Hurricane Katrina Emergency Housing Act of 2005

HURRICANE KATRINA EMERGENCY HOUSING ACT OF 2005 -- (House of Representatives - October 06, 2005)

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Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, I appreciate the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Waters) for yielding me this time. She is the ranking Democrat on the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Opportunity and has been playing a very leading role, not just now but for years, on housing issues, and I fully subscribe to her really very forceful and eloquent description of where we are.

Let me take up where she left off. I am going to vote for this bill. It is later than we would like. It is less, in some ways, than we like, but everything it does do, it seems to me, is useful. And I want to express my appreciation to the Members on the other side who had, I believe, a role in making sure of this.

There was some original fear that the housing vouchers or the equivalence of vouchers which will be funded out of FEMA would somehow be competing with the existing voucher program. Several of my colleagues told me that they had heard from housing authorities in their areas, in other parts of the country that they were being told, Okay, here come these FEMA people, they go to the head of the list, and they would in effect take a voucher away where there are waiting lists.

Let us be clear that that is not happening. These are additives. These are additional. So it is very important to note that, because as the gentlewoman from California noted, we have waiting lists. We have an ongoing problem, and this does not make it any worse, but it does not make it any better. But let us be clear, it does not make it worse. So anyone who was under that misimpression, we had a briefing, and I appreciate the majority facilitating this, and staff from both sides and Members were there, and FEMA and HUD both made it very explicit to us that these are additional to the voucher program. So no one should feel they are going to be competing with someone already there.

The next question, though, is, what do we do next? Yes, it is important to get people the vouchers, but they are a short-term solution by definition: 6 months and 6 months. We hope people will be able to find some alternatives. But what do we do? That is the point I want to address, because this underlines the need for us to get back in the business of helping construct on a permanent basis new affordable housing.

We made great mistakes as a society decades ago by building for low-income people Columbia Point or Pruitt Igoe or Cabrini Green, large sterile warehouses for far too many people with far too few services, and they did not work well, and not because of any character defect in the people that lived there but because of the inherent flaw in the way they were planned. We have learned since then how to use public money to build housing that is desirable; how, in particular, to use public money in conjunction with private developers, profit-making and nonprofit, to provide decent homes.

There has been a lot of concern here about making sure that faith-based organizations are allowed to participate in government programs. Well, in the housing area, there is nothing new about that. Faith-based organizations for years have been the leaders in using Federal programs to provide affordable housing. In my own State of Massachusetts, the Boston Archdiocese and Office of Urban Planning has been a superb provider of affordable housing. So has the Jewish Community Housing for the Elderly. If you talk to the Association of Homes for the Aging, religious entities are very much involved.

I would note that none of them ever told me that they had to discriminate in hiring to provide that housing. But what we should be doing is taking advantage of that experience and broadening it, because we have got to the point where the only housing that has been built has been for older people. And that is important, building housing for the elderly and the disabled, but as we now see, we also need some family housing.

Here is the problem: If all we do is what we are doing today, and what we are doing today is important and I am for it, but if this is all we do, a year from now, where will these people live? Because there is not this great excess of affordable residential units all over the country. There are pockets where there are.

We also have the question about what happens in New Orleans and other areas. Now, I was very distressed to hear the Secretary of HUD say; not surprised, I must add but distressed, that when New Orleans is rebuilt, there will be fewer African-Americans there. Shame on us if that is the result because, where are these people supposed to go? This was their home. This was a community. And we should be providing temporary help, but we should also be determined to allow this community to rebuild itself.

That does not mean building inadequate housing in the middle of a floodplain. It does not mean having people be vulnerable to floods. It means we should use our wit and our resources to provide replacement housing for people that is better and safer and protected. We know how to do that.

So as I support this bill today, I want to reaffirm, and I know the gentlewoman from California has been a leader on this, and I want to acknowledge that the gentleman from Louisiana, who is managing this bill, he and I and others on our committee are working on one piece of legislation that might be a vehicle for this, that there are many ways to do it. But I want to stress the importance of, after the vouchers, then what?

If we want to allow people to move back not just to New Orleans but to the Mississippi gulf and other communities, then we, in part, should be building housing. There are other things we need to today, and our committee is working on that and working with the financial community.

And in this context, I really have to express my great disappointment here in the President's approach. When the President gave his major speech not for the interim but for the longer-term situation, the only housing situation he addressed was the homeownership through an urban homesteading plan. Now, homesteading has a great history in the United States. And in the 19th century, people were given a piece of land out in the unsettled parts of the country, and they could chop down trees, and they could build their houses. I do not think that model translates all that well to an urban area.

I do not think, when the people in New Orleans are given a piece of land, which is what the President's program says, I will give you the land but nothing else, even if there were any trees left after the flood, I do not think the average returning resident of New Orleans will be able to chop them down and build a house. The urban homesteading plan is wholly inadequate. By definition, the President's urban homesteading plan helps a very small percentage of those who need the help. He is having a lottery.

Since when for a program to meet basic human needs do you have a lottery, which by definition means a very small percentage of the people get in there? Just look at the inadequacy of that program. It says the Federal Government will try to find property it owns. It will not be based on suitability about where to build. It will be on what the Federal Government owns and has no use for and then will be made available to a small percentage of people. And then they are on their own and have to find somehow some money to build on it or to rehabilitate it. That just does not make sense.

What we need to do, following on from this, is a sensible housing production program working with the local officials in New Orleans and in the gulf and elsewhere, the gulf of Mississippi and elsewhere. Let sensible planning go forward at the local level, building not large sterile public housing units but mixed housing, because people with various incomes will need help, and various forms of help will be necessary.

For some people, because we want to promote home ownership, various forms of mortgage assistance will make sense, so working with the financial institutions. For others, we will need to build some housing. We also, I think, have an obligation to rebuild the public housing units that were destroyed, not exactly as they were. We have had some experience, and our committee has in general voted often to reauthorize the HOPE 6 program, which is a way to take public housing and improve it.

So, yes, I vote for this bill. I also welcome the fact it does not take away from the existing voucher program. It does, of course, emphasize the importance of the voucher program, but it also will leave us, and I hope we will address this in this Congress later this year or early next year, a program for the reconstruction of housing in New Orleans for people of various incomes, some of whom will not be able to return to their homes without the construction, with Federal help, of affordable housing.

We know how to do that. We have very good examples of it. And it is very important that we go forward.

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