Home Sweet HOME

SEATTLE - There are exceptions, of course, but twenty-five-year-olds usually haven't - and aren't really expected to have - made their mark in the world. Just out of college, just starting a family, just thinking about buying a first home, or just launching a career or business, most of the contributions they will make to their neighborhoods, their city and their nation are still a few years ahead of them.

That's not true of at least one twenty-five-year-old - the HOME Investment Partnership program. Signed into law "with great delight" by President George H.W. Bush on November 28, 1990 as part of the Cranston-Gonzalez National Affordable Housing Act it quickly became the largest Federal block grant to States and local governments designed exclusively to create affordable housing for low-income families.

"This legislation represents true bipartisanship, considerable give-and-take, and good-faith negotiation," President Bush said. "It reforms and reauthorizes existing programs to provide for community development, to operate and modernize public housing, and to assist in meeting the needs of low-income families, the elderly, and the handicapped. In addition, through HOPE, it provides the potential for the redirection of housing policy back toward the poor."

Pure and simple, HOME created as a housing toolbox providing eligible state and local with, said President Bush, "a wide variety of approaches" and resources allowing them to:

• Help homebuyers meet the down-payment and closing costs associated with their purchase;
• Assist in the rehabilitation - up to code - of both ownership and rental housing;
• Cover other "necessary expenses" related to the development of "non-luxury" housing:
• Acquire or improve sites or demolish dilapidated housing to "make way" for HOME-assisted housing;
• Offer tenant-based rental assistance contracts of up to 2 years.

Numbers alone don't tell the HOME story. "An investment in HOME," HUD Secretary Julián Castro has explained, "is an investment in the American people."

You see that "investment" paying big dividends across Washington State. Completing an abandoned, half-finished residential subdivision in Yakima and creating additional opportunities for first-time homeownership. Transforming a former auto salvage yard in Kelso into a site for to expand the community's housing stock. Affording the not-so-well-off an opportunity to buy a home on the very-well-off, very pricey Bainbridge Island. Expanding rental opportunities and sparking the revitalization of the Sunset Terrace neighborhood in Renton. Getting the chronically-homeless off the street and giving them a place to call home in Seattle's booming South Lake Union neighborhood. Helping low-income and elderly Spokane homeowners keep their homes in good repair and up to code. Building "workforce" rental housing so that workers in downtown Bellingham (www.vhausa.com/media/docs/lincoln-place-2-page-info-sheet.pdf) can afford to live downtown.

"Not good enough," say some eager to gut the HOME program. From 2010 to 2015, funding for HOME was cut in half. Today there ae active efforts to cut HOME funding another 90 percent and "essentially eliminate the program altogether," the coalition observed. America, some apparently believe, can't afford affordable housing.

When, 25 years ago, President Bush signed the bill creating HOME he said it "presents us with opportunity to renew our commitment to the goals we all share: decent, safe, and affordable housing." Twenty-five years and 1.2 million of HOME-funded affordable housing units later, has proven a commitment well-kept with, wrote a coalition of more than 1,500 national, state, regional and local housing and community development organizations "a proven track record of successfully addressing the whole spectrum of housing needs, from homeownership to rental to rehabilitation and from urban to suburban and rural communities."

But now that commitment is at risk. "Our families and communities deserve better," the coalition wrote. 25 years after he created HOME, President Bush likely would agree.

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