Typhoon Merbok CDBG-DR Household Survey

What is the CDBG-DR?
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) provides Community Development Block Grant for Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds to help cities, counties, and states recover from Presidentially declared disasters. The purpose of the CDBG-DR funds is to focus on long-term recovery efforts and address unmet needs in housing, infrastructure, and local economies that other federal programs have not addressed.

For Typhoon Merbok, HUD awarded the State of Alaska $38,493,000 ($33,472,000 for unmet needs and $5,021,000 for mitigation activities). The State of Alaska must decide how to allocate these funds to benefit the 53 communities that were Most Impacted and Distressed (MID) by Typhoon Merbok. The Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development (DCCED) Division of Community and Regional Affairs (DCRA) is leading this effort for the State.
For a more detailed overview of the Typhoon Merbok Unmet Needs Assessment and Action Plan, please visit the project website: https://www.commerce.alaska.gov/web/dcra/GrantsSection/CDBG-DR-Merbok.aspx

For more information about how CDBG-DR funds are appropriated, allocated, and administered visit this https://www.hudexchange.info/programs/cdbg-dr/overview/.

Why are we doing this survey and other outreach?
The project team developed a HUD-approved CDBG-DR Typhoon Merbok Action Plan (available on the project website) using publicly available data, with some input from regional organizations, to quantify the remaining unmet needs from Typhoon Merbok’s impacts and propose a prioritized list of uses for the funding. We know that this data has gaps – applications for public programs don’t reach everyone and some storm impacts take time to emerge. This survey and other outreach activities in the impacted region will help fill these gaps and allow DCRA to design and modify the proposed use of the CDBG-DR funds for disaster recovery. If you’d like to share photos, please email to: cdbgdr@alaska.gov.

What are we going to do with the information?
The information that you provide will be used to update the proposed use of funds that will be included in an amendment to the action plan (expected September 2026). It will help ensure that funding is allocated to the recovery and mitigation projects and programs that need it most.

Thank you for your input!