OpenFEMA Dataset: Individual Assistance Housing Registrants - Large Disasters - v1

Description

1.1. What is the data in the submission?

Individual Assistance is provided by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to individuals and families who have sustained losses due to disasters.

Homeowners, renters, and business owners in designated counties who sustained damage to their homes, vehicles, personal property, businesses, or inventory as a result of a federally declared disaster may apply for disaster assistance.

Disaster assistance may include grants to help pay for temporary housing, emergency home repairs, uninsured and underinsured personal property losses, and medical, dental, and funeral expenses caused by the disaster, along with other serious disaster-related expenses.

Disaster assistance grants are not taxable income and will not affect eligibility for Social Security, Medicaid, medical waiver programs, welfare assistance, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, or Social Security Disability Insurance.

This dataset contains detailed non-PII data on the Individuals and Households Program (IHP). FEMA provides assistance to individuals and households through the Individual Assistance (IA) program, which includes all of the following: Mass Care and Emergency Assistance (MC/EA); Crisis Counseling Assistance and Training Program (CCP); Disaster Unemployment Assistance (DUA); Disaster Legal Services (DLS); Disaster Case Management (DCM); and Individuals and Households Program (IHP). IHP is comprised of two categories of assistance: Housing Assistance (HA) and Other Needs Assistance (ONA). For more information read FEMA's IHP unified guidance: https://www.fema.gov/sites/default/files/2020-05/IHP_Unified_Guidance_FINAL_09272016_0.pdf

Individual data elements and descriptions are listed in the metadata information within the dataset.

1.2. How is it generated?

The data is derived from the National Emergency Management Information System (NEMIS). The system has been used since 1998 to process all cases for FEMA's Individual Assistance (IA) program as the system of record. The dataset was extracted using FEMA's Enterprise Data Warehouse to ensure reliable, uniform data.

1.3. How can the data be used?

The data can be used to analyze FEMA's IA program response attributes. This could particularly help local and state governments and non-governmental organizations put together applications for funding from the Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) Community Development Block Grants (CDBG) program for rebuilding efforts during and after major disaster declarations. This data was instrumental in Hurricane Sandy community rebuilding and is designed for use in the 2017 hurricane season recovery and beyond.

OpenFEMA customers can comprehensively identify data trends that demonstrate needs of particular communities. For example, large numbers of households with elderly residents in areas susceptible to flooding who may need specific design considerations in home elevation, or low-income renters concentrated in communities where additional assistance may be needed to improve recovery.

Community groups in Texas assisting survivors with their recovery must have accurate and comprehensive data to allocate resources and design recovery programs to accurately and fairly meet the true needs of Texans, particularly the most vulnerable households and communities. The public must have access to this data in order to understand and evaluate state and local recovery plans, and advocate for an effective and equitable recovery.

Citation: The Agency’s preferred citation for datasets (API usage or file downloads) can be found on the OpenFEMA Terms and Conditions page, Citing Data section: https://www.fema.gov/about/openfema/terms-conditions.

Please note that there may be some inconsistent address format and systems, address and location reporting translation/miscues, and standard FEMA Geolocation algorithms ill fitted to O-CONUS addresses. Addresses in Puerto Rico and the way they are reported or even understood by survivors and local officials do not match well with the standard use Geocoders (algorithms that take an address and assign it to its coordinate (x, y/latitudal, longitudinal location on the earth)). When geocoders cannot find an on structure/parcel/point match they tend to place a point at the geographic center of various polygon boundaries (zip code, City/barrio, Municipio, etc.), this at least puts the point in the vicinity of the address provided. This is done from a spatial analytics perspective which will still allow the point to be count in an aggregate and still be useful in helping to formulate the bigger picture.

This is raw, unedited data from FEMA's National Emergency Management Information System (NEMIS) and as such is subject to a small percentage of human error.

Any financial information is derived from NEMIS and not FEMA's official financial systems. Due to differences in reporting periods, status of obligations and how business rules are applied, this financial information may differ slightly from official publication on public websites such as usaspending.gov; this dataset is not intended to be used for any official federal financial reporting.

This dataset is not intended to be an official federal report, and should not be considered an official federal report.

If you have media inquiries about this dataset, please email the FEMA News Desk at FEMA-News-Desk@fema.dhs.gov or call (202) 646-3272. For inquiries about FEMA's data and Open Government program, please email the OpenFEMA team at OpenFEMA@fema.dhs.gov.

Full Data

Data Fields

See Also

Access the metadata API calls for additional information:

• https://www.fema.gov/api/open/v1/OpenFemaDataSets?$filter=name%20eq%20%27IndividualAssistanceHousingRegistrantsLargeDisasters%27
• https://www.fema.gov/api/open/v1/OpenFemaDataSetFields?$filter=openFemaDataSet%20eq%20%27IndividualAssistanceHousingRegistrantsLargeDisasters%27%20and%20datasetVersion%20eq%201