Community Development Block Grants Disaster Recovery, Rental Requirements, and Rental Market Impacts

Brian An
Jenny Moody
Georgia Institute of Technology

Rachel Drew
Andrew Jakabovics
Enterprise Community Partners

California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Seva Rodnyansky
Occidental College

Community development in the wake of natural disasters is a challenging undertaking. For the past 2 decades, the distribution and implementation of Community Development Block Grant Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) grants have varied widely, creating useful experimentation to explore the effects of different community development strategies. This article presents an original, hand-collected dataset documenting the requirements in CDBG-DR grants that could shape rental recovery outcomes. Case-study counties were selected from this dataset to track rental market outcomes before and after the natural disasters. The authors found that multifamily rents grew more slowly, and multifamily permits increased more in ZIP Codes that received CDBG-DR funding than in comparable disaster-impacted ZIP Codes that did not receive CDBG-DR funding. These findings suggest that the program’s rental requirements are likely associated with improved outcomes for renters, who are uniquely vulnerable to disasters and deserve further attention from researchers and policymakers looking to mitigate the negative effects.