What Next for Affordable Housing? The sub-prime mortgage crisis offers a silver lining .....

[marmar]

from The American Prospect:



What Next for Affordable Housing?

The sub-prime mortgage crisis offers a silver lining -- the potential for the less-well-known problem of affordable housing to get some well-deserved attention and funding.

Tim Fernholz | July 30, 2008 | web only



Affordable housing programs have fallen lower and lower on Congress' priorities list over the last decade. But the sub-prime mortgage crisis offers a silver lining: the potential for the less-well-known problem of affordable housing to piggyback on the attention given to its more glamorous cousin. For example, a measure of the recent housing bill allows local housing authorities to purchase foreclosed homes to provide affordable housing. It's a start, but real improvement will require broader efforts. What is needed for more affordable housing -- attention and funding -- will come only when its challenges are linked with policy challenges like climate change, crime, education, and economic development.

According to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), there are 6 million households that qualify for the full extent of government affordable housing assistance, though many fewer will receive it. This is the largest number of households with worst-case housing needs since the government began counting in 1990. These families earn 30 percent of the Area Median Income (approximately $20,000 or less per year) and are eligible for HUD programs that subsidize their rent beyond 30 percent of their income per month. However, there is a shortage of available units -- in D.C. alone there are 22,000 people on the Housing Authority assistance wait-list; multiyear wait-lists exist in most cities. Households that earn up to 80 percent of the Area Median Income -- about $50,000 per year -- also have trouble finding affordable housing and are helped along with tax credits and other indirect subsidies, like inclusionary zoning.

The last major government initiative in public housing was the HOPE VI program, passed in 1993 under President Bill Clinton, which funds the demolition and rebuilding of these projects as mixed-income communities. This program, virtually eliminated in funding cut-backs last year, is part of a package of policy tools that includes rent vouchers, tax incentives for developers, zoning regulation and direct public subsidies that has created a wide, and confusing, approach to supporting affordable housing. These programs have also seen resource problems; HUD's housing subsidies for 2008 are underfunded by billions of dollars.

"There's a perception that public housing being dealt with, when it actually isn't," Conrad Egan, head of the National Housing Conference, a coalition of affordable housing organizations, said. "The capital funding that's needed to renovate and recapitalize is about 30 billion in the hole."

We know the need, but what we don't know about these policies is just as problematic. There has not been the funding to support comprehensive research into the efficacy of the variety of programs that provide affordable housing, according to experts in the field. Given the variety of policy-making tools available at all levels of government, liberals need to realize that fixing this problem will not be an easy undertaking. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=what_next_for_affordable_housing

[Demeter]

1. Some of those Foreclosed Properties Are so Ticky-Tacky

that they aren't "affordable" even if free. Affordable means energy-efficient, low maintenance, and well-located to mass transit and jobs. Local farms is another plus.