PERSPECTIVE ON THE NORTHRIDGE EARTHQUAKE : Feds Come Up Short on Housing : There are rent vouchers, but disaster policy assumes, wrongly, that the market will replace affordable apartments.

FEMA-bashing is a popular sport after a major disaster. In the days following President Clinton’s promise of speedy federal assistance for victims of the Northridge earthquake, thousands of rattled people queued up at disaster-relief centers to collect housing vouchers. Instead, they got sheafs of application forms to fill out and appointments with FEMA counselors two or three weeks down the line. The federal government clearly was overwhelmed, unprepared for the scope of Los Angeles’ needs. People were outraged, and until the bureaucratic reinforcements got into gear over the weekend, the situation threatened to turn very nasty. But was the outrage justified?

No.

Angelenos, like most Americans, assume that FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is there to help them individually when disaster strikes. They are misinformed. FEMA was established in 1974 to provide disaster assistance when a state’s resources are exhausted. The federal government’s primary commitment is to assist in the reconstruction of public works--roads, freeways, bridges, dams, power and water lines as well as schools and civic buildings. Private housing recovery is not integral to FEMA’s mission. Why?

Until the Loma Prieta quake in 1989, few natural disasters in the United States had caused major damage to the housing stock. As a result, when the federal government thought of disaster relief for housing, they tended to think of a farmhouse in Kansas hit by a tornado. Thus, the federal model for housing recovery is a rent voucher, a small cash grant for lost eyeglasses, prescription medicine and the like, and perhaps a repair or rebuilding loan from the Small Business Administration.

The federal government’s policy is to treat housing losses as small private losses. While the government acknowledges that it has a role in assisting homeowners’ recovery from uninsured losses, the basic assumption is that market forces will work to rebuild apartments and other privately owned rental buildings. That model is no longer useful.

In the past five years, there have been five major disasters affecting tens of thousands of housing units. The Loma Prieta quake wiped out 12,000 and damaged 30,000 more. Hurricanes Andrew and Iniki affected at least 50,000 homes, as did the Midwestern floods. FEMA’s latest estimate for the Northridge earthquake: 36,000 housing units seriously damaged or destroyed.

This should not come as a surprise. Most Americans live and work in cities or close-in suburbs; when disaster strikes, the toll will be high. The good news is that we in California have a building code system that works. The process of regulating building design and construction here is one of the best in the world. Yes, some buildings failed last Monday. Yes, some people lost their lives, but the number was mercifully small. In India and Armenia, recent earthquakes of similar magnitude killed 25,000.

Countless Angelenos are alive today because of the controversial 1981 ordinance that mandated retrofitting of unreinforced masonry buildings. Some of them were damaged last week, but no one was killed in a retrofitted masonry building.

That was the good news. The bad news: There is no code, policy or program to “retrofit” the lives of the thousands of people displaced by the Northridge earthquake. While the federal government has been remarkably prompt and generous in responding to this disaster, it is not programmed to help with the primary need: housing. In the aid package announced by President Clinton on Monday, $757 million is geared to loans for uninsured losses sustained by homeowners, renters and small businesses. Another $150 million is earmarked for rental vouchers. Missing from the equation is replacement of the lost rental units, a major problem for the San Fernando Valley, where more than half of the residents are renters.

The immediate lessons from the Northridge earthquake are virtually identical to the lessons from Loma Prieta, which have yet to be incorporated in federal disaster-relief policy:

* Housing losses will be large and concentrated in multifamily structures.

* The real-estate market will never replace affordable housing and will be slow to rebuild market-rate rental housing.

* The concept of recovery as loss replacement is inadequate to the task of rebuilding urban housing resources.

* Housing recovery will not happen unless there is adequate funding in place through existing housing agencies.

As a point of comparison, the price tag on Loma Prieta was $10 billion; 90% was spent on roads, bridges, public buildings and infrastructure, 10% ($1 billion) on housing repair and replacement. Half of the money came from insurance claims and the rest from a patchwork of federal, state and Red Cross programs that were understaffed and underfunded. More than four years later, 2,000 to 3,000 units have not been rebuilt.

Major disasters change the physical and social fabric of cities in unalterable ways. An individual rebuilding his house may want to change the design; a city may see the need for a homeless shelter. It is within that context that the reformulating of disaster recovery policy must take place. First, it must recognize the importance of all types of housing in disaster assistance. Ideally, it would include a real commitment to protecting the existing housing stock and mitigating hazards as well as rebuilding multifamily structures and expediting repair funds for homeowners and landlords.

Federally funded assistance is essential, but the way those funds are spent should be decided by local governments, which have the responsibility to rebuild community life.