![]() |
Home | En Español | Contact Us | A to Z |
![]() |
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
FY 1999 Annual Performance PlanStrategic Objective 3
Increase Availability of Affordable Housing in Standard Condition to Families and Individuals, Particularly in the Nation's Poor and Disadvantaged.
Introduction
The agency remains committed to addressing the broader housing
affordability needs of the Nation to help create housing and homeownership
opportunities for all Americans. HUD will continue to provide rental housing opportunities by:
Strategies
Transforming Public Housing
Public housing represents a tremendous affordable housing resource
for lower-income Americans. The majority of the 1.4 million units
of public housing work successfully: they are well-managed and
provide decent housing to poor families who desperately need affordable
housing at an affordable price. Public housing units represent
one third of all of the housing that is available nationwide to
families with minimum-wage incomes.
On the other hand, the Department and the Nation is now living
with decades of mistakes in public housing. In too many cases,
the original site plans and architecture of the developments were
flawed. Other times, buildings have outlived their useful lives.
In some locations, local management contributed to the deterioration
of properties, as did certain program statutes and regulations
issued in Washington. In other cases, neighborhoods changed from
healthy residential settings to isolated pockets of poverty and
despair.
The Department has begun a comprehensive effort to fundamentally
transform public housing. In this effort, the Department and
its local partners are improving the quality of public housing
stock and management and making these communities better, safer
places to live. For example, the HOPE VI program has provided
$2 billion in funding for the demolition and revitalization of
68 of the worst public housing developments. The Administration's
"One Strike and You're Out" policy is based on the idea
that public housing is a privilege, not a right, and residents
who commit crime and peddle drugs should be screened out or immediately
evicted. These efforts contribute to the Department's efforts
to increase access to healthy, affordable housing and will continue.
Increasing the supply of affordable rental housing
A fundamental role of the Department is to ensure that Americans
of all income levels have access to decent quality housing at
a cost that does not drive out spending for food, clothing, and
other necessities. This has been a difficult role given budget
constraints. Over 5 million very low income renter households
pay more than half their income for rent or live in severely substandard
housing. A centerpiece of HUD's affordable housing agenda is
a proposal to provide 100,000 new incremental rental vouchers.
Unlike previous years, however, HUD is proposing to martial new
housing resources for specific strategic purposes: 50,000 for
helping welfare recipients make the transition to work; 34,000
for homeless persons and families who are ready and able to make
a transition into permanent housing in the private rental market;
and 19,000 for the elderly, family unification and other targeted
purposes.
HUD's programs also concentrate on: creating a supply of housing
that is affordable to renters and homeowners whose incomes are
low but who do not have extremely low or poverty level incomes;
and maintaining the public and assisted housing programs that
currently serve over 4 million needy households, most of whom
would have worst case needs if they were not receiving assistance.
HUD will construct or rehabilitate more than 400,000 units per
year through its programs. Continued Federal funding for public
housing and renewal of expiring subsidies under the Section 8
programs will ensure that the overall number of families assisted
by these programs does not decline and that they provide decent
and affordable housing. Linkage to HUD 2020: Management Reform Plan
PIH faces many challenges as it continues to transform public
housing across America. In order to successfully meet these challenges,
PIH will align is staff resources to address the greatest needs.
It will establish centers that house "back office' activities,
freeing Field Office staff to target their energies on monitoring
and providing services to 3,400 Housing Authorities and the 1.4
million families they house.
PIH will: (1) establish its own Grants Center; (2) establish,
in coordination with Housing, a Department-wide Section 8 Financial
Processing Center; (3) participate in the Department-wide Real
Estate Assessment Center; establish Troubled Agency Recovery Centers
to work with troubled Housing Authorities; and (4) undertake other
privatization and streamlining efforts to encourage greater productivity
and accountability with local PIH partners and customers.
With new, more effective approaches to assessing PHAs, HUD will
be in a position to move quickly to identify "troubled"
PHAs. Because of the complexity and sensitivity experienced by
the Department in past work with troubled agencies, we need to
make greater efforts to turn around troubled PHAs and prevent
them from reaching that stage. This will require more staff attention,
which is difficult to allocate given the competing priorities
for administering a multitude of programs with limited staff resources.
Programmatically, HUD will revise PHMAP to include better assessment
and propose receivers for troubled management and privatize the
HOME VI construction management and development process as appropriate.
Authorizing legislation for these, and other reforms, has been
proposed. For a more detailed discussion, please see page 66
of the Management Reform Plan. External Factors
As with other objectives, HUD's ability to provide affordable
housing to the needy is greatly constrained by the broader economy.
The number of housing units that HUD directly affects is a small
percentage of the Nation's housing stock and a rather small percentage
even of the stock available to those with low incomes. Increases
in unemployment, increases in the cost of developing housing,
and changes in people's abilities to rehabilitate housing all
are major factors affecting housing affordability over which HUD
has little control. Within the assisted stock itself, external
factors affect HUD's ability to provide affordable housing. When
tenant-paid rents are established as percent of income, declining
incomes necessitate greater subsidies. This means that fewer
families can be assisted with the same amount of funds. These
factors make HUD's efforts in this area highly dependent on the
unemployment rate, particularly among the working poor, and the
numbers of people who lose income as a result of welfare reform.
Annual Performance Goals
Increasing availability of affordable housing requires a two-pronged
approach. Not only does HUD need to increase the supply, but
also to transform public housing. To increase the supply, we
must endorse more multifamily loans and risk-sharing mortgages.
HUD must partner with communities to shorten the length of time
between approval for demolition of uninhabitable units and completion
of construction of new units.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
Content Archived: November 29, 2011 | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||