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MAKING CONTACT Transcript: #44-00 Shrinking Supply: Low Income Housing in the U.S. Phillip Babich: This week on Making Contact.... Congressman Barney Frank: Our economy today is increasing in many areas: the cost of housing at a clip that many, many people cannot afford. We've got to put the production of housing back on the national agenda. Sheila Crowley: We have seen a systematic slicing of the federal investment in housing over the past twenty-five years. I would say that if we had maintained the level investment that was happening in the mid-seventies, we would not have a affordable housing crisis today. Phillip Babich: Hundreds of thousands of low-income households are at risk of losing their homes. On this program, we take a look at what some housing rights advocates are calling "a housing crisis" in the United States. I'm Phillip Babich, your host this week on Making Contact, an international radio program seeking to create connections between people, vital ideas and important information. According to a report released by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition in September, 2000, a minimum wage worker cannot afford to pay the average rent for a two bedroom apartment anywhere in the United States. One way low-income households are trying to make up the difference is by applying for federal housing assistance. Helen Lima is an 83 year old renter in the San Francisco Bay area, where a minimum wage worker would have to clock in 195 hours per week to earn enough for the average rent. Lima receives what's known as Section 8 assistance and lives in a home specially built for low-income seniors. One-third of the units in Lima's building are set aside for Section 8 tenants. Helen Lima: It's worked beautifully for me. I've no complaints about it at all. I think it's the right kind of program to have. I'm certainly an advocate of it and I'm sorry that it's being cut back financially by the federal government. Phillip Babich: Cutbacks are just one aspect of what some housing rights advocates are calling a crisis in low-income housing. More than forty percent of those covered by the Section 8 project based program, like Helen Lima, are seniors or people with disabilities. Lima, who helped found an organization called "Save Section 8" when she and her friends received eviction notices on Labor Day weekend 1996, says that some lawmakers have unfairly criticized the program and those who participate in it. Helen Lima: Part of the process of getting rid of it is demonizing it. But it's been under attack in this way: that it's been ignored, that it's been slandered, the people who live in it have been slandered. Many times the people that live in the Section 8 projects are portrayed as petty criminals of one kind or another, prostitutes or drug dealers. But this is not true if the facts are looked into. But it helps to alienate many people in this country from the idea of giving assistance to these folks. And so this is the way they've broken it down. And now there's simply not money appropriated for the full program. It's less every year, and it's on a year-by-year basis. It used to be long term contracts--twenty years, ten years. Now it's on a year-by-year basis, and it's being cut back continually. Phillip Babich: What would happen if you lost your Section 8 benefits? Helen Lima: If I lost my Section 8 benefits, I'd have to move in with one of my kids. I don't think I'd have any alternative. Phillip Babich: And so you would lose your freedom, your nice place that you have...? Helen Lima: I would lose my independence, and I'm not anxious to do that. Phillip Babich: Nor are a lot of other seniors and low-income renters. But if current trends are any indication, many poor households could be uprooted. To have a clear picture of the low-income housing situation in the United States, it's important to consider a few basic facts about federal housing assistance. First of all, the Section 8 project based program is one of three federal housing programs. The other two are Section 8 vouchers and public housing. Section 8 vouchers are direct payments to low-income tenants renting from private landlords who have signed agreements with the federal government to accept such vouchers. Recipients pay thirty percent of their total income toward rent and their voucher covers the rest. Public housing is owned and operated by local housing authorities that receive federal money. Those who qualify for federal housing assistance are among the poorest in the United States. But the budget for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development--or HUD--only covers about one out of four qualifying households. Meanwhile, the supply of available low-income residences is plummeting as Section 8 landlords opt out of the program to go after higher rents on the open market. Michael Kane is with the National Alliance of HUD Tenants: Michael Kane: We've lost well over 100,000 units of housing nationally since 1996. And that trend will just continue into the future. As long as the program remains voluntary, that is that owners have the option of getting out at a certain point. And that leaves the buildings at risk of being lost as affordable housing, the communities means these will lose affordable housing over time. And it leaves some tenants at risk of displacement or inconvenience when that happens. Phillip Babich: According to HUD two-thirds of the nation's Section 8 contracts will expire by the year 2004. Texas will lose 41,00 units, New York 81,000 and California 89,000 units. Sheila Crowley, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, says that many of those who lose their Section 8 units will get vouchers to use on the private market, but that doesn't guarantee them a place to live. Sheila Crowley: Because of demolition and conversion in the public housing program as well as in the Section 8 program, which are privately owned but publicly subsidized housing units, many of the owners of those are now choosing to get out of the Section 8 program , out of the subsidized program and go to market because they are able to command higher rent on the open market. And so that's a major concern is that there's...people are being displaced and that...and they have no place to go and that we are actually losing assisted stock. Michael Kane: I can think of one building here in Boston where...it's an elderly building in the downtown waterfront of Boston, very attractive location. When the owner opted out of the federal contracts, the rents tripled in the property. Phillip Babich: Michael Kane Michael Kane: The government in that case provided rent vouchers for most of the tenants that covered the difference. But as those tenants move out or they usually become vacant over time, the owner will be able to convert those apartments to very high rent apartments rented to yuppies when they live in the waterfront of Boston. So over time, the building's character is changing. And what happened almost immediately after the conversion is that the elderly tenants were...they started moving them around to less desirable apartments in the building to make the more desirable apartments available to market renters, to maximize profits. And people found a number of subtle differences in the level of services they were getting, the level of repairs. And the character of the building changed. It became less of a resource for affordable housing for senior citizens and much more of a market rate building for young professionals. Phillip Babich: The three major federal housing assistance programs subsidize about 4.3 million households in the United States in roughly equal proportions. In recent years, HUD has been demolishing public housing projects and vouchering out the tenants. Elaine Beale in the National Radio Project's Women's Desk take a look at some of the impacts of public housing demolitions. Elaine Beale: We've all seen the pictures: dramatic demolitions of those ugly edifices. Cabrini Green in Chicago, Lafayette courts in Baltimore are just a couple of examples. Federal officials, local government and developers alike hail these demolitions as a sweeping away of urban blight, a solution to the segregation, crime and drug activity so often identified with public housing. But for public housing residents, the reality is often a different one. Marjorie and Marie were tenants of Corning Homes, a public housing project in Albany, New York slated for demolition. Surrounded by boxes and crates on moving day, Marie, who did not want to use her real name, described her feelings about her long-time home: Marie: I've been Corning Home for eighteen years. Inside Corning Home we were all family. We all knew each other. Our children grew up together. Now are children's children were growing up together. There were nights that we could go to sleep and leave our doors open, leave our windows wide open. We never had to fear about anyone coming in invading our home or privacy or whatever. Elaine Beale: Like her friend Marie, Majorie (who also did not want to use her real name) is angry about having to move: Marjorie: I felt safe here, you know? Like she said, our community...our community--we lived here; we kept it very well. It was friendly, you understand what I'm saying? It was like family. Elaine Beale: But the Department of Housing and Urban Development, otherwise known as HUD, is forcing tenants like Marjorie and Marie to leave their homes. Catherine Bishop, attorney at the National Housing Law Project, describes how public housing, which serves more than 1.3 million poor households, is being downsized: Catherine Bishop: There's no new public housing being constructed, and HUD is in the middle of a campaign to have at least 100,000 units of public housing around the country demolished. As a matter of fact, it just approved twenty-six grants to demolish over 8,000 units this year of public housing at a cost of about $50 million. Elaine Beale: Corning Homes, where Marie and Majorie lived, has 292 families. In its place only 162 new units will be built. And as demolition continues, HUD has reversed the long standing requirement that poor and homeless families are given preference over those less in need. Catherine Bishop: Catherine Bishop: HUD is allowing public housing authorities to establish admission procedures that are all local, and is in fact encouraging housing authorities to be very selective in who moves into these public housing units. So that it's giving housing authorities the opportunity to select higher income families over lower income families. And so that families who are most in need with the lowest incomes will sit on the waiting list for longer periods of time prior to being able to get into that housing. And they may even sit on that waiting list for a lifetime. Elaine Beale: Right now, almost eighty percent of public housing households are headed by women. Most are extremely low-income. And revised public housing authority priorities mean that large numbers of these poor, female headed households will be excluded from the new upgraded public housing. This is likely to be the case for Marie of Corning Homes. Marie: It's income level that they want. The income level will go up, so a lot of us single, working, black women with dependents won't be here. We won't come back. Elaine Beale: The government gives tenants displaced from public and other subsidized housing Section 8 vouchers. Vouchers are another form of housing subsidy. But typically they don't place tenants in affordable units. Instead, tenants have to search on the private market and persuade landlords to take their subsidy. As Catherine Bishop of National Housing Law Project notes, in a tight market this isn't always easy: Catherine Bishop: In some jurisdictions where there are vouchers, there just isn't the housing available that tenants can use those vouchers. There are also some tenants in this country who suffer from discrimination. And the discrimination may be because they're disabled, and the discrimination may be based upon color, it may be based upon language barriers. And those individuals have a hard time finding landlords who will rent to them. Elaine Beale: One recent study, critical of the voucher program, described discrimination against voucher holders as a more socially acceptable way to discriminate against poor, minority families. When Marie was given a Section 8 voucher in place of her public housing, most landlords turned her away. Marie: People didn't want to hear about Section 8. They didn't like the paper work with Section 8. They didn't like waiting for their money. So a lot of the decent housing you couldn't get. A lot of the slum houses they was willing to throw at you. After looking at thirty-three apartments, I just took what came to me. I was tired. I was frustrated. There was nights I wasn't sleeping. I mean, I'm worried about my kids in this neighborhood. And Thursday night I tossed and turned and cried just about all night. Elaine Beale: Catherine Bishop's clients face similar struggles in Oakland, California. Catherine Bishop: Several months ago, I represented a group of Section 8 tenants who were...the landlord was terminating their Section 8 contract. And because of the discrimination that they faced in terms of landlords not wanting to enter into Section 8 contracts with these tenants or voucher contracts, many of them took...it took them a 120 to 180 days to find a landlord who was willing to rent to them. Many of them moved out of the jurisdiction. It meant that every single family had to remove their children from their local elementary school. One mother was very concerned because her son was a baseball star, and it was his senior year in high school. And so she was concerned because she knew that he was being looked at perhaps for scholarships to go to a state college. He wanted to continue at that high school. He knew if he came into a new high school he would not be with the same coach. And so it would jeopardize his opportunity to receive higher education which the mother was not in a position to be able to provide for her son. Elaine Beale: Marie of Corning Homes: Marie: They know who's dispensable. They know nobody's going to speak up and say, "Don't do this to these women and these children." There's nobody that cares. I believe it's politics. I believe it's business. And I believe that there's always sacrificial lambs. I've lost my grandchildren who lived around the corner from me, my daughter, my friends. My sister lived right next door to me. I had cousins that lived down the hill from me. I lost my family. We're scattered...scattered. Elaine Beale: For Making Contact, I'm Elaine Beale. Phillip Babich: Elaine Beal is development director at the National Housing Law Project. You're listening to Making Contact, a production of the National Radio Project. If you want more information about this broadcast, we'll be giving out our toll-free number at the end of this program. Phillip Babich: The U.S. government spends about $17 billion per year on housing subsidies for poor people. According to Sheila Crowley of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, HUD's budget is less than half of what it was at the end of the Ford administration. Sheila Crowley: We are in this absurd position in Washington where there's, you know, budget surpluses just gushing and budget rules that keep appropriators locked inside of a fairly narrow band of what they can spend. And so those members of Congress who are most informed about housing issues and most concerned about housing issues in both parties and who are working in trying to improve housing programs, are really boxed in with the appropriations process. Phillip Babich: One of those in Congress who's advocating for greater spending on federal housing programs is Representative Barney Frank from Massachusetts. In September, 2000 he spoke at a Housing Summit sponsored by the Congressional Black Caucus in Oakland, California. Frank says that there's been a collapse of federal funding for housing, and that there's been no spending to build new public housing. Barney Frank: Years ago America made a commitment to try to help the poorest of the poor. Franklin Roosevelt talked about one-third of a nation ill-housed, among other things. So in the New Deal, they began for the first time housing programs. But then, as we know, World War II came along - this is one of the late New Deal efforts - and the country turned conservative. So there was a theoretical commitment to building housing for the poor, but no real willingness to put the necessary resources into making it work. So what did we get? We got [word unknown]; we got Cabrini Green; we got Columbia Point in Boston. That is we got housing for the poor which consisted of hundreds and thousands of small units jammed together with the poorest people of society put in there with no services. Guess what...those didn't turn out to be great places to live. And then we blamed the poor because we constructed public housing so badly that it was destined to fail. And then we said, "Oh, we tried, so let's get out of the business." We tried to do it so cheaply, that we did it inadequately. And that failure, ironically, has been used as an excuse not to do it right. And so for years the theory in Washington has been--over the objection of many of us, but we got out-voted--that the federal government shouldn't try to build housing. Instead they got into this voucher notion. Basically the idea was: we'll give the lower income people some money so they can go out and compete for the available housing. That was better than the nothing and in some parts of the country that still makes sense. But increasingly, in a society in which there is a scarcity of the supply of housing that working people can afford, giving people a little money so they can compete with others doesn't do a great deal. Because what you're doing--and the conservatives ought to understand this in their own free market economic terms--what you have is a situation where housing prices go up, the supply stays the same and if you give a little bit more money to some people, what we're doing is we're adding to the demand for housing without in any way increasing the supply. And any good conservative economist ought to have been able to figure out that that simply means the price goes up. Phillip Babich: Congressman Barney Frank. There have been governmental attempts to preserve Section 8 units since the late 1980s, when a wave of Section 8 contracts began to expire, by increasing voucher amounts and extending contracts with Section 8 landlords. But according to Jim Grow, staff attorney at the National Housing Law Project, counting on private landlords to meet the long term needs of low-income tenants is dicey since they have no obligation to continue providing low-income housing once their contracts expire. Grow notes that landlords who have taken part in Section 8 programs have benefited heavily from government subsidies and should owe the public something in return. Jim Grow: They provided the mortgage insurance. They often provided a mortgage interest subsidy in addition. They provided the tax shelter, and in some cases, they even provided the rental assistance necessary to subsidize the tenants' rent. So the government involvement is extremely heavy. And if you look at the investments of the owners, they're sometimes fairly limited and only on paper. So unfortunately, it's one of these situations where, if you're going to use private enterprise,it has strengths and weaknesses and one of the weaknesses is that eventually the owner can get out and the tenants' housing is unstable. Or, if you're going to preserve it, it can be very, very expensive for the public sector. And remember that the public sector has also shouldered quite a bit of the risk here through the insurance program. So that some people look at this situation and say it's a 'Heads I win; tails you lose' situation. Phillip Babich: Middle and upper income households are also winning out when it comes to federal housing dollars. Those households receive more than five times as much in subsidies in the form of tax deductions on mortgages as low-income ones. Grow adds that providing federal housing assistance to low-income households benefits not only the recipients of such aid, middle and upper income households also gain by living in healthier communities. Jim Grow: Decent housing is important to the family who lives in it , but it's also important to the surrounding community. Because if the families do not have places of refuge, places to raise their children, places of solitude and repose, places to do your homework, places to explore family relationships, you cannot be.it's very difficult to be productively engaged in the well being of the surrounding community. And that has an impact on everybody. And you know, the fact is that many of us do have subsidized housing, especially people who own homes. So it's time for the people who already enjoy a disproportionate public subsidy of their housing situation to stand shoulder to shoulder with those in need to demand adequate public resources for housing for everybody. Phillip Babich: Meanwhile, the federal government has taken up proposals to increase the value of Section 8 vouchers in half of the nation's metropolitan areas. HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo, who made the announcement in September 2000, said that higher rents are a "cruel irony" of the robust economy. But many low-income tenants may find themselves in an even more ironic situation, having a sizeable voucher with no place to spend it. Section 8 renter, Helen Lima, says the solution to the housing crisis is to build more homes. Helen Lima: The main thing to keep in mind is that federal money is essential if any housing is going to get built. The state and the cities cannot do that without federal help. They can do all kinds of other things with their money. They can repair, rebuild, but the important matter of building housing for poor people is strictly dependent on federal money. That's a terrible situation at the moment. But that's what it is and that's what we have to work toward getting the federal government to pledge themselves to. Phillip Babich: Now some people in Congress are advocating for more money to be allocated to voucher programs, that they should voucher out all of the Section 8 money and let the tenants just have at it in the free market. What do you think about that idea? Helen Lima: We're very opposed to vouchers. We feel that's just a fancy way of getting rid of Secion-8. It's killing us slowly is what it's doing. The basic principle that you are.your income has protection, that you know that you won't have to give away. more than thirty percent of your income in rent is gone with a voucher. You're stuck with whatever the extra costs are after you've moved into a place. And you only have a one year lease on a place with a voucher anyway, and then you have to start all over again. So it's not at all a protection. Michael Kane: What people are finding, especially in tight markets, is that a significant portion of people going out into the market with rental vouchers are simply unable to find housing at any price that will rent to them with vouchers, for a variety of reasons. Phillip Babich: Michael Kane of the National Alliance of HUD Tenants. Michael Kane: Either it's simply not available at the payment standard that the government sets for that market, that's a very common problem, or there's discrimination against the people with vouchers. Or some combination. But for whatever set of reasons, the turn-back rate - that is the rate of people not able to use their vouchers - has been pretty high in a number of markets--over fifty percent, for example, in New York City for a long time. It's approaching fifty percent now in Boston , we hear, from local housing authorities and others. And nationally the number's supposed to be about twenty percent, but it is higher than that in some markets, we know. Phillip Babich: For now, Kane says, it's imperative that the U.S. government takes steps to preserve existing Secion-8 in public housing units. Michael Kane: In the long term, you know, some sort of national regulatory framework is needed to restrict the choices of these owners who have made so much money from the system of just getting out and converting market rate and making a huge windfall profit at the public's expense. We would like to see a return to something like a program which was called the Housing Preservation Program in the early nineties which required owners to keep rents affordable for people and maintain a regulative profit, not a windfall profit at the taxpayers' expense. That's the best long-term solution to preserve the stock. Otherwise, there will just inevitably be an erosion of affordable housing over time that would be extremely expensive to replace. That's the most important thing to preserve the existing stock. Secondly, we would like to see a new housing construction program to build new affordable housing to replace, not just the inner city loss but to meet the actual needs that are out there which are vastly greater than the units that have been lost. Phillip Babich: On the front lines, tenants like Helen Lima are picketing, educating others and lobbying policy makers. Helen Lima: Get organized is the message. There is no substitute for organization in political action. The two things go together and that's the answer to this. And it's got to be broader and bigger than it is now and it's got include a whole lot more than seniors. Phillip Babich: That's it for this addition of Making Contact:: A look at housing rights in the United States. Thanks for listening, and special thanks to Peggy Rockwell and Radio station WRPI in Troy, New York for recorded portions. We have recorded portions and production assistance from Lisa Rudman and the National Radio Project's Women's Desk. Orla Rapple and Krissy Clark also provided production assistance. Laura Livoti is our managing director; Peggy Law, executive director; associate producer, Stephanie Welch; senior advisor, Norman Solomon; national producer David Barsamian; Women's Desk coordinator, Lisa Rudman; Prison Desk coordinator, Eli Rosenblatt; production assistant, Shereen Meraji; and I'm your host and managing producer, Phillip Babich. If you want more information about the subject of this week's program, call the National Radio Project at 800-529-5736. Call that same number for tapes and transcripts. Our theme music is by the Charlie Hunter Trio. Bye for now. |