Grants Approved to Help Mississippi Mortgage Holders Affected by Katrina
The U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department approved Gov. Haley Barbour’s $700 million plan to help an estimated 10,000 lower-income homeowners with Katrina recovery grants of up to $100,000 each.
HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson, at a ceremony outside Gulfport City Hall, also announced the approval of a $500 million program to help business recovery and economic development in the 49 Mississippi counties covered by the Katrina disaster declaration.
This program will provide grants of up to $10 million for those counties and will take loan applications from the counties to promote business recovery and employment. At least $160 million of the economic development money is earmarked for six southern counties in the state, as assistance continues to pour in for Mississippi mortgage holders.
Both programs are being funded by the more than $5 billion in federal Katrina recovery money that U.S. Sens. Thad Cochran and Trent Lott and Gov. Barbour shepherded through Congress last year, unprecedented in previous disasters.
The Secretary talked to a small crowd of city, state and federal leaders yesterday, praising efforts to help those with home mortgages that lost their jobs and cannot afford financing on their own.
“(Sen. Cochran) has been to my office so many times I was concerned that he liked the view and might want to take my office from me,” Jackson joked. “Without him acting very swiftly, we would not be here today… Gov. Barbour has made sure that every resource needed in Mississippi gets here. But the governor understands not just homeowners need help. He was the first governor, and I mean the first governor, to propose funding for the recovery of public housing residents.”
“I believe (HUD) will continue to work with you until every homeowner, every family and every resident in [the South Mississippi housing market] can rebuild and have a place to call home and every business can rebuild,” Jackson said.
The new homeowner grant program is being called Phase II.
It follows a first grant program, also funded with the HUD money Congress approved, that started last April and is slowly providing grants of up to $150,000 to homeowners of any income level, provided they lived outside the federal flood zone and lost their homes to Katrina’s surge; and provided they had homeowner’s insurance at the time.
The new grant program approved Wednesday applies to homes that suffered flooding inside or outside the flood zone, whether or not they were insured. But it applies only to homeowners whose household income does not exceed 60 percent of the area’s median income, roughly $63,000 for a family of four.