Activists link homelessness to federal spending priorities:
Mortgage-holders get more aid than poor
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
By Gwen Filosa
Cutbacks in federal affordable-housing programs over the past quarter century caused "massive homelessness" on American streets, according to a report released Tuesday by a California-based advocacy group.
Since 1996, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has spent nothing directly on construction of new public housing while more than 100,000 public housing units have been demolished, sold off or redeveloped during the same time period, the report found.
Instead, HUD has relied on the Hope VI grant program that it administers to transform distressed public housing, such as the St. Thomas and Desire complexes in New Orleans, into mixed-income neighborhoods that invariably deliver fewer subsidized homes.
"The federal government is spending money on housing, but not on developing and preserving affordable housing," according to the study, "Without Housing: Decades of Federal Housing Cutbacks, Massive Homelessness, and Policy Failures," by the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP) in San Francisco.
The report, which documents trends of public spending on housing for the poor over the past 25 years, is the result of four years of research. It draws a correlation between spending trends by government agencies and the number of homeless families in the United States, finding that the government has not reduced spending on subsidized housing over the past two decades. Instead, it has changed its priorities about who receives assistance.
Each year, the government allocates $122 billion for mortgage interest deductions for homeowners, and $29 billion for affordable housing for the poor, the report found.
"Homelessness is a direct result of the decisions and funding priorities of our federal government," the report said.
More than 4 million families live in HUD subsidized housing, including 1.2 households in public housing buildings. Between 2 million and 3.5 million people experience homelessness in any given year, WRAP found, including more than 1 million children.
" 'Without Housing' blows apart the myth that homelessness is about anything other than deep poverty, the lack of affordable housing, and misplaced priorities," said Brad Paul, executive director of National Policy and Advocacy Council on Homelessness.
"Historic cuts to the HUD and USDA budgets have fueled the nation's low-income housing crisis, resulting in the suffering of millions," Paul said. "This report begins to set the record straight on the causes and solutions to homelessness."
The report hits home in New Orleans, where advocates for the homeless say an unprecedented housing crisis has left families living in cars, in abandoned buildings, or in crowded homes with relatives.
"When you lose your public housing unit, chances are you're going to be homeless," said Paul Boden, executive director of WRAP. "There is no big leap from public housing residency to homelessness."
HUD plans to demolish some 4,195 units of public housing damaged by Hurricane Katrina, including the city's four largest public housing complexes. A number of those units, however, were empty long before Katrina struck in August 2005. New Orleans had only 5,146 units of public housing occupied pre-Katrina, with the remaining 2,454 vacant.
Today, the number of occupied homes is about 1,100.
Public housing has been slowly disappearing from the city's landscape for decades. HANO's housing stock numbered 13,694 units in 1996.
The report notes that homelessness is complex, resulting from different factors, but finds that the scope of the problem cannot be blamed solely on a person's shortfalls.
"This isn't about individual poor people who are so dysfunctional that they end up homeless," said Boden, who spent about five years in and out of shelters before starting a career in advocacy in 1983. "There are so many of us in so many different places at once."
The report is available on the Web, at www.wraphome.org.
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Gwen Filosa can be reached at gfilosa@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3304.