Dear Editor,
I am a regular reader of Street Sense and found this week’s front-page article interesting, if incomplete. The article, “Higher Rents for Poorest Tenants?” criticizes bill language in the Affordable Housing and Self-Sufficiency Act that proposes raising the minimum rent for households in public and assisted housing. The current minimum rent of $50 has not been raised in 14 years. A lot has changed in that time including the current federal budget crisis that has caused severe under funding of public housing. The Obama Administration and Congress have actually taken away $3 billion from the public housing budget since 2010. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently measured the deferred capital backlog of public housing at $25.6 billion. The stark reality is that public housing, without adequate operating and capital funding, will soon need to board up units thereby shrinking the supply of deeply affordable housing.
Public housing is community-owned and accountable to its boards of commissioners, resident councils
and mayors. In the local/federal contract, housing authorities provide the physical properties and professional housing managers in return for the federal government’s commitment to fund the difference between what low-income tenants can pay and what it actually costs to operate the housing. The federal government has essentially abrogated that “contract” sending housing agencies scrambling to find additional funds. The minimum rent increase is just one way to generate additional funds. Your article should have mentioned that the minimum rent provision comes with a hardship exemption so that the neediest households are protected if they cannot afford to pay.
More hard choices are ahead for public housing. Rather than merely complain to the House Financial
Services Subcommittee Chair Biggert about one small and necessary measure, interested parties should work with her to find new and creative ways to generate adequate funding at housing authorities so that this very limited supply of affordable housing can be maintained.
Kathi Whalen
Housing Policy Analyst
Public Housing Authorities Directors Association
