Statement from NLIHC President Sheila Crowley on HUD’S Rejection of Texas’s Disaster Plan

CommonDreams.org
November 20, 2009

he National Low Income Housing Coalition joins housing advocates from Texas in applauding the decision by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to reject the plan submitted by the state of Texas on how the state would use Hurricane Ike disaster recovery funds.

Housing advocates in Texas objected to the state plan primarily because it failed to assure that low and moderate income Texans who lost their homes or whose homes were damaged in Hurricane Ike would be assisted. After conducting their review of what the state proposed, HUD officials agreed with the advocates that the plan did not meet federal CDBG requirements.

In a letter to Texas Governor Rick Perry, HUD Assistant Secretary for Community Planning and Development Mercedes Marquez notified him that these requirements had not been met and more than $1.7 billion in Community Development Block Grants would be withheld until they were. The state now has 45 days to resubmit its plan.

HUD based its denial on Texas's failure to provide an adequate method of distribution of the funds that would allow the public to exercise its right to comment on where the funds would be spent and who would benefit. Federal law requires that states who receive CDBG funding for disaster recovery detail how the funds will be allocated to local units of government and that the state notify the public of the state action plan and give the public an opportunity to comment.

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LA Parish Neighbors Voice Opposition to Development

Houma Today
Naomi King // November 20, 2009

HOUMA — More than 40 residents voiced strong opposition Thursday to a planned residential and commercial development in Gray that Terrebonne Parish government is helping finance with $10 million in hurricane-recovery grants doled out after the 2008 storms.

The 144-acre subdivision, which would include a golf course, grocery store, day care center, two hotels, 335 low-rent apartments and roughly 100 single-home lots, would be built off La. 24 south of U.S. 90, between Evergreen Drive and Marietta Place. The grant money will be used to build the multi-family units as part of the state's requirement that the $10 million be spent on affordable rental housing.

Residents, overwhelming from the Southern Estates subdivision, feared the homes and apartments would alter the character of their neighborhood, drive down their property values or bring crime onto their streets.

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What does law on housing require?

Galveston County Daily News
Heber Taylor // December 9, 2009

It doesn’t matter what public officials think of the Galveston Open Government Project. Members of the self-styled watchdog group have asked some good questions. People in government should be able to answer them.

The folks in this political group, who have described public housing as a failed social experiment, have asked whether a lawsuit in Baltimore has implications for public housing in Galveston County. Ironically, the lawsuit in Baltimore was championed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Politics can make for strange allies.

The lawsuit, Thompson v. the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, claimed that the plans to continue the decades-old pattern of public housing in Baltimore discriminated against African-Americans living in public housing.

In 2005, U.S. District Judge Marvin Garbis said: “Geographic considerations, economic limitations, population shifts, etc., have rendered it impossible to effect a meaningful degree of desegregation of public housing by redistributing the public housing population of Baltimore City within the city limits. Baltimore City should not be viewed as an island reservation for use as a container for all of the poor of a contiguous region.”

The judge said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development would have to take a regional approach to promoting fair housing opportunities.

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Bush administration blew off civil rights enforcement

Valley Morning Star
Mary Sanchez // December 17, 2009

This one is for those who naively believe that an entity called the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice should be in the business of enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws. Under the late Bush administration, one had reason to doubt. For years, critics blasted the Bush Justice Department for ideologically inspired hiring and firing decisions, unfair treatment of career (read: ideologically unreliable) staff members, and a selective approach to its enforcement responsibilities.

Now a 180-page report prepared for Congress by the Government Accountability Office bears out many of those contentions.

The report, which assessed civil rights enforcement between 2001 and 2007, found big declines from the Clinton years in cases having to do with housing and job discrimination, and with disability rights. Thomas Perez, the new Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, summarized the findings to Congress in testimony this month.

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Barriers to Affordable Housing

National Center for Policy Analysis
James Franko // December 1, 2009

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) considers housing affordable if it costs less than 30 percent of a family's income. Yet, according to HUD, 12 million renters and homeowners spend more than 50 percent of their income on housing. Many of these are low-income individuals or families. But in some areas even middle-income families find the supply of affordable housing limited.

For instance, assuming a family spends no more than 28 percent of its gross income on housing [see Figure I]:

• In the San Francisco metropolitan area, only 26.9 percent of houses sold are affordable to a family with an annual median income of $96,800.
• In greater Chicago, more than two-thirds (67.8 percent) of houses are in the price range of a median income family ($74,600).
• In Indianapolis, almost all homes (94.5 percent) are affordable to the typical family ($68,100).

Since rental prices closely track home prices, these numbers also indicate the general availability of affordable housing.

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The Fight After the Storm - Why hasn’t Galveston rebuilt public housing?

The Texas Observer
Forrest Wilder // November 27, 2009

After Hurricane Ike battered Galveston in September 2008, city leaders promised that the island’s poor would be welcomed home. Public housing, they pledged, would be rebuilt within a year or so. But a number of bureaucratic setbacks, as well as a spasm of anti-public housing activism—some of it racially charged—has hindered the rebuilding effort.

More than a year after the storm, local officials confess that residences for displaced families may not be ready for another two to three years, and that’s if everything goes as planned.

The Galveston Housing Authority had planned to not only replace the public housing units lost to the storm, but build additional homes to meet increased need.

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Revived La. Parish Faces Fight Over Race

National Public Radio
Debbie Elliott // November 19, 2009

Slowly, about half the population of St. Bernard Parish has returned to the area since Hurricane Katrina. But with a twist — it's not as white as it used to be, which has sparked a battle over low-income housing and race.

After Katrina, local attorney David Jarrell decided he could help his native St. Bernard Parish rebuild by buying and renovating damaged houses. In a bound notebook with pictures of the dozen or so properties he has refurbished, he singles out one that was "trashed" by the hurricane before he restored it.

"This was the inside — it was wood floors, 10-foot ceilings," he says. "Everything was meticulously designed. But it was still affordable for people, so if anybody was looking to rent, it was just a great little house."

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