“HOPE VI has accelerated the loss of public housing,” House Financial Services Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity Chair Maxine Waters (D-CA) said in her opening remarks at a July 29 hearing, “Academic Perspectives on the Future of Public Housing.” Chair Waters spoke throughout the hearing on her concerns about the program, including that HOPE VI has resulted in a net loss of more than 50,000 public housing units, the displacement of public housing residents, and a low rate of return to the redeveloped public housing units by original residents.
The hearing drew on the testimony of witnesses from both inside and outside of academia and built on Chair Waters’ interest in the impact of public housing redevelopment on residents. The hearing comes at a time when HUD continued to advocate for its Choice Neighborhoods Initiative to be included in the FY10 HUD spending bill (see article on Senate appropriations elsewhere in Memo). Presumably, any new program of such scope would be first authorized by the Financial Services Committee before funds are appropriated for its implementation, and the issues raised at the hearing could help direct how the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative proposal takes shape.
Subcommittee Ranking Member Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) said in her opening remarks that federal spending for public housing is at an all-time high and any new funding should be looked at in a “smart and efficient way.” Mrs. Capito also urged more flexibility for local public housing agencies and more attention to rural housing needs.
James Fraser, associate professor in the Department of Human and Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University, described HOPE VI as having both place- and people-based goals. When these goals compete with each other, often one of the goals can be neglected, he said.
He also discussed the program’s impact on residents. “HOPE VI has been geared for a specific type of low income citizen, namely those who have clear paths in mind to achieve their goals, access to decent paying jobs, relatively few barriers in their way, and they view HOPE VI as providing quality, income-stabilized housing as a stepping stone on their journey,” Dr. Fraser said. “Evidence suggests that the large majority of people in poverty do not fall into this category.”
He noted that many low income families live in isolated poverty, have multiple barriers to work, and lack access to living wage jobs. “Indeed, HOPE VI has been designed to create mixed-income communities based on the belief that somehow low income families would benefit from being around more middle-income populations,” Dr. Fraser said. “We now know that there is little, if any, evidence to show that living in a mixed-income community, HOPE VI or otherwise, has actually empowered low income residents to move into economic self-sufficiency, accumulate wealth, or even find living wage jobs.”
Dr. Fraser also focused on the importance of resident participation in public housing redevelopment. “[T]he main drawback in a program like HOPE VI is that the very residents we are trying to empower to achieve greater economic self-sufficiency and increased quality of life have not been provided the authority to actually make the decisions about how HOPE VI is implemented and what types of communities are to be built,” he said.
Dr. Edward Goetz, director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota, acknowledged that research on HOPE VI indicates that the program has succeeded in improving neighborhood conditions in public housing communities. But, he said, “many of the community-level benefits identified by researchers are associated with population turnover rather than the upward mobility of the original low income residents.” Dr. Goetz said his research shows that the benefits of HOPE VI to original residents are “quite limited, modest, and inconsistent.”
“The program has shown no effect on health, on the educational experiences of children, or on the economic security and self-sufficiency of families,” he said. “In fact…there is some evidence that forced mobility increases economic insecurity. There is some consensus among researchers that the relocation of public housing residents often disrupts social support systems and creates new difficulties to overcome. This is a disappointing record of individual-level benefits.”
Dr. Goetz recommended halting the demolition of public housing, incorporating provisions into redevelopment that limit or avoid forced displacement of residents, incorporating anti-displacement techniques so that the existing residents of HOPE VI neighborhoods can experience the neighborhood benefits produced by the program, using the lessons of HOPE VI to expand production of new public housing units, and providing voluntary mobility opportunities for families wishing to leave public housing communities.
During the hearing, Chair Waters reiterated her commitment, expressed in the June 15 letter she and Financial Services Chair Barney Frank (D-MA) wrote to HUD, asking HUD to impose a one-year moratorium on the demolition and disposition of public housing units (see Memo, 6/19). “I am committed to a moratorium on demolition for the next year,” Chair Waters said.
Orlando Cabrera, who served as HUD Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing under President George W. Bush, said that public housing’s future is entirely dependent on both adaptability to new provider models and predictability that the decisions made by local public housing practitioners, to the maximum extent that Congress can allow them such flexibility, will endure over time.
Community Service Society of New York president and chief executive officer David Jones focused his testimony on the New York City Authority’s (NYCHA) implementation of Section 3 of the 1968 Housing Act, which requires that HUD funds be used to maximize job and training opportunities for low income residents.
He noted that NYCHA receives more than $1 billion in HUD funds each year, and this year will receive several hundred million dollars in economic stimulus funds as well. “NYCHA is a major engine of economic activity within the New York City megaplex,” Mr. Jones said. “We have good reason to expect its Section 3 efforts to be significant, but we find it falls short of providing economic opportunity to residents at a comparable scale.”
Dr. Jones spoke in support of forthcoming legislation from Representative Nydia Velazquez to improve the implementation of Section 3 (see Memo, 7/24).The bill would give first hiring and training priorities to residents in developments where HUD funds are being expended; provide a “private right of action” that enables aggrieved parties to take legal action against agencies or contractors; strengthen the requirements for hiring and training for agencies and contractors receiving HUD funds; and creates a Section 3 Office within the office of the HUD Secretary.
“We urge Congress and the Secretary to consider performance incentives that enable housing authorities to retain a reasonable share of increased rental revenue that is attributable to its Section 3 efforts,” Dr. Jones said in suggesting how the Section 3 bill could be improved.
Susan Popkin of the Urban Institute described “hard-to-house families” as the most vulnerable families for whom HOPE VI has not been a solution. “Hard-to-house” is a term Dr. Popkin applies to families facing “multiple complex problems including mental illness, severe physical illness, substance abuse, large numbers of young children, weak labor-market histories, and criminal records.” Her research indicates that families falling into one or more of these categories ranged from 37% to 62% in HOPE VI developments.
“In many cities, public housing has served as the housing of last resort for decades, with the poorest and least desirable tenants warehoused in the worst developments,” Dr. Popkin said. “As these developments have been demolished, housing authorities have often simply moved these vulnerable families from one distressed development to another. With a concentration of extremely troubled families and a lack of adequate supportive services, these replacement developments have the potential to become even worse environments than those from where these families started.”
Dr. Popkin recommended incorporating “intensive case management and permanent supportive housing for the most vulnerable into Choice Neighborhoods and any other comprehensive redevelopment effort is one way to ensure these initiatives truly meet the needs of all public housing families.”
The Choice Neighborhoods Initiative has been proposed by HUD as the next iteration of the HOPE VI program. Unlike HOPE VI, which focused on particular developments, the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative would be more holistic, address entire distressed neighborhoods, and would include public housing, assisted housing and market rate housing.
The Administration has yet to release details of how the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative would work, how it would be similar to, or different from, HOPE VI, and what the program’s eligible uses would be. The Administration requested $250 million for Choice Neighborhoods in FY10.
The testimony can be read by clicking here.
From Oregon Opportunity Network August 6 Newsletter
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