GRAPEVINE
The Write Stuff for Housing
BY ANDRE SHASHATY
AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • NOVEMBER 2007
As we close in on the end of the
first year of the Democratic-controlled
110th Congress, there’s
good news and bad news for
affordable housing.
On the plus side, our national legislators
have moved a number of important housing
bills. Much of this legislation was instigated by
Barney Frank and the House Financial
Services Committee he chairs.
Now even the slow-handed Senate is
finally starting to follow Frank’s activist lead.
After he was “missing in action” on housing
issues most of the year, Sen. Chris Dodd (DConn.),
chairman of the Senate Committee on
Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, and
Sen. Charles E. Schumer
(D-N.Y.), who heads the
panel’s housing subcommittee,
are finally moving
some housing bills forward.
Even officials in the
Department of Housing
and Urban Development
seem determined to make
things happen in the waning
months of the Bush
administration.
My Washington sources tell me these officials
want to push the Federal Housing
Administration (FHA) back into taking an
active role in financing apartments after several
years of declining volume. They know there
is tremendous demand for FHA financing for
affordable rental housing at a time when other
loan programs are offering lower proceeds and
raising interest rates, and they hope to speed
up application processing to make FHA viable
again.
The bad news is that NIMBYism is not
going away. In Marin County, Calif., where I
live, affordable housing advocates had to work
overtime just to convince the county board of
supervisors not to completely cave in to virulent
anti-development lobbying as they revise
the plan for where to allow development.
A partially “affordable” project near my
house is going forward, but the approval
process was tortuous. My local city council
approved it in August—after 28 official government
hearings and 100 meetings involving
several city committees and boards. All that
work was not for a giant development. It was
for 81 homes and townhouses, down from 88
in the original application. Only 18 units are
designated as affordable, and only nine are
meant for low-income households.
Meanwhile, our town has 1.7 jobs for every
unit of housing, and we are widening the freeway
that splits the city to accommodate all that
commuting—and we’ll still have traffic jams.
I hear stories like this from all over the
country, and I’m convinced NIMBYism is getting
worse, not better.
That’s why I am supporting a media
awards program named for the late Cushing N.
Dolbeare, long-time housing advocate and
founder of the National Low Income Housing
Coalition (NLIHC).
We need to get more reporters and editors
to focus on affordable housing, especially as we
enter the start of the presidential election cycle.
The Dolbeare Awards provide tangible incentives
to reporters to cover housing needs in more
depth and with more frequency. Dolbeare, who
died in 2005, began NLIHC in 1974.
The awards will recognize authors of
newspaper and magazine stories that were
published in 2007 and shed light on the affordable
housing crisis. First-place winners will
each receive $2,500 and be honored at a reception
in February 2008 in Washington, D.C.
If you know reporters who write about
housing, this is a great excuse to call them.
Remind them that homebuyers facing rate
adjustments are not the only housing story
they should be covering. Encourage them to
deliver insightful reporting on the affordable
housing crisis and enter their work in the
Dolbeare Awards program.
If they want more information, direct
them to Nicole Letourneau at (202) 662-1530,
ext. 227, or nicole@nlihc.org, or visit
www.nlihc.org.
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