(3 of 4)
What Washington must do is make sure that available money is carefully targeted and intelligently spent. Local governments have already taken the lead in offering low-interest loans or tax-exempt bonds to finance housing construction. By providing loans to developers and easing building codes, San Diego has spurred the creation of five new SRO hotels, where tenants pay from $240 to $390 a month. In New York City last week, local officials joined with a community-development group to finance the construction of 1,000 apartments for low-income families; $25 million of the $80 million cost was raised from corporations, which can write off their contributions as a federal tax credit. An additional $25 million has been raised through the tax-credit program -- a little-noticed innovation tucked into the 1986 tax-reform bill -- for low- income housing in Los Angeles, Kansas City, San Francisco and about a dozen other cities.
There are other reasonable options the next President should consider, steps that transcend the rhetoric that either candidate has offered so far.
Rehabilitate old units. Though public housing is routinely condemned as a failure, there are 800,000 applicants on the waiting lists to get into it. Public-housing developments like St. Louis' Cochran Gardens and the Montgomery County, Md., program demonstrate that well-maintained, well-managed projects can be successes and not eyesores or breeding grounds for crime. Yet about 70,000 of the country's 1.3 million units are vacant: uninhabitable while awaiting repair or occupied by squatters. The Comprehensive Improvement Assistance Program, which provides funds for the maintenance and rehabilitation of public-housing projects, was cut from $2.5 billion in 1983 to $1.6 billion last year. Surely it is cheaper, as well as more humane, to renovate available apartments than to dump families into welfare hotels.
In private-housing stock, some of the most ambitious renovation is being performed -- again -- by community-development corporations, which obtain funds from local governments, financial institutions and religious organizations. In Chicago, Bethel New Life, a Lutheran Church group, has refurbished 321 homes, built a day-care center and saved a crumbling school building. Congressman Joseph Kennedy II of Massachusetts has proposed a bill that would provide $500 million to help nonprofit community groups purchase and rehabilitate low-income housing.
Use foreclosed housing. HUD owns 47,000 properties seized for mortgage defaults. Traditionally, these repossessed buildings have been sold at auction to the highest bidder. The Government ought to start seriously complying with 1987 housing legislation that calls for underused property to be turned over to the homeless, by donating or selling buildings at low prices to housing advocacy groups.