Help, not hinder
TheJournal News.com
http://www.thejournalnews.com/newsroom/053004/30edsection8.html
President Bush's homelessness czar, Philip Mangano, brought a message to Westchester Tuesday: Create a 10-year plan to end homelessness. What does Mangano think Westchester has been trying to do for the last 20 years?
Here's a message for Mangano to take back to Washington: Help, not hinder. Stop cutting back federal dollars that assist local communities in providing housing that prevents homelessness.
Mangano met with County Executive Andrew Spano to outline the administration's vision of a partnership between counties, local municipalities, nonprofit groups, businesses and the homeless aimed at preventing people from losing their homes, providing services to those newly placed in housing and redirecting some of the money spent on emergency housing to permanent housing.
Sounds wonderful — and we've heard it before.
Apparently Mangano does not realize the strides Westchester has made since, say, 1990, when the county spent $40 million to house the homeless in motels, and when a county-commissioned study set a goal of developing 5,000 affordable housing units. A recent update of the affordable-housing study showed how far Westchester still has to go.
We could use a little federal help here. As director of the Interagency Council on Homelessness, which coordinates 20 federal agencies, Mangano could provide it.
How about increasing, not decreasing, federal aid to the self-help groups and others around the county that buy and renovate abandoned apartment houses? And organizations that help people fallen on hard times to pay their rent and avoid eviction? How about restoring funds for the HOPE VI program that Yonkers and New Rochelle had hoped would assist in renovating older public-housing complexes? And how about reversing the latest federal cutback to the Housing Choice Voucher Program, better known as Section 8?
Spano's chief adviser, Susan Tolchin, rightly called Mangano on the Section 8 reductions. "That has stopped our progress and our continued progress in helping fund permanent housing for homeless families," she said.
Indeed, cutting the Section 8 program by $1 billion nationally, which has frozen vouchers, is expected to cost the Yonkers Municipal Housing Authority $2.24 million; New Rochelle and its housing authority, $1.46 million; and Mount Vernon, $914,000. That's money that low- and moderate-income people could use to make up the rest of the rent after they paid 30 percent of their income in this high-rent county. Peter Smith, executive director of the YMHA, which administers about 1,750 vouchers and has a waiting list of 1,200, called the impact on Yonkers "devastating."
It isn't just homeless or low- and moderate-income people who have difficulty finding housing in a county where the median price of a single-family home was $545,900 at the end of 2003. Some police, fire, emergency medical and Civil Service personnel — all vital to municipal operations — are among those commuting longer because they can't afford to live in the communities in which they work.
The affordable-housing update issued in April called for providing more than 10,000 units of affordable housing by 2015. The county's Housing Opportunities Commission is charged with trying to make that possible.
Call it an 11-year plan. Call it an opportunity for Washington to help it succeed.