On June 21, the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Committee approved a HUD funding bill for fiscal year 2006. The United States Senate is expected to draft its own version of the bill in mid July, and following the August summer recess the House and Senate will negotiate a final bill. So, what’s the damage at this point?

The big-ticket item all eyes were fixed on was the Section 8 program, a target of ongoing assaults by the Bush Administration. The House bill would fund tenant-based vouchers at $314 million below the President’s request and project-based assistance at $210 million below the 2005 level. As a result, we shouldn’t expect the brutally long Section 8 waiting lists to disappear anytime soon, and actually seeing new vouchers appears to be a feature of the past.

Ah, nostalgia… the late ‘90s!

Additionally, Community Development Block Grants, Native American Housing Block Grants, the Youthbuild program, and Rural Housing and Economic Development each incurred deep cuts from their 2005 level.

The HUD McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Grants program was funded at $1.34 billion, representing a modest increase from the previous year. This increase, however, is not enough to cover all the permanent housing renewal requirements without forcing cuts to other pieces of the Continuum of Care. Furthermore, the bill requires that at least 30% of all homeless assistance grants go toward new supportive housing, projects which non-disabled families and children are not eligible. These policies are proving to be increasingly problematic for communities struggling to meet emergency needs in the face of budget cuts and federal mandates under the President’s “chronic” homelessness initiative.

The bill does reject some of the Administration’s proposed cuts, however, specifically to Section 202 (housing for the elderly), HOPWA (housing for persons with HIV/AIDS), and Section 811 (housing for the disabled), by flat funding these programs at their 2005 level. In the curious world of DC policy making such results will be labeled a “victory” and “good news” (and holding level is certainly better than cuts), but let’s be clear that these woefully inadequate budgets represent a viscous war on the poor and only perpetuate the system’s cynical game of compromise. We can’t fool ourselves into thinking that we are making any progress in “ending” homelessness when the real causes continue to go unadressed and the perverse “logic” of the budget process shapes our response. Always compromising. Always compromised.

A modified and slimmed down variation of the National Housing Trust Fund Act (NHTF) is suddenly in play in Congress. A bipartisan bill recently emerged from the US House Financial Services Committee that could generate several million a year for the creation of low-income housing.

The Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005, designed to provide greater regulation of government sponsored enterprises (GSE), Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, includes the establishment of an affordable housing provision. If enacted into law, each GSE would dedicate 5% of its after-tax profits to an affordable housing fund designed for the production, preservation and rehabilitation of rental housing for low-income families.

Passage of the Act would greatly expand available resources to help address the nation’s housing crisis, and advocates should encourage their Member of Congress to support the bill but also ensure the legislation is structured in a way to assist those with the greatest housing needs.

Housing trust fund legislation introduced in the 108th Congress by Representative Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) and supported by over 5,500 organizations, required that 30% of trust fund dollars serve households making minimum wage and below, but no such income targeting exists within Federal Housing Finance Reform Act.

As previewed in the June issue of Street Sheet, at its annual conference in Chicago, the U.S. Conference of Mayors adopted a resolution, introduced by Anchorage, Alaska Mayor Marc Begish, streamlining the federal definition of homelessness. The resolution was co-sponsored by the Mayors of: Hattiesburg, Mississippi; Fayetteville, Arkansas; St. Paul, Minnesota; Trenton, New Jersey; Richmond, California; Quincy, Massachusetts; Reno, Nevada; and San Antonio, Texas.

The resolution came from the grass roots and recognizes the extent and severity of family homelessness and the problems caused by the varying definitions of “homelessness” used by different federal agencies. The resolution also specifically cites the definition successfully utilized by the U.S. Department of Education.

Finally, the resolution calls on the federal government to adopt a single, unified definition of homelessness. Philip Mangano, President Bush’s “homeless Czar” and head of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, will be required to report to the Conference of Mayors next year on the progress made toward this goal.

The resolution should be an important step toward expanding the HUD definition of homelessness to include those living “doubled and tripled up” or in weekly stay motels due to lack of alternatives, and help ensure that families and children experiencing homelessness will be able to access housing and services provided by HUD and other federal agencies.

Brad

This entry was posted on Friday, July 1st, 2005 at 12:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.