Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo today awarded $500,000 in grants to fight drug abuse and other crimes in HUD-assisted housing in Bayamon and Ponce, Puerto Rico. Housing developments in each city will receive $250,000, Cuomo said.

Puerto Rico's grants will be go to the owners of La Hacienda Housing Cooperative in Bayamon and La Ceiba Housing Cooperative in Ponce. Both properties are HUD-subsidized housing for low-income families.

"These grants are good news for some of the poorest families in Bayamon and Ponce and bad news for drug dealers who terrorize them," Cuomo said. "We will fight drug abuse with prevention and treatment programs and with a crackdown on drug dealers and other criminals. We are telling drug dealers in HUD housing to find another line of work or be sent to another type of subsidized housing - a prison cell."

Cuomo said that President Clinton's recent signature on the Department's $24.5 billion budget for the 1999 fiscal year, which he called "the best HUD budget in 10 years," will speed the transformation of public and assisted housing.

"HUD is transforming its public and assisted housing from isolated ghettos of poverty, drugs, despair and crime into safe and economically integrated communities of opportunity," Cuomo said.

In Bayamon, the $250,000 New Approach Anti-Drug Grant to La Hacienda Housing Cooperative will go toward programs to combat drug-related activity in housing developments and the surrounding neighborhood. Activities will focus on law enforcement, drug prevention, physical improvements, and increased security.

The $250,000 New Approach Anti-Drug Grant for Ponce will allow the La Ceiba Housing Cooperative to improve and increase security and help prevent drug-related criminal activities in the neighborhood.

Nationwide, 53 privately owned HUD-subsidized low-income housing developments will receive a total of $11.7 million from a program called the New Approach Anti-Drug Program.

The New Approach Anti-Drug Program (formerly known as the Safe Neighborhoods Grant Program) provides funds for improving security at HUD-assisted developments and in surrounding neighborhoods by: hiring security guards, paying for extra police patrols, assisting in the investigation and prosecution of drug-related criminal activity, and implementing security-related physical improvements.

HUD's budget for the fiscal year that began Oct. 1 increases funding for HUD's key programs and renewals of Section 8 rental assistance by a total of more than $2 billion in the budget over 1998 levels. Spending was increased on most HUD programs and wasn't cut in any programs.

• Transform public housing by reducing segregation by race and income, encouraging and rewarding work, bringing more working families into public housing, and increasing the availability of subsidized housing for very poor families. In addition, the bill improves living conditions in public housing, gives the poorest families neighbors who will be role models of working families, and reduces crime. The bill also allows HUD to continue to tear down the largest failed public housing projects and replace them with new townhouse-style developments.

• Expand the supply of affordable housing by enabling 90,000 more families to get Section 8 rental assistance vouchers that will subsidize their rents in privately owned apartments - the first increase in vouchers in four years.

• Increase homeownership by raising the limit on home mortgages insured by the Federal Housing Administration from the current range of $86,317 in low-cost housing areas to $170,362 in high-cost areas. The bill increases the loan limits to a range of $109,032 in low-cost areas to $197,621 in high-cost areas. The higher ceiling on FHA-insured home mortgages opens the door of homeownership to thousands of families needing FHA insurance to get mortgages, but locked out now because the current loan limits have not kept pace with rising home prices.