It’s been 13 months since the Maui wildfires last August. Since then, the Valley Isle has been dealing with a housing crisis exacerbated by the fires, with little affordable housing available to longtime residents. Congress has a mechanism to provide emergency funding for housing recovery from major disasters, but it isn’t using it. When Congress comes back into session on Sept. 9, it should immediately authorize emergency funding for housing recovery in Hawaii, and it should make the program permanent so other communities can benefit when they’re hit by disasters.

I study disasters in the context of climate and geopolitics, and I just published the Disaster Dollar Database, which tracks federal grantmaking for disaster recovery since 2015. The data allows us to compare Hawaii’s experience with other similar disasters, in terms of how much federal help people and communities got for recovery.

Most people think of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as the front line of the federal government’s response to disasters; it’s often the first agency to arrive on the scene and people apply directly to FEMA for assistance through its Individuals and Households Program (IHP). The database shows that about 17,500 people applied to FEMA for help after the Maui wildfires, and just over 7,000 were eligible for assistance. The average grant from FEMA to individual households was $6,502 for recovery from the wildfires.

As anyone dealing with the housing crisis knows, $6,500 doesn’t go very far toward rebuilding affordable, resilient housing for the people who live on Maui year-round. Maui had a housing affordability problem before the fires. Now, the housing market is being squeezed by vacation rentals, exacerbating the housing crisis for longtime residents.

In the past, Congress has recognized that community-level investments are needed after disasters, especially to preserve and repair affordable housing. Since 2015, Congress has made $50 million in emergency appropriations to the U.S. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Department to support community recovery from disasters.

But for the last 15 months, Congress has not made a single emergency appropriation to HUD for disaster recovery, despite a record-breaking $28 billion in disasters in 2023 alone. There has been no emergency funding for recovery from the wildfires in Hawaii, or for any of the other disasters that have happened since May 2023.

Part of the reason that Congress has been caught flat-footed is that there is no permanent program at HUD for disaster recovery that Congress can fund on a non-emergency basis. FEMA’s Disaster Relief Fund is permanent, so FEMA was able to offer help after the wildfires without Congress having to make a special, emergency appropriation just for Hawaii. HUD needs a similar fund.

Even before the wildfires, Hawaii’s U.S. Sen. Brian Schatz has been a strong advocate for permanently creating HUD’s programs for disaster recovery so that communities don’t have to wait more than a year for the kind of emergency funding they need to recover their housing stock. When Congress comes back into session on Monday, it will be the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season. There’s no better time to pass a bill funding Hawaii’s housing recovery and permanently authorizing affordable housing recovery programs, for any place where a big disaster hits.

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More online: See the Disaster Dollar Database at 808ne.ws/disasterdollar.

Sarah Labowitz is a nonresident scholar with the Sustainability, Climate and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.