Whither Public Housing?

On the heels of a report showing that 13 million low-income individuals have "worst-case" housing needs, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan writes here at The Huffington Post that the administration's Transforming Rental Assistance initiative is critical to ensuring that affordable housing options remain available to low-income households.

Among other things, the initiative would -- if all goes according to plan -- create stability for owners of public housing, in turn allowing them to use private capital to replace and rehabilitate public housing properties. The hope is that private capital will plug the current $20-30 billion backlog of capital needs, a sum Congress will never fund. The failure to fill the hole is allowing more and more units to be lost to demolition or sale.

Secretary Donovan emphasizes that the initiative is part of an effort to "reset" national housing policy "to focus not only on homeownership, but to invest in quality rental housing as well." Preserving affordable public housing is certainly part of this reset and finding a way to do so in an unfavorable fiscal climate is particularly laudable.

However, the significance of the reset must be qualified. Although the initiative does not privatize public housing, it brings into stark relief the resistance to a robust -- and expensive -- federal role in public housing. The need to marshal significant private resources to rehabilitate existing public housing stock makes construction of more public units seem a (needlessly) forgotten goal.

Finally, the initiative's $350 million price tag is a drop in the ocean of federal funds. The mortgage interest tax deduction costs the federal government $80 billion a year. Putting just a fraction of these resources toward public housing and policies that benefit renters is the real reset that is needed. Secretary Donovan is obviously making due with the political and economic climate he has inherited, but it would be dangerous to ignore the significant challenges that still exist in refocusing the federal government on rental housing.

 

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Comments

[propitiousmoment]

01:39 PM on 05/28/2010

Sorry, we can't worry about how or where our citizens are living; we have these illegal wars to throw money at.

[PrometheanSalvation]

08:23 PM on 05/27/2010

Poor people are lucky they taste terrible; the rich already see them as livestock.

[coolaid8]

04:22 PM on 05/27/2010

"The mortgage interest tax deduction costs the federal government $80 billion a year." Wrong. It doesn't cost the government something everytime we are allowed to keep a little more of our own money. How about using bail out money instead to help these people build their own houses and renovate depressed areas rather than another tax grab to warehouse people in public housing?

[oldpotsmuggler]

04:35 PM on 05/27/2010

Good! There for a minute I thought you might be a conservative. But when you write approvingly about using the tax code to have the government influence activity in the marketplace I can see that you're just another socialist like the rest of us.

Thanks.

[coolaid8]

05:49 PM on 05/27/2010

No, I think that's a measure of how much I've given up. It's a given that we as a country are economically hosed, and it's a given that more and more government is going to be utilized to try to fix the mess, whether they are good at it or not. I'd much rather see our money going to help families and individuals by doing useful things such as rebuilding houses and giving them to people who need them, instead of dropping bombs on people across the world, bailing out banks, paying UAW members to continue building cars that nobody wants, running the world's largest computer network so regulators in many different agencies can sit and watch porn, etc.

[Meizhu Lui]

02:52 AM on 05/28/2010

The mortgage interest tax deduction lets those with money a-plenty keep more than they deserve. It's as if you had a grown son making lots of money, and you let him live at home without helping you pay the mortgage/rent or for the food and laundry facilities he uses. He needs to make a contribution! Folks who buy McMansions and then get a tax break on their up-to-a-million-dollar mortgage are freeloading, just like that big spoiled kid living off his parents. But if you are low-income and own a home, you may not benefit from the mortgage interest deduction, because if you don't earn enough to itemize, there's no tax to get a break on. Most of the benefit if this deduction goes to the very wealthiest among us, and encourages them to buy bigger homes and take out bigger mortgages. Even the Bush tax commission thought this deduction needed to be capped. We give away far more to wealthy homeowners than we spend on helping the homeless or the working poor.

Meizhu Lui

[coolaid8]

03:05 PM on 05/28/2010

Letting people keep their own money isn't giving it away. Taking the money that people made and giving it to others is giving it away. I am not saying that is something we shouldn't do, but if we are going to redistribute wealth than at least look at it the right way. You are right that low income people don't get a break from the mortgage deduction, but they get a pretty good break by not having to pay income tax at all.