Congress debates housing reform

The 105th Congress has been intensely partisan on most issues. But there is a remarkable amount of unanimity on many of the “fixes” needed to revitalize the nation’s public housing program.

At every opportunity, Republicans are echoing HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo’s promise to “work day and night [to enact] historic, constructive and definitive” legislation this year.

Indeed, Republicans have started the ball rolling with legislation sponsored by Rep. Rick Lazio (R – N.Y.), chairman of the House Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity, that passed the House on May 14. Seventy-one Democrats joined Republicans to pass the bill.

The need for radical reform is obvious. About 75 percent of the nation’s 3,400 public housing authorities (PHAs) are troubled – physically or financially run down, if not both. Current regulations make it difficult to fix many of their problems. Additionally, budget cuts ensure that HUD will have neither the staff nor the resources to aid PHAs as it has in the past.

Though Lazio and Cuomo are in agreement on many things, some issues, like “income targeting,” remain to be decided.

Lazio wants each public housing development to have a tenant population in which at least 35 percent of residents have incomes 30 percent or less of the area’s median income. (Current law mandates 75 percent of residents meet that income standard.) Once that number has been reached, PHAs could fill vacancies with tenants whose incomes are as much as 80 percent of the area’s median income.

Cuomo, on the other hand, wants 40 percent of new tenants to have incomes below 30 percent of median and 90 percent to be below 60 percent of median.

Cities have not been overly concerned about the “show stopper” issues such as how much rent tenants pay and the tenant mix. Instead, they have been pushing the panic button over a provision in Lazio’s bill that would cost them part of their Community Development Block Grant money if they are shown to be contributing “substantially” to a housing authority designated as “troubled.”

That provision, which does not appear in the Senate’s version of the bill, targets a number of largepublic housing authorities that have crumbled because of inept management by city officials. HUD Inspector General Susan Gaffney, who is independent of both Cuomo and the administration, says her office supports this provision.

“Local governments have, in many cases, abrogated their responsibilities to ensure the successful operation of public housing in their jurisdictions,” she says.

HUD has been attempting to clean up serious problems in Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, New Orleans and San Francisco, among others, action undertaken after “authorities were permitted to be mismanaged for many years, even decades in some cases,” Gaffney says.

Still, in what may be the most pro-city language in Lazio’s bill, one provision would allow local governments, as distinct from PHAs, to essentially take over public housing by setting up alternative block grant programs. That provision has dismayed the Public Housing Authorities Directors Association.

John Hiscox, executive director of the Macon, Ga., Housing Authority, told Lazio’s subcommittee that the high-profile problems of some big-city PHAs were the results of too much, rather than too little, city involvement. He asked the subcommittee: “Does anyone seriously believe that New Orleans, Chicago or Washington, D.C., got into serious difficulty because of a lack of involvement from the local political power structure?”