Bush Housing policies for poor assailed

• Originally published in the Contra Costa Times March 12, 2005

Copyright 2005 Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

By Rick Jurgens

 BERKELEY -- Panelists at a conference sponsored by UC Berkeley's Housing and Urban Policy program painted a bleak picture Friday of the options available to families with incomes too low to buy houses or pay market rents.

"Where affordable housing is concerned, (the Bush) administration is the worst in a generation," said Xavier de Souza Briggs, a planning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a housing official under President Bill Clinton.

Government fails to adequately fund programs that provide housing to low- and middle-income people, and spending cuts proposed by the Bush administration would worsen the problem, according to housing advocates.

Things are especially grim in the Bay Area, with its soaring housing prices and already high rents, and throughout the rest of California, said Jean Ross, executive director of the California Budget Project. "We have a state where it's incredibly difficult to survive (on) the wages that are paid," she said.

Only about one in four eligible families receives assistance under the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department's Section 8 program, which provides rent vouchers to low-income tenants, according to panelists. The Bush administration wants to replace the existing program, which limits recipients' housing costs to 30 percent of income, with grants that states could spend on other housing programs as well as subsidies.

Stephen Schneller, acting regional public housing director for HUD, said Section 8 now accounts for about 65 percent of the department's total spending. The "driving force" in reform proposals, he said, is that "vouchers are costly."

That's just what worries critics. While supporters compare Section 8 reform to welfare reform, which opened the way for some innovative programs, in reality "the administration's motive here is to cut spending," said Barbara Sard, a Washington, D.C., housing advocate. "The policy flexibility is (only) about who to hurt," she added.

But Schneller said the existing program is flawed: "It is a safety net, but it is not a big enough safety net."

Keynote speaker and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom noted that big money is being made in the housing market: "I have a lot of developer friends, and they are doing very well." He spelled out his administration's efforts to streamline housing development but defended the city's requirement that projects include affordable units. Society has "a moral obligation to help people that need it the most," he said.

Newsom tied the affordable housing shortage to homelessness, which he termed "a national disgrace" that has received no attention from state or federal leaders.

Participants on a panel on discrimination saw some progress. Parallel studies done in 1989 and 2000 showed better treatment of Latino and African-American clients by real estate agents but not much improvement for African-American renters and worse treatment of Latinos, said Stephen Ross, an economics professor at the University of Connecticut.

Ross and a federal regulator saw the worst discrimination against people with disabilities. Paul Smith, a HUD fair housing official, said that discrimination against the disabled is "really quite blatant and egregious."

Smith also said that predatory lending remains a problem but that budget cutbacks have hurt enforcement efforts.

Peter Zorn, an economist at Freddie Mac, a government-sponsored provider of money to mortgage lenders, said "the majority of policing is self-policing by financial institutions."