New Bush housing plan means more cuts for the poor

[Charles Brown <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Poor get screwed in housing orgasm

New Bush housing plan means more cuts for the poor

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By Susan Wood

NEW YORK, May 31, 2005 (IPS/GIN) - The administration of President George W.
Bush, having already slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from public
housing programs, is proposing legislation that would reverse a decades-long
federal policy that helped provide decent housing for some of the neediest
people in the United States, say housing advocates.

Both houses of Congress are debating the bill, known as the State and Local
Housing Flexibility Act. It would introduce sweeping changes in the
so-called Section 8 housing voucher program, which helps cover the cost of
private rental housing for families living close to the poverty line.

The bill would remove limits on the share of income these families must pay
for rent and utilities, while targeting housing subsidies to families
earning significantly higher incomes. Public housing residents also would
see their rents rise, in some cases to near-market rates.

The effect of these changes would be to shift increased housing costs onto
the backs of those least able to afford them -- families with children, the
elderly and the disabled, who make up the bulk of subsidized housing
tenants, advocates told IPS.

Some might lose their apartments and have to double or triple up with
relatives, or in the worst-case scenario, swell the ranks of the homeless.
Such an outcome would contradict the administration's stated goal of ending
major homelessness in 10 years, they said.

"Rents are going sky-high," said Charlotte Rodgers, a public housing
resident in Brooklyn, New York. Even in her neighborhood, Bedford-Stuyvesant
-- an economically depressed, largely Black district - landlords charge
1,200 dollars a month for a one-bedroom apartment, she said.

The people she knows work as security guards or home health aides, earning
six to eight dollars an hour, which works out to an average of 280 dollars
for a 40-hour week. Paying market rent means "you wouldn't have much to live
on," Rodgers said.

Section 8, known formally as the Housing Choice Voucher Program, was
established during the Richard Nixon administration and expanded under
Ronald Reagan. The program is administered nationally by the Department of
Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and at the regional, state, and local
level by some 2,800 public housing agencies (PHAs). Some two million
households receive vouchers.

Since 1998, the voucher program has been the largest form of federal housing
assistance. The reason, according to Linda Couch, deputy director of the
National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC), is that giving poor tenants a
choice of where to live was found to be a better strategy for fighting
poverty than concentrating them in public housing projects. Since most
vouchers are provided to particular tenants rather than to buildings, the
program allows them to move into less drug- and crime-plagued neighborhoods
with better job opportunities and schools.

The system does not work perfectly.

Landlords sometimes illegally discriminate against voucher holders and
nationwide shortages of affordable housing mean that waiting lists are
essentially frozen in many areas. In New York City, there were 123,000
families on the list for the Section 8 program as of last autumn. Overall,
however, the program has provided "an immediate safety net" for people who
might otherwise become homeless, Couch said.

That safety net now is in danger of unraveling. Under current rules, 75
percent of vouchers must go to families with incomes below a certain
threshold, about 15,000 dollars nationally. The proposed legislation would
reverse that requirement, mandating instead that 90 percent of vouchers go
to families earning twice that much, and 10 percent to those earning even
more. The bill also would do away with a requirement that families pay no
more than 30 percent of their income for rent and utilities and allow PHAs
to set rental payments based on market conditions, not income.

Other provisions of the bill would cut off assistance to voucher holders
after five years, reduce voucher portability, and abolish so-called
"enhanced" vouchers that protect tenants from steep rent increases when
landlords opt out of the Section 8 program -- displacing 200,000 families,
according to Michael Kane, executive director of the National Alliance of
HUD Tenants (NAHT).

Adam Glantz, a spokesperson for HUD, defended the proposals as necessary to
meet the rising costs of the program, which he said have jumped by 50
percent in the past five years to the detriment of HUD's other programmes.

The new rules are designed to make the program "more cost-effective" by
giving PHAs the "flexibility" to serve higher-income tenants, he said in an
interview.

Such flexibility, however, is exactly what the bill's opponents fear.

"If funding is being cut, if agencies are given the freedom to reduce the
number of families getting vouchers and use the money thereby freed up to
fill any shortfall in their public housing funding, they might do that,"
said Barbara Sard, director of housing policy for the nonpartisan Center on
Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

"There's no dispute that if you make people contribute more towards their
rent you can stretch your dollars," Sard said. "But all that says is, you
can make different priority choices."

While the Bush administration's budget request for fiscal 2006, which begins
Oct. 1, 2005, includes an increase in the number of vouchers for low-income
families, it would restore only half the voucher funding that was cut this
year, according to a study published on CBPP's Web site. The center
estimates that by 2010, funding for all public housing programmes, including
vouchers, will be 3.7 billion dollars below current levels, which would mean
370,000 fewer families would receive vouchers.

Kane, of NAHT, compared the administration's housing proposals to its
campaign to privatize the government's Social Security retirement program,
charging that ideological opposition to publicly funded social initiatives
drives both efforts. "If you make successful programs unworkable by cutting
their funds, then as public support declines you can pull the plug further,"
he told IPS.

"Pitting middle-class people, many of whom will become elderly or disabled
and will need Section 8, against the poor should not be done when tax cuts
are going to the wealthy," he added, an allusion to changes in the U.S. tax
code made under Bush.