Washington updates via NLIHC

An exceptionally newsy National Low Income Housing Coalition Memo to Members is posted this morning, so usefully that the following is a Washington update built largely on NLIHC's efforts:

Among the items in the M2M are results of NLIHC's latest weekly conference call on the housing relief effort and a number of technical details on housing aspects of the hurricane recovery, including a new analysis of the KDHAP operating guidelines.

Legislative reports in the M2M include housing aspects of three disaster relief bills passed by the House on Thursday. It says housing advocates managed to keep HR 3894 from letting higher-income hurricane victims into the Sec. 8 program -- but they regretted that the bill did not create new vouchers.... HR 3895, the Rural Housing Hurricane Relief Act, would mainly provide six-month temporary assistance... H.R. 3896 would waive the 15% restriction on use of community development block grant funds for "public services." Also, HUD begins the fiscal year with insufficient funding, Sen. Jeffords introduces S. 1834, to give matching grants for affordable housing preservation (it's not yet on THOMAS but you can search the bill number there in a day or two), and the Violence Against Women Act reauthorization passes the Senate.

Then there's a digest of last Thursday's subcommittee hearings on FEMA and Katrina. Can't find transcripts yet, but the (mostly uninformative) House Appropriations Homeland Security subcommittee site for the hearing is here. Press release from Senate Homeland Security here, downloadable RealPlayer recording of the Senate hearing here.

A further item goes over the FMR changes that that HUD released last week. It notes that NLIHC has updated its overall FMR change summary page to reflect the new figures.