Citizens' Road Home Action Team
Road Home Program Misery Index

* ICF call center staff continue to give wrong information to applicants who sometimes find out only months later that their “problem” holding up an application can be fixed immediately at an “advisory” appointment at the Housing Center. This allows ICF to clock in more hours for reimbursement and justify keeping the Housing Centers open while applicants who are far from Housing Centers or don’t have the time to go there (often many visits are required to settle “problems”) are out of luck.

• Applicants waiting up to 1 1/2 years for their grant are told that there are liens on their property when there are not. One applicant who applied 15 months ago with no grant in sight, wrote last week that there were no liens on her home other than an SBA loan but an ICF employee told her that she should know better than them as to the nature of liens which Road Home stated were on her property. The ten supposed liens on her property were from different people who shared only the same, common last name. See similar inexcusable mistakes about liens in a Times-Picayune story

• Many Road Home applicants struggling to rebuild tell of being “forced” to go to closing despite the award amount being wrong and then being left in dispute resolution or appeals for many months with no resolution. Applicants are sometimes incorrectly told by ICF staff that they must go to closing before they can dispute the amount of their grant. This allows ICF to make quotas for closings with quantity, not quality (fair grants desperately needed by thousands of applicants).

• A family living in a FEMA trailer on their lot with rats around them. The mother applied 16 months ago, when the program first started, who still has not gotten her grant and does not know why. They had 6-7 feet of water but were told by ICF staff that it was not enough damage. The mother told us that she just really want to get back into her home and get her life back together. She has been repairing her home little by little with little money that is coming into the household. Then, like so many Road Home applicants she pleaded for us to help her.

• An 86-year-old woman who applied the first month of the program, 16 months ago, and has never received her award letter wrote that the ICF staff finally told her to write a letter and send it to appeals. She then received a letter stating that she was declared ineligible because she never had the first meeting. She had to send a letter to appeals showing that long ago she did have the required initial appointment.

• Very many applicants have had delays of many months in their “second closings” for obtaining the additional compensation grants for those with under 80 percent of the area median income or increases in grants for those who won dispute resolution or appeals cases. That and the indefinitely stalled elevation allowances are deterring people from rebuilding their homes.

• An applicant suffering with his family in a FEMA trailer, who got his shortchanged grant and while awaiting on appeal the money he should be eligible for was told that he would get no more because the Road Home would not cover the extreme mold damage that required gutting of his house after 8 inches of long-standing flood water.

• A New Orleanian who applied 15 months ago with no award letter and only found out in Dec. 2007 upon intercession of a State senator that the hold-up was because the area where her home was located is being reviewed by the state because the area was an agricultural landfill(superfund). No one is able to give her information when a decision will be made or other options I have until a decision is made.

• An applicant whose grant award got down-sized after he raised objections to the delays found out that Road Home ordered three BPO’s to estimate his home’s value, even though he raised no objective to initial pre-storm value from the Road Home. The square-footage of the “comparables” were lower than for Road Home’s stated square footage of his house and the last one had the lowest square footage of all thereby giving him a lower pre-storm value and decreased grant.