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HUD love

I’m belatedly getting around to checking out the 2010 budget proposal for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and am glad I did – there’s a lot in there to love, beginning with the words “program eliminated” for the American Dream Downpayment Initiative, President Bush’s misguided push for no-money-down mortgages. Section 8 vouchers get a pay raise; the agency is going to make another go at bringing in more private-sector innovation (good luck); the public housing demolition program HOPE VI is due for reinvention as “Choice Neighborhoods Initiative,” which would

challenge public, private and nonprofit partners to extend neighborhood transformation efforts beyond public housing and link housing interventions more closely with school reform and early childhood innovation.

I can’t help but think of Choice Market, a ridiculously delicious French catering and coffee shop down the block from the projects in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, where those who flock to the outdoor benches on sunny days most assuredly do not live in public housing. I expect HUD has a different kind of neighborhood transformation in mind.

But the part that may be most promising is the overhaul of the Community Development Block Grant program to “reflect America as it is today, not as it was three decades ago.” As I wrote in The American Prospect a while back, it’s been a very long time since CDBG effectively fulfilled its mission to provide “decent housing and a suitable living environment and expanding economic opportunities, principally for persons of low and moderate income.” Instead, it had turned into a broad federal subsidy that city governments mostly used for infrastructure like sewer lines. To head off a political firestorm, HUD wants to increase total funding for the block grant so that every local government that got a grant last year will get the same amount next year; then on top of that HUD will steer extra to low-income areas that get less than an approrpriate share because CDBG money currently goes to every city in the nation with more than 50,000 residents, no matter how little poverty lives there. (I’m lookin’ at you, Greenwich, Connecticut.) That’s a start. But sooner or later, Congress will have to assent to change the formula.

May 26th, 2009 | Tags: community development block grant, HUD, public housing
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