[Mb-civic] NYTimes.com Article: The War on Affordable Housing

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The War on Affordable Housing

October 16, 2004
 


 

Ideologues in the Bush administration would like to
dismantle Section 8, the most successful public-and-private
housing partnership in the history of the United States.
That's the only way to explain the destructive policies
emanating from the Housing and Urban Development
Department, which has been hammering at Section 8 all year.
The conflicting signals and general aura of hostility have
convinced housing authorities around the country that they
need to defend themselves by avoiding new commitments and
cutting back on their old ones. 

Even worse, the developers who have counted on Section 8
money to build affordable housing for the poor, the elderly
and the disabled now think that they can no longer trust
this program. Republican lawmakers whose districts are
being hurt have kept quiet in the name of party solidarity.
But this posture of loyal complicity will be difficult to
maintain as the housing crisis deepens, which it surely
will if HUD continues along its current course. 

A landmark program, Section 8 has produced affordable
housing for needy Americans since the Nixon years. It works
this way: instead of doing the construction itself, the
government guarantees subsidies for rents in the private
market. Families, most of them at or below the poverty
level, pay 30 percent of their incomes toward rent, and
Section 8 vouchers pay the rest. At the moment, the program
covers about two million people, a majority of them elderly
or in families with children. Developers building
affordable housing have come to depend on Section 8
guarantees for financial backing. 

Things are getting worse by the day, thanks to ideologues
in the Bush administration who prefer a laissez-faire
approach, regardless of the social costs. Unable to
dismember the Section 8 program directly, HUD has chosen to
destabilize it with a series of rule changes and budget
maneuvers that are being felt from coast to coast. The
current HUD secretary, Alphonso Jackson, has settled on a
particularly destructive strategy involving misdirection
and sleight of hand. He releases poorly explained policies
that include hidden, but draconian, cuts. After an outcry
from Congress, he retreats to lesser cuts that leave the
program diminished, housing authorities confused and the
general public mistakenly believing that the status quo has
been regained. 

The latest incident, laid out by The Times's David Chen,
came after HUD released a vaguely worded and irrational
proposal that involved reducing the value of housing
vouchers for poor residents in some of the most expensive
housing markets in the country. The proposed change was
widely thought to have been rescinded after housing
advocates and lawmakers raised a fuss. But a close look at
the data shows that HUD still seems to be planning to
enforce a part of the plan that would make it more
difficult for large families to find larger apartments. The
landlords have been quick to react. Faced with the prospect
of Section 8 vouchers that pay less than fair-market rents,
they have made it clear that they will simply refuse to
deal with the program, especially in tight markets where
they can pick and choose tenants. That will be a disaster
for poor families with several children. 

The insanity of this ideologically driven attack on Section
8 is underscored in a bipartisan book - written by two
Republicans and two Democrats - just out from the Joint
Center for Housing Studies at Harvard. The authors include
two former housing secretaries: Jack Kemp, a Republican,
and Henry Cisneros, a Democrat. The authors argue
convincingly that the country is sacrificing both families
and neighborhoods by hacking away at the most successful
housing program in history. 

The book, "Opportunity and Progress," calls for restoring
the sane bipartisan effort that produced the federal
housing program in the first place. Most significantly, the
authors urge Congress to insulate the housing program from
partisan sniping by creating a national trust fund. Modeled
on similar programs that work well at state and local
levels, that national fund would be used to build,
rehabilitate and preserve 1.5 million affordable
apartments. 

The proposal resembles one already pending in Congress,
where a trust fund bill is bottled up in committee even
though it has more than 200 sponsors. The bill, as
originally introduced, would finance itself by redirecting
a small portion of the profits from the Federal Housing
Administration's mortgage insurance fund. 

This page is generally suspicious of dedicated funds, but,
given the national housing crisis, it makes good sense to
direct money earned from housing back into housing. The
bill would certainly have wide support, if only the
Republican leadership allowed it to be brought to the
floor. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/16/opinion/16sat1.html?ex=1098934266&ei=1&en=ac3d9752e124dc5a


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