There's a woman I know; let's call her Jane. Until recently, I knew Jane only in that way that you "know" people whom you see regularly, recognize, and with whom you exchange small talk. She is one of the crew of two or three who clean our building each night. They do a fine job of keeping our office clean and relatively dust-free despite all of the equipment, drawings, etc. around which they're working. She has been working in our building for about a year; she has been unfailingly polite and friendly every time I have encountered her.
One evening recently, I was working late, and was still in the office when Jane came in to clean. I looked up from my work, and we exchanged the usual sort of greetings: "Hi, how's it going?" "OK. You're working late again." "Yeah, I have a deadline coming up." I started to turn back to my computer, but she had more to say to me.
"I just figured out that I'm living in one of the apartments you designed," she told me. "When I was in here a couple of nights ago, I saw a picture of my building on the wall."
"Really? Which project is it?" The housing that we design is primarily affordable workforce housing, and I was not surprised that, in Seattle's tight housing market, an office cleaner might have an income low enough to qualify her to live in one of our clients' developments.
Jane told me the name of the apartment development, and which particular unit within that development was hers. And then she continued: "I've been trying to get into one of
's apartments for several months. Last December, I moved out of my boyfriend's apartment. He'd been knocking me around for a while, and I had to get away, but I couldn't afford the security deposit for a place of my own, and I didn't have anywhere to go.
"I ended up living in my car for three months. I was always trying to find a safe place to park so that I could sleep. Sometimes people woke me up trying to break into my car. Other times the cops woke me up, telling me I had to move, or that it wasn't safe for me to be sleeping there. There are showers in the restrooms on the second floor (of our office building), and I was using them each night after I finished working.
"Finally, LIHI had this studio apartment available, and I could afford it. I don't have much of anything in it yet, but I don't have to worry about going to sleep. And the other people around are really friendly. It's a nice place to live, and I feel safe there."
I knew that this development has a number of transitional units (designated for people who have been homeless), and asked if hers is one of those. It is. "I'm really glad that you're out of your car, and in a safe place," I told Jane. (She nodded vigorously in agreement.) "Thanks for telling me that you're living there. I'll tell my coworkers, too; we're always thrilled to know people who live in the places that we design, and to hear that they're happy there."
Jane is one of the many people who, for one reason or another, have become homeless
. Unfortunately, she did not have friends or family nearby who were able to provide her with someplace to stay while she got back on her feet. There may be a Jane (or John) in your office building, the place where you eat lunch, your corner store. Someone like Jane could be one of the people you meet each day.
Funding for the apartment development where Jane now lives, and much of the affordable housing like it, comes in part from a variety of government programs. Yes, this is that bad old "Big Government" at work. However, if the current administration has its way with HUD programs (as discussed in this
), that funding may soon disappear completely. While this would have unfortunate consequences for the work that I do (as no funding for projects means no architectural design of such projects), the consequences for Jane and others like her would be much more severe, and much more unfortunate.
In case the links cease to function, I've included the full text of the articles mentioned above:
Bush to Cities: Drop Dead!By Karrie Jacobs
Metropolis Magazine
Posted March 21, 2005
The news is all bad. And it's nearly impossible to focus when confronted with the 99th article about the soaring deficit, the Bush administration's efforts to privatize Social Security, or the latest multibillion-dollar request for funding the Iraq war. The numbers are incomprehensible, the arguments read like boilerplate, and it's tempting to tune it all out. Better to let the policy wonks in Washington squabble.
So here's a headline from the Washington Post, January 14, 2005: "Bush Plans Sharp Cuts in HUD Community Efforts." It makes your eyes glaze over, doesn't it? It's one of those stories that is easier to skip. After all, what's it got to do with you? But read on: "The White House will seek to drastically shrink the Department of Housing and Urban Development's $8 billion community branch, purging dozens of economic development projects, scrapping a rural housing program, and folding high-profile antipoverty efforts into the Labor and Commerce departments, administration officials said yesterday."
If you consider it for a moment, you might realize that this article discusses things you care about. What is housing and urban development if not architecture, design, and planning? The upshot of the story is that the administration's budget proposal for 2006 would slash half of the $4.7 billion Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, a 30-year-old source of funding for everything from sewer systems to ADA compliance to historic preservation to affordable housing. It is a program so vital to the day-to-day life of America's cities that the United States Conference of Mayors, meeting in Washington a few days after the Post article came out, issued an emergency resolution in support of full funding for the CDBG program that reads like a scream of pain from cash-strapped local governments.
Other programs slated for elimination or exile include the Brownfields Economic Development Initiative, which promotes infill development and discourages sprawl (this would be packed off like a stepchild in a Dickens story to the Commerce Department), and the modest $24 million Rural Housing and Economic Development program, which would be shut down.
As its name implies, HUD is the federal agency that tends primarily to the needs of cities (although it also helps build houses and infrastructure in rural areas). And part of the problem is that the Bush administration is not especially enthusiastic about cities or the people who live in them; in November John Kerry took 54 percent of the urban vote and 60 percent of the vote in America's big cities. Also the increasingly expensive Iraq war combined with expansive tax cuts means there's less money to spend on domestic programs. Necessities such as housing and infrastructure have suddenly become luxuries.
"You've got a deficit to address, and your constituency base is not cities," says Chandra Western, director of the National Community Development Association, summarizing why the president's budget request might eliminate programs that serve so many people. North Carolina-based architect Bryan Bell, known for devising innovative housing for migrant farmworkers, has a different take: "I just think it's guns or butter. And we're losing butter."
"Essentially what's being challenged is whether the federal government should continue to have a role in solving the problems of community and economic development for low- and moderate-income families," explains Paul Hilgers, the director of neighborhood, housing, and community development for the city of Austin, Texas.
Hilgers runs what is one of the most progressive city housing agencies in the country. Austin recently completed an architecturally ambitious 26,820-square-foot homeless shelter and outreach center that harvests rainwater to flush toilets and runs on solar power. It was funded in part by HUD's CDBG, a program that Hilgers points out was started by a Republican. "It began in the Nixon administration, and the concept was very simple," he says. "We've got national problems that the federal government has some responsibility for but that we don't know how to solve. So we're going to create a program that allows for a lot of flexibility at the local level."
In other words, the CDBG program is a model of big government acting with the nimbleness of small government, a remarkable achievement for the Nixon administration. Sadly the idea of cutting community-development funds by 50 percent is redolent of a different 1970s Republican president. It's vintage 1975, as in "Ford to City: 'Drop Dead!'"
But maybe the idea that the federal government has a bad attitude toward America's cities is too sweeping a generalization, too unwieldy an abstraction. Maybe you care about sewers and sidewalks in roughly the same way you care about Social Security--you don't really want to think about it too much but would surely notice if it wasn't there. In that case, there's a smaller, more accessible story buried in all the bureaucratic chatter. It's about how we've begun to learn in the last decade that innovative and affordable housing are not mutually exclusive categories. The bottom-up approach that HUD began to emphasize during the Clinton years--making funds available for community development with a minimum of red tape--helped nurture a new generation of architects, who, inspired by the successes of Samuel Mockbee's Rural Studio in Alabama and similar programs at universities around the country, began to try and recapture the Modernist mission of good design for everyone.
Earlier generations had taken Modernist ideas quite literally and used federal funds to build the monolithic housing projects that became the symbols of the public sector's inability to effectively do good. Now a new generation of architects finds affordable housing beguiling: an intriguing puzzle to solve. Young practitioners, often graduates of university design/build programs, have become masters of ingenuity in the design and the funding of low-cost, affordable housing. Money from HUD is almost always part of the equation.
Hilgers says: "We have a very progressive group of young architects and engineers coming out of schools who are seriously committed to taking creative design standards to a lower-income level of people than ever before. And it's very unfortunate that, at a time when we have a cadre of young creative professionals who need this kind of support, we would be looking to cut."
Hilgers's own office has been supportive of Austin firms like
Krager Robertson Design Build, helping them to tap into federal funds. KRDB got enough HUD funding through Austin's city housing program to make the houses they developed, designed, and constructed on Cedar Avenue, in East Austin, more affordable to moderate-income buyers. These lean, elegant daylight-filled homes sold for $105,000 and $125,000. Assistance from HUD shaved $10-15,000 off the selling prices and gave buyers a significant break on their down payments.
In Raleigh, Bryan Bell's organization,
Design Corps, relies heavily on funding from various branches of HUD, including the Rural Housing and Economic Development program that is scheduled for elimination. "If you talk about the Home Investment Partnership [not currently on the list of programs to be eliminated] and Rural Housing and Economic Development, those are entirely the sources of our projects," Bell says. "And those are two programs that architects would really appreciate because the philosophy behind both of them is that it's a local solution for local problems."
"For me, it's a one-stop shop," Bell says, adding that having HUD funds helps him attract additional private backing to his projects. "It's nice because it's available in every state. You learn the regs. You cross the t's, you dot the i's, and you get the funding. It's a great way of doing business."
So next time you read a headline about cuts to HUD, don't imagine a bland, faceless bureaucracy and skip to a juicier story. Don't choke on the alphabet soup. Instead imagine architects, like Bell or KRDB, who are gradually developing new ways to make good architecture accessible to everyone who needs it. Think of the HUD cuts the way the scientific community might think of the abandonment of the Hubble telescope, a debilitating blow to a mission of exploration that's allowing us to see farther and more clearly than we have ever seen before.
Bush Plans Sharp Cuts in HUD Community Efforts
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 14, 2005
The White House will seek to drastically shrink the Department of Housing and Urban Development's $8 billion community branch, purging dozens of economic development projects, scrapping a rural housing program and folding high-profile anti-poverty efforts into the Labor and Commerce departments, administration officials said yesterday.
The proposal in the upcoming 2006 budget would make good on President Bush's vow to eliminate or consolidate what he sees as duplicative or ineffective programs. Officials said yesterday that economic development programs are scattered too widely in the government and have proved particularly ineffectual at HUD.
Advocates for the poor, however, contended that the White House is trying to gut federal programs for the poorest Americans to make way for tax cuts, a mission to Mars and other presidential priorities. Administration officials would not say how much the consolidation would save, but it could lead to steep funding cuts. That is because the HUD programs would have to compete for resources in Commerce and Labor budgets that are not likely to expand to accommodate the shuffle.
"I'm always willing to look at consolidation, but clearly they're using consolidation as a shield for substantial budget reductions," said Rep. Barney Frank (Mass.), the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, which has jurisdiction over housing and community development programs.
The plan was detailed in a December memo from the White House Office of Management and Budget to HUD. The document provides one of the first concrete examples of the types of cuts in the works as the administration comes to grips with a soaring deficit.
"The purpose of the exercise has nothing to do with achieving or not achieving savings," said one administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid preempting the Feb. 7 release of the president's fiscal 2006 budget request.
"What we are trying to accomplish is to meet our obligation to people living in distressed communities, to hold communities accountable for helping those people and to become more efficient in the process," another official said.
HUD programs to be moved under proposal / Program's annual cost / Destination
Community Development Block Grant / $4.7 billion / Commerce
Youthbuild USA high school dropout outreach / $62 million / Labor
Brownfields Economic Development / $23.8 million / Commerce
Rural Housing and Economic Development / $23.8 million / Eliminated
Empowerment Zones/Renewal Community / $9.9 million / Commerce
SOURCE: Office of Management and Budget
Congressional housing aides say the $4.7 billion Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program -- the bulk of the community planning budget -- could be cut as much as 50 percent. Cities have become dependent on HUD's development programs, especially the CDBG, which has existed for 30 years, city officials said. Stanley Jackson, director of the D.C. Department of Housing and Community Development, said the city has used CDBG grants of $21 million to $22 million a year for clinics, recreation centers, day-care facilities, literacy programs and housing development.
With housing and property values skyrocketing, the need for such programs for low-income families has never been higher, he said.
"If this is a backdoor way of eliminating a program like CDBG, it would have a profoundly negative impact on cities," said Jim Hunt, a vice president of the National League of Cities and a city council member in Clarksburg, W.Va.
Under the plan, the CDBG program -- which provides multipurpose development grants to state and local governments -- would be sent to the Commerce Department. The Urban Empowerment Zones and the Renewal Community programs -- both of which offer tax incentives for development in urban or other troubled areas -- would also go to Commerce, as would the Brownfields Economic Development Initiative, designed to revitalize abandoned industrial sites.
Youthbuild USA, a $62 million program to teach teens home-construction skills, would be sent to the Labor Department. The $24 million rural housing and economic development program would probably be eliminated.
HUD would maintain the Home Investment Partnerships to build or buy affordable housing, homeless assistance programs and housing assistance for AIDS sufferers. The budget would eliminate $260 million in economic development projects earmarked for this year by lawmakers. HUD could ultimately lose a quarter of its $31 billion budget.
White House officials said HUD employees would have to stay on the job to oversee outstanding grants for some time. But with Bush promising an aggressive attack on domestic spending, the 817 HUD community planning and development employees are girding for the worst.
"It's a body blow," said one career employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired.
The proposal could face an uphill fight in Congress, said Frank, who called the proposal "just appalling." With budgets tight, vested interests in the Commerce and Labor departments would be expected to favor their programs over the newcomers from HUD. "It wouldn't even be a fair fight," he said.
Moreover, HUD has evolved into an agency designed to support urban interests and low-income citizens, while Commerce and Labor are more receptive to business needs. Indeed, community development programs at HUD are far larger than those at Commerce and Labor, said Saul Ramirez Jr., executive director of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials and a former deputy secretary of housing. The Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration has a $320 million budget, a fraction of CDBG's allocation.
"If there are any programs in Commerce that encourage direct economic development to some of the most disadvantaged and blighted areas, those programs are dwarfed by these programs," he said. "If [consolidation] is what they want, the reverse should be proposed."
One White House official agreed that HUD programs have more of a community focus, while the Commerce Department's Economic Development Administration is more interested in economic growth. But, he said, "they're funding a lot of the same things."
HUD's city focus may be why the White House is dismantling the HUD programs, Frank charged. "HUD is the place where mayors and urban interests can put up the strongest fight," he said.
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