| Sumario: | The federal administration of individual housing repair aid in the wake of climate disaster is meant to improve survivors’ well-being and assist with unmet housing needs. However, the assumptions, categories, and evaluation practices around which U.S. disaster aid is organized often end up creating exclusions. Such exclusions may be organized through supposedly neutral discourses and measures meant to prevent disaster fraud in evaluative bureaucratic encounters between survivors and the state. This paper focuses on property and ownership as a central sphere through which disaster governance is organized, enacted, and contested. Drawing on ethnographic research in Puerto Rico from 2018 to 2019, government documents, media, legal advocacy sources, and a comparative lens with post-Katrina New Orleans, I argue that institutional valuations around property and ownership produced eligibility exclusions and foreclosed access to recovery for some. The federal government’s strict requirements around proving homeownership for individual home repair aid ultimately undermined the local organization and lived experiences of property owners in Puerto Rico, delegitimized ownership claims, and created barriers to accessing aid.
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