The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announces a funding opportunity for community studies of recovery from wildfire. The deadline for proposals is July 19, 2022. Up to $600,000 is available. Details are available on grants.gov under the name “HUDRD – Wildfire Recovery and Resilience.”
Background
The Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2021 provided HUD funding to study the effectiveness of its disaster recovery funding. To find out how disaster assistance, including CDBG-DR and CDBG-MIT grants, can be used more effectively during recovery to enhance resilience to wildfires, HUD will award one or more cooperative agreements for studies of communities in the American West affected by presidentially declared wildfire disasters that occurred in 2017 or later. To be considered for funding, a study must include at least one community that received CDBG-DR or CDBG-MIT funding, but may also include one or more communities that did not receive such funding as part of a comparative analysis.
HUD is soliciting proposals that use a community studies method to examine positive, negative, and neutral effects of disaster assistance on the resilience to wildfire of low- and moderate-income persons and communities. HUD seeks proposals that will consider both biophysical factors (e.g., defensible space, location of buildings) and social factors (e.g., insurance coverage, education) that affect resilience to wildfire, including actions that may be individual (e.g., putting a new roof on your home, having a get-away bag at your front door) and collective (e.g., building codes and enforcement, free chipper days). “Community studies method” means an observational study that uses multiple data sources to investigate a problem within the context of other behavior and attitudes within a community (adapted from Arensberg, 1954). HUD will consider both retrospective and prospective studies for funding.