- 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."