NEWS HEADLINES

10-Point Plan for Next President

By Andre Shashaty

This magazine’s policy formulation effort is a work in progress, and we know we don’t have all the answers, so we count on you to guide us.

We still need your feedback to help us refine our proposals and turn our ideas into a powerful set of 10 policy proposals for the next president. Once we do that, we need your help to get endorsements for our 10-point plan for housing from business, civic, media, and other opinion leaders.

You will notice some obvious omissions, such as support for the National Housing Trust Fund legislation. Our mission is to put forth ideas that are not already well along in the legislative process. However, we will list key housing bills that are pending in Congress and worthy of support from the next president.

You will also notice that we don’t call for setting over-arching goals like ending homelessness. This is because we want to focus on specific and urgent steps the next president should take in his or her first 100 days in office.

Tell us what you think. Send your comments on which of the 13 policy ideas that follow should be included in our 10 points for the next president, or tell us what we have left out. E-mail comments to Donna Kimura at dkimura@hanleywood.com.

Proposals for inclusion in Affordable Housing Finance’s 10-point plan for the next president:

• Increase federal funding for rent subsidies under the Sec. 8, voucher, and U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Sec. 521 Rental Assistance programs, with the proviso that the incremental assistance be targeted to tenants of specific projects that are undergoing rehab, which creates jobs and improves energy efficiency, and for Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) vouchers, bonus allocations to public housing agencies that have effective job training and placement programs for their voucher recipients or are located in cities where there is active local government effort to facilitate development of new affordable housing.


• Recognize that HUD is a wasteful, dysfunctional agency that delays and blocks good housing projects at least as often as it facilitates them, and appoint highly qualified senior staff who are knowledgeable and accomplished in housing and community development and are strong managers. Direct them to reinvigorate HUD from the top down and hold them accountable for bringing HUD up to the standards of performance one would expect of an organization with a $38.5 billion-per-year budget.


• Propose legislation to deregulate and streamline HUD operations, including repeal of statutory provisions that impose regulatory costs and delays for which there is no important and measurable benefit, and including elimination, consolidation, or delegation of programs and functions that are not consistent with its mission or are not cost effective.


• Restructure the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to let it run its multifamily and single-family insurance programs in a much more flexible and responsive way that would address urgent housing needs by implementing the recommendation of the Millennial Housing Commission to make it a wholly owned government corporation within HUD. Ensure that it can work on the same time frame as private real estate participants and has the flexibility to vary its loan terms and can have control of its own loan closings and rulemaking (as opposed to having to go through HUD).


• Acknowledge the cumulative damage done by consistent underfunding of operating costs for public housing and propose a fiscal 2010 budget for HUD with full funding under the public housing operating subsidy formula.


• Expand the Community Reinvestment Act to cover insurance companies and credit unions.


• Propose financial incentives to encourage states and localities to expand opportunities for new development of affordable homes, including allowing higher density around current or planned transit stops, provided that a share of new housing in those areas is affordable to families with low incomes; enacting inclusionary zoning; and reducing delays and costs for entitling land. Also, set up a task force on rationalizing land-use planning processes by studying the success of state laws that override local policies when they act to preclude affordable housing and by looking at ways to create incentives for coordination of land-use policies on a regional basis.


• Establish an “Affordable Green” program to coordinate aggressive efforts to bring existing federally assisted housing up to modern standards of functionality, habitability, and energy efficiency within your first four-year term, including public housing. Consider housing this effort in a new independent agency much like the Office Of Multifamily Housing Assistance Restructuring staffed by real estate professionals so that it can operate as free of HUD constraints and bureaucracy as possible. This is a very effective way to reduce federal subsidy costs and cut the carbon footprint of the built environment.


• Order the Department of Labor and HUD to work jointly to encourage recipients of federal housing aid and job training aid to collaborate at the local level to use housing rehab and construction to create training and job-placement opportunities for unemployed youths.


• Restore substantial funding for the USDA Sec. 515 rental housing assistance program and increase the amount of federal HOME community housing development organization funding for rental projects to provide deep subsidies to low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) projects in counties with low median incomes.


• Allow recycling of repayments on tax-exempt private-activity bonds, put unused annual bond cap in a national pool for reallocation to states that used all of their cap that year, and allow state allocators to exchange unused cap for bonds and the accompanying 4 percent tax credits for 9 percent tax credits.


• Recognize that housing that is built or rehabbed with LIHTCs is more than just shelter—it’s a delivery system for education, job training, health care, and youth development services, and direct HUD, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Treasury Department to work on ways to coordinate resources and policies to help finance provision of services at projects. Use as an example the Ways & Means program being implemented by The Community Builders in Boston. The Community Builders intends to enable working poor households to double their earned income in 10 years and enable 50 percent more young people to graduate high school and get successfully launched as young adults.


• Expand the LIHTC program with additional authority aimed at preservation of public housing and federally assisted housing.