GRAPEVINE
Who needs Brad Pitt?
BY ANDRE F. SHASHATY
AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • MARCH 2008
NEW ORLEANS—Visiting this city for the first time
since Katrina, I was not that
shocked by what I saw. After all,
I’m from Youngstown, Ohio,
which suffered a storm of its
own, only an economic one.
In the Lower Ninth Ward, where actor
Brad Pitt says he plans to build 150 homes, I
felt New Orleans had a slight advantage over
my hometown. It had the Army Corps of
Engineers on hand to tear down all the dangerous
hulks that used to be homes.
The problems this city faces are not that
different than those of
Cleveland, Youngstown,
Detroit, or other cities that
have been facing decay and
decline for years. And if the
home mortgage foreclosure
disaster keeps getting worse,
as it appears it will, other
recently healthy urban areas
will soon join this unfortunate
club.
Sure, presidential candidates
and congressmen are
playing at housing policy as
they realize the economic
impact of the housing market
slump, but they are tossing out possible
solutions like baseball mascots tossing Cracker
Jacks into the bleacher seats.
A year or three ago, those of you in the tax
credit business could stick to your knitting and
ignore the huge gaps in American housing and
urban policy. Many of you wrote off the
Department of Housing and Urban
Development (HUD) and stopped dealing
with that hellhole years ago.
But guess what? Your comfort zone is no
longer a safe hiding place. Tax credit deals have
been getting harder to put together for a while,
but now we are reaching a critical phase as
equity repricing continues for a second year
and costs and allocating agency mandates keep
increasing.
It’s time to wake up and smell the
formaldehyde. We are at a crisis point in housing
and urban affairs in this country. It’s no
longer about complaints that our progress is
too slow. Rather, as former Enterprise
Chairman Bart Harvey told me, we are at risk
of watching much of the progress we have
made over 20 years disappear.
In 10 months, a new president takes
office, and he or she will have a thousand
things to worry about. We all know the fundamental
nature of the nation’s housing woes and
how an effective housing policy could help the
economy, our children’s health and education,
our transportation systems, and on and on.
But we also know that the folks in
Washington and the folks advising the president-to-be have no idea what to do about any
of this. It’s our job to tell them.
You have fought on the front lines of housing
development. You’ve confronted NIMBYism.
Now it’s time to go out and fight on the
political front lines to elevate housing to be a
key election-year issue and a top priority for the
first 100 days of the next president’s term.
I wish Mr. Pitt good luck in his venture,
but if he really wants to help New Orleans, he’d
be in Washington, not the Ninth Ward.
He’d recognize that what’s needed is a
new national housing commitment, and he’d
lead a march on Washington. Imagine what
might happen if he traveled across the United
States, stopping at troubled neighborhoods
and highlighting the scope and breadth of our
housing and community development problems,
arriving in Washington just in time for
the inauguration of the next president.
Maybe that is too much to hope for, but
we have to think big and act boldly to make the
need clear. There hasn’t been a chance like this
since the Tax Reform Act of 1986, and it’s up to
us to take advantage of it. Read our story on
what the next president needs to do about
housing on page 24. And then get out there
and take political action.
The time you invest in the next 12 months
will determine what happens to this industry
and the people it serves for many years to
come.
|
