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FEMA closes gap that prevented many Black families from accessing disaster aid

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The Federal Emergency Management Agency is set to announce sweeping changes to the way the U.S. government will verify homeownership for disaster relief applicants who lack certain legal documents for inherited property, reports NBC News.

The change responds to pushback against rules that have stymied Black Americans in the Deep South from getting help to rebuild after catastrophic storms if they can’t adequately prove they own their homes — and it comes as Hurricane Ida as threatened to repeat the cycle.

“What we’re trying to do is make sure that we understand each individual situation is unique and that we need to not have a one-size-fits-all approach,” FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell said in an interview Wednesday at Mississippi Emergency Management Agency headquarters, where she spoke about how FEMA was helping with recovery from Ida.

“We’re going to continue to try to improve our program and make additional changes. Some of them we can do right away, like this. Some of them will require some regulatory change,” she said. “But we are really driving hard to make these changes.”

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