**Please Help Send a Request to the Obama Transition Team**

[JeffR]

The issue of homelessness is dire, and the solution is low-income housing. This is not a high-visibility issue, and it's important to let the Obama administration know that low-income housing desperately needs attention.

Please read through the facts about low-income housing below, pick one or two facts that you see as important, and write one or two sentences about it to the Transition Team at: http://www.change.gov/page/s/contact

Then, please pass this on to friends, family and anyone you can think if in order to take action on this. Homelessness MUST be eradicated in the richest country in the world, but it won't be unless we start now to draw attention to this issue!

Thank you for your efforts!

:bluebox: Between 1970 and 1995, the gap between the number of low-income renters and the amount of affordable housing units skyrocketed from a nonexistent gap to a shortage of 4.4 million affordable housing units – the largest shortfall on record. ¹

:bluebox: Even with low wages, many poor people could afford housing if they had access to government-subsidized public housing. However, the federal government has been cutting back on building housing and providing subsidies for housing since the early 1980s. There is a 10-year waiting list for Section 8 vouchers in Massachusetts, and no more are being given out. ²

:bluebox: According to HUD, in recent years the shortages of affordable housing are most severe for units affordable to renters with extremely low incomes. Federal support for low-income housing has fallen 49% from 1980 to 2003. ³

:bluebox: Rep. Barney Frank, in his proposal for The National Housing Trust Fund Bill, said that there are 9 million people in need of low-income housing, and 6 million available units.

:bluebox: Research identifies the lack of affordable housing as the primary cause of homelessness among families in the United States. ⁴

:bluebox: In recent years, over 200,000 private-sector rental units have been lost annually, and 1.2 million unsubsidized affordable housing units disappeared from 1993-2003. HUD budget authority in 1978 was 65 percent more than its 2006 budget. ⁵

:bluebox: Right now, the number of homeless male and female Vietnam era veterans is greater than the number of service persons who died during that war. ⁶

:bluebox: Over the last 30 years, annual tax expenditures for home owner subsidies have grown from less than $40 billion to over $120 billion per year. Every year since 1981, tax benefits for home ownership have been greater than HUD's entire budget and have dwarfed direct expenditures for programs that benefit low-income renters. Those benefiting the most from this tax program may actually be banks and real estate corporations that make their largest profit margins on high-end housing. ⁵

:bluebox: HUD isn't even using the funds it has available. For instance, Fort Wayne Housing Authority, which has a waiting list for help paying rent with more than 2,000 families on it, had millions of dollars it failed to spend on the program, a new audit shows. ⁷

:bluebox: Despite what the New York Times on Dec. 2 (2007) called an "acute rental shortage," HUD plans to spend $762 million to demolish public housing and replace it with only 744 new units of affordable housing. HUD will spend an average of $400,000 for each new mixed-income unit, while statements by HANO'S own insurance company have shown that many of the multiple-unit buildings to be demolished could be repaired for less than $10,000 per building. ⁸

:bluebox: Prior to 1996, federal housing law provided that every public housing unit that was demolished had to be replaced on a one-for-one basis with another public housing or equivalent unit. In this manner, the nation's inventory of public housing units would remain constant, and housing would remain available to meet the housing needs of the nation's most vulnerable populations, such as the very-poor, the elderly and the disabled. However, in 1996, this requirement was suspended and later repealed by Congress. ⁹

:bluebox: In fact, from 2000 to 2008, almost 100,000 units of public housing have been demolished, but only about 40,000 units of public housing have been constructed. This means that over 60% of the public housing units demolished over the last eight years have not been replaced, and the nation has lost over 60,000 public housing units. ⁹

:bluebox: Finally, it should be noted that the largest federal housing assistance program is the entitlement to deduct mortgage interest from income for tax purposes. In fact, for every one dollar spent on the low income housing programs, the federal treasury loses four dollars to housing-related tax expenditures, 75% of which benefit households in the top fifth of income distribution. More over, in 1994 the top fifth of households received 61% of all federal housing benefits (tax and direct), while the bottom fifth received only 18%. ¹⁰

1. Institute for Children and Poverty, 2001 http://www.icpny.org/index.asp?CID=0
2. Betty Reid Mandell, New Politics, Volume XI, No. 3 http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue43/BMandell43.htm
3. National Low Income Housing Coalition, 2005 http://www.nlihc.org/template/index.cfm
4. Burt, M.R. "What Will it Take to End Homelessness?" Washington, DC: Urban Institute, 2001 - cited by the Chicago Alliance to End Homelessness http://www.thechicagoalliance.org/homelessstats.aspx
5. The Western Regional Advocacy Project http://wraphome.org/index.php
6. Department of Veterans Affairs http://www1.va.gov/homeless/page.cfm?pg=1
7. Dan Stockman,The Journal Gazette http://www.journalgazette.net/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080525/LOCAL10/805250383
8. Lewis Wallace, In These Times http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3504/first_came_katrina_then_came_hud/
9. Return of One-for-One Replacement for Demolished Public Housing Units by Bill Wilen, Director of Housing Litigation, Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law
http://blog.povertylaw.org/2008/09/the-return-of-one-for-one-replacement-for-demolished-public-housing-units/#more-73
10. p. 90, Poverty And The Homeless, Mary E. Williams, Editor 2004 http://www.amazon.com/Current-Controversies-Poverty-Homeless-hardcover/dp/0737723106

Cross-posted in the Poverty and Activist HQ forums. This post is the result of research by a group of DUers and others dedicated to advancing the cause of affordable housing and related issues.