to distribute a second $1.2 billion tranche. But a Texas Tribune investigation found that, too, routed aid disproportionately to more white, inland counties at less risk of natural disasters.

Houston Mayor John Whitmire and Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo did not respond to requests for comment on Thursday.

What action the Justice Department may take is unclear with President Donald Trump, an ally of Abbott, returning to office next week. Trump’s transition team did not respond to a request for comment.