Gulf Coast Hurricane Housing Recovery Act of 2007 (Part II)

Floor Speech

GULF COAST HURRICANE HOUSING RECOVERY ACT OF 2007

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Mr. JEFFERSON. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding to me.

I am having a great deal of trouble connecting the debate here to the reality that people are facing back home. Starting out, you have to know, and just look back to what the conditions were in New Orleans before the storm. Before the storm there wasn't enough affordable housing there even then. There were 18,000 people on a waiting list, 10,000 or so for public housing, 8,000 or so for section 8 vouchers. There were people on waiting lists for 202 housing. All sorts of needs were there. The folks who were down and out then are worse off now. And the folks who were doing a little bit better then are worse off than they were. And so the need has expanded for more assistance there rather than less.

With respect to the issue of permanency, which seems to be the gravamen of the gentleman's objection here, we are talking about people who were eligible for section 8 or 202 or whatever the programs might have been before the storm, who were displaced to other places, and who will remain eligible there in these new places. We passed laws early on after the storm to make sure that people were eligible who otherwise might have lost their eligibility because of the fact they were just physically in another place. We took care of that.

Now, none of us here would have anticipated it would have taken so long to get people back in their places, to get folks back to New Orleans, to get this whole thing fixed. But it has. For whatever reason, it has. We can cast blame here or there, but whatever the reason is, people have not been able to come back home.

I can tell you this much. There aren't many people I have met, and I have been all over the place, in Memphis and in San Antonio and in Houston and in Atlanta, just above in Baton Rouge and up the river. There aren't many people out there who do not want to make their way back home. They are trying desperately to get home. Many of them are close in, doubled up and tripled up in houses, trying to find a way back home. They do not want to be outside of New Orleans. They do not want to be away. We don't need to worry about creating a disincentive for people who return. They want to return home right now, already. Believe me, at the bottom of it all, people want to come back home.

Our objective here is to say as long as they are displaced through no fault of their own, as long as programs aren't working to get them back home right now, we have got to make sure that they have a chance to live decently and in some order outside of the city. That is really all that is going on here. You need to understand that the need remains, and it is even greater than it was before the storm for the programs we are talking about here.

As to this notion of setting a deadline, we have tried this before in almost every program. All we do is just kind of make people's lives unsettled. We say to people who are in assisted housing in someplace in Houston that by deadline X, you must be out of your place. This is, simply put, to put pressure on people to hope they'll find a way to find a house somewhere. They can't, and so the deadline gets moved anyhow. If we set a deadline here, it can only be arbitrary. We don't know that by December such and such there won't be a need for these programs. We don't know that. What this legislation does is take the more reasonable view that so long as they need the program, then they remain eligible. When they don't need it, then the eligibility disappears, and the people are no longer on the program.

That is the only sensible way to deal with this, because no one of us knows, no one of us here can say today when this disaster will be at its end, when recovery will be done. We need to see this through and be logical about it.

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