FEMA's average disaster payout is $4,200 — roughly 1% of what it costs to rebuild a home

FEMA's Individual and Households Program (IHP) caps housing assistance at $43,600 per household per disaster, but the average grant actually disbursed is just $4,200. A typical home destroyed in the 2025 LA wildfires or Hurricane Helene costs $500,000-$750,000+ to rebuild. The gap between what FEMA provides and what rebuilding costs is not a rounding error — it is an order-of-magnitude shortfall that leaves survivors in financial free-fall. So what? Survivors who receive a $4,200 check cannot begin construction — they cannot even hire an architect. They are told to apply for SBA disaster loans to bridge the gap, but SBA loans are debt, not relief, and carry interest rates of 4-8%. Many survivors — especially elderly homeowners who owned their homes outright — do not qualify or do not want to take on a 30-year loan in their 60s or 70s. So they sit. Months pass. Their empty lot grows weeds. Their temporary housing assistance expires. They drain savings, move in with family, or leave their community permanently. In Altadena, more than 70% of displaced residents remain displaced over a year after the Eaton Fire. In rural North Carolina after Helene, counties spent $50 million on cleanup against annual budgets of $42 million while waiting for FEMA reimbursement that still has not arrived. This problem persists because FEMA was never designed to make disaster survivors whole — it was designed to provide a bridge to other resources. But 'other resources' (insurance, SBA loans, state programs, personal savings) have each independently deteriorated. Insurance companies are fleeing disaster-prone states. SBA ran out of disaster loan funds entirely in October 2024. State budgets are strained by overlapping disasters. The result is that FEMA's $4,200 average grant is often the only money survivors receive, and the program's architecture assumes a support ecosystem that no longer exists.