Joint Housing Solutions Group Program Support

Project Overview

The Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Joint Housing Solutions Group (JHSG), a multi-agency housing task force, sought to improve FEMA’s disaster housing assistance capacity.

Understanding the Mission

The JHSG aimed to expand the range of housing options available to support communities and individuals impacted by disasters.

The Hagerty Approach

Hagerty Team performed a variety of services to support the JHSG, including:

• Developing a comprehensive tool to identify and assess housing alternatives;
• Performing site visits and assessing more than 50 different physical housing alternatives;
• Identifying seven potentially viable units and working with FEMA to develop a procurement approach;
• Developing the Mission Scoping Tool to define and forecast the scope of a housing mission and the resources required by FEMA;
• Providing field-based technical assistance after the 2007 California Wildfires, the 2008 Iowa Severe Storms and Floods, and 2008 Hurricane Ike to help analyze the potential for alternative housing, consider administrative options for housing people, and implement data analysis and reporting methods;
• Drafting and circulating an Administrative Options White Paper to FEMA Headquarters (HQ) outlining alternative options to housing people instead of physical manufactured housing;
• Issuing a comprehensive annual JHSG Report to senior FEMA officials;
• Representing and presenting the JHSG at national and regional conferences, including the National Hurricane Conference (NHC) and the Alternative Housing Pilot Program (AHPP) conferences; and
• Providing overall program management and coordination to FEMA leadership.

Achieving Results

Over the course of this multi-year engagement, FEMA exercised all available option periods and expanded the project budget from $400,000 to $2.6 million. As a result, FEMA initiated testing of the seven proposed housing alternatives in Bridge City, Texas, and Emmitsburg, Maryland.