FEDERAL HOMELESS POLICY UPDATE: Reading the Fine Print
What you try to hide ain’t top secret
Steel Pulse, 1978
In the August issue of STREET SHEET, we briefly made reference to some of the more peculiar funding requests of U.S. Senate appropriators. More details are emerging. As mentioned, buried in the corners of the fiscal year 2006 Senate transportation and housing spending bill is a $50 million dollar item to create an ‘Affordable Housing Technical Assistance Board’. This group would be composed of “respected national non-profits” who would help local communities deal with the “overly complex” nature of HUD programs.
The funding source for this board would not be new money, but rather dollars transferred from Section 8, CDBG, HOME, homeless assistance grants, housing for the disabled, housing for the elderly, and, Native American Housing Block. Rather than actually do something about those overly complex HUD rules, the bill proposes to take money from affordable housing programs to pay for a technical assistance board, one of whose tasks will be assisting state and local groups who don’t have enough money for affordable housing.
And, what does $50 million taken in equal parts from these eight programs ($6.25 million each) translate to in real terms? $6.25 million could provide Section 8 vouchers for close to 1,000 low- income households—a critical need since Congress has failed to fund any new vouchers since 2002. Moreover, while 16% of all requests for homeless assistance grants went unfunded in fiscal year 2004, the Homeless Assistance program’s contribution to the ‘Affordable Housing Technical Assistance Board’ might otherwise be used to help fund some of the 51 continuums of care that failed to receive any funding in the last round. Indeed, the real cost of the proposed technical assistance board is the loss of housing for vulnerable populations.
Please contact your Senators and urge them to put HUD dollars where people need it most—housing and homelessness programs. Urge your Senators to strike the proposed report language creating a technical assistance board. Please call the US Capitol Switchboard to be connected to your Senator: (202) 224-3121. It is best to fax letters to your Senators. Fax numbers for Senate offices may be found here.
In a June 14 editorial, the Wall Street Journal went on the attack against low income housing in a piece entitled “Mr. Oxley’s Slush Fund” [Representative Michael Oxley (R-Ohio) is the Chair of the US House Financial Services Committee]. Curiously echoing the Bush Administration’s now familiar talking points, the editors of the Journal attempted to make the case against an affordable housing fund contained within H.R. 1461, the Federal Housing Finance Reform Act of 2005.
The scathing dismissal of a rather modest affordable housing provision contained within the much larger reform bill was telling and suggested a general hostility to low income housing. In fact, rather than serve as Congressional payola or income for “liberal interest groups,” as the editorial charged, the bill is specifically designed to produce, preserve, and rehabilitate rental housing that is affordable for extremely low and very low income families. The Journal’s mischaracterization, however, does help underscore the need for initiatives that address the housing crisis for the nation’s poor and homeless.
The balance sheet of continued cuts to Federal housing programs, escalating housing costs and stagnant wages reveal 15 million low-income households paying at least 50% of their income on rent and another 3.5 million people lack housing altogether. Indeed, the Journal was certainly correct to note that few poor people own $500,000 mortgages and therefore stood to benefit little from the proposed reform of government-sponsored enterprises. That much is certain. In fact, in order to even rent a modest two-bedroom apartment in the city of San Francisco, a minimum wage worker must work over 175 hours a week.
Such a monumental housing gap within the more commonly discussed market boom is precisely why the bill proposes to take a small percentage of after tax profits of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and create a fund to help address America’s housing crisis. Meanwhile, American homeowners annually receive over $100 billion in federal subsidy through the mortgage interest deduction and other property tax breaks. By comparison, the President’s entire HUD budget request for this next year is less than $30 billion. Yet, a solid block of conservative lawmakers have come out in opposition to the affordable housing fund within the Fannie and Freddie reform and are equally almost certainly not ready to open discussion about the mortgage interest deduction. Evidently, some federally subsidized housing is more equal than others. But whether from the pages of the Wall Street Journal or the Administration’s anti-housing playbook, such delusional thinking about the reach of the American Dream or the nation’s robust housing market is but a cruel joke for the nation’s poor.
Brad