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5: STATE HOUSING AGENCIES’ POLICIES AND PROGRAMS
- State University of New York Press
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5 STATE HOUSING AGENCIES’ POLICIES AND PROGRAMS Following the devolution of housing policy, state housing officials began to look differently at their role as state policymakers and at how they used both federal and state resources in their programs. The cooperative partnership approach was reflected in policy statements made in public documents, such as the federally required Consolidated Plans. Federal programs and state legislatures required state housing agencies to target programs to lower income households equitably among all areas of the state. The first section of this chapter describes the changes to housing policy in the three case study agencies. The types of programs developed using state and federal resources are then described in the second part of the chapter. NEW DIRECTIONS IN HOUSING POLICY Minnesota Housing Policy: Focusing Attention on Workforce Housing In 1988, both the Minnesota legislative auditor and the Governor’s Commission on Affordable Housing found that MHFA had been “too passive in deliberating and deciding housing policy.”1 The auditor’s report commented that MHFA needed more input from cities and nonprofit housing agencies in its decision making; that it should enter into a partnership with these entities to expand the supply of low-income housing. The auditor’s report also noted that MHFA had focused too much on using large-scale, for-profit developers, while disregarding the work of housing nonprofits. Most of MHFA’s programs during the 1980s were focused on homeownership, and while it was able to target 101 these to low-income households, the auditor’s report noted it was ignoring low-income renters. In its conclusions, the report urged MHFA to “shift its resources away from homeownership programs to programs that directly assist renters, . . . towards conserving the existing housing stock,” and toward programs that served the homeless and low-income, single-parent families.2 During the early 1990s, the agency began making changes based on these recommendations. The agency’s new priorities were reflected in its 1996–2000 Consolidated Plan. In that document, the agency identified two main policy objectives: meeting Minnesota’s basic housing needs and strengthening its communities.3 Its top priority was to serve extremely low and low-income renters, whereas assisting homeownership opportunities fell to sixth priority. The Consolidated Plan identified extremely low and low-income households as the ones most at risk for homelessness, because they did not have incomes that would enable them to own a home, and many paid 30 to 50 percent of their incomes on rent. For this population “a combination of rehabilitation and new construction is a must. Rehabilitation ensures that existing affordable rental units continue to be habitable; . . . new Construction ensures that the supply of affordable units rises.”4 Preservation of existing affordable units was seen as the best strategy for helping extremely lowincome households—a difficult population for whom to develop programs because the financing had to bring the cost of the housing low enough to be affordable. The Consolidated Plan also pointed out that, while housing is a basic need, it “occurs in a context: the community where it is located. Housing is an important part of a community’s infrastructure. Communities experiencing job growth must have an adequate supply.”5 Rehabilitation of older housing and assistance for homeownership were needed to help stem the problems faced by communities experiencing declining property values, crime, and other aspects of deterioration. Governor Carlson’s Economic and Vitality and Housing Initiative was a first step in focusing attention on the need for workforce housing in the state—housing that helped low-income working households. That program was later expanded to become one of the three major funding programs for MHFA (more details to come in the second part of the chapter). By 2005, programs that provided housing choices for workers made up nearly 61 percent of the agency’s program resources.6 Housing advocates were very supportive of this change in policy. In 1996, the Family Housing Fund, a nonprofit advocacy organization , began publishing a pamphlet each year to educate the public and policymakers about how the lack of affordable housing hurt the work102 THE CREATION OF A FEDERAL PARTNERSHIP [44.200.141.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 16:12 GMT) ing poor. Entitled “Working Doesn’t Always Pay for a Home,” the pamphlet stressed the fact that affordable housing was needed by people with low-paying jobs such as cashier, retail clerk, bank teller, janitor, school bus driver, and receptionist. In 1998, a working household would have had to...