“How dare the Bush Administration come to San Francisco to praise itself for funding homeless assistance while it continues to decimate funding for affordable housing?” said Paul Boden, executive director of the Western Regional Advocacy Project. “With more than 914,000 homeless students in public schools, as identified by the US Department of Education, with nearly 170,000 in California alone, they should be ashamed. Instead, they’re holding a press conference designed to deceive the people living in the Speaker’s district about their accomplishments in addressing homelessness and poverty.”

While it may be true that San Francisco will receive a record allocation of $18.8 million in McKinney-Vento funding for homeless services, and that the $1.365 billion in nationwide grants may also be a record, to put this in the context of ending homelessness we must also look at Federal funding for affordable housing programs. Recent trends in Federal affordable housing funding:

• $3.3 billion in cuts to affordable housing programs in the past two years.
• $700 million in cuts to public housing operating funds last year, which will only cover 85% of documented need. Last year, the San Francisco Public Housing Authority eliminated 30 positions in response to this “change in funding formula.”
• San Francisco currently has over 55,000 households on its Section 8 and public housing waiting lists.
• Nationally, since 1996, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s budget for new public housing—the safety net for the poorest among us—has been zero, while over 100,000 public housing units have been lost to demolition, sale, or other removal in that same time.

President Bush’s 2008 budget calls for even more affordable housing cuts:

• Despite the fact that 7.8 million people in rural communities live in poverty, the budget eliminates all funding for the US Department of Agriculture Section 515 rural affordable housing program (which is currently funded at $99 million), and cuts $49 million from USDA Section 521 rural rental assistance programs.
• The budget cuts $112 million from HUD Section 811 housing programs for disabled people.
• The budget cuts $160 million from HUD Section 202 housing programs for elderly people.
• Despite a more than $20 billion backlog for public housing modernization needs, the budget cuts $415 million from public housing capital expense funding.

For the Bush administration to ignore and continue to downplay the shortfall of many billions of dollars in affordable housing funding, while patting itself on the back for granting San Francisco less than $19 million in homeless assistance funding, is both disingenuous and shameful. McKinney-Vento is an important source of funding for addressing the immediate suffering of homeless people, but if we—as a nation—want to end homelessness, we must demand more from our Federal government.

Read WRAP’s report on housing cuts and homelessness at http://www.wraphome.org

WRAP

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