The Dire Need to Invest in Affordable Housing

  • Wednesday, September 9, 2015
  • David Butler, Habitat For Humanity
David Butler
David Butler
While America’s affordable housing crisis continues to reach new heights, the challenges facing Tennessee families and communities have worsened as a result of the inability of Congress to gain a balanced budget. In 2011, Congress passed a law to set in motion dangerously low spending caps if they were unable to find common ground to reduce the federal deficit. Even though these spending caps do very little to solve the deficit issue, they were designed to be so disastrous that no reasonable Member of Congress would allow them to take effect.
 
America is stronger when we have decent, affordable homes and stable communities. Yet, since 2011, Congress has allowed low spending caps to deprive families and neighborhoods of the housing and community development investments they need to thrive. Highly successful and effective programs have been significantly cut, including those that help Tennessee’s seniors, people with disabilities, low-income families with children, veterans, and people experiencing homelessness access safe, decent, and affordable housing.
 
A glaring example is the HOME Investment Partnership Program (HOME), which has been slashed by 50 percent since the spending caps have been in place. This year, due to tight budget constraints, the House of Representatives proposed to provide HOME just $767 million in appropriated funds or 58 percent less than in 2010. The bill also contains a highly objectionable transfer that would essentially eliminate a new housing resource - the National Housing Trust Fund - in an attempt to increase HOME funding to its record low of $900 million. The Senate proposes to severely cut the HOME program by 93 percent, which would essentially eliminate it altogether.

 

HOME is exactly the type of program that Congress should be investing in, not eliminating. Over 20 years, HOME has helped build and preserve more than 1.2 million affordable homes in Tennessee and has served as direct rental assistance to thousands of low-income families in Chattanooga alone.
HOME gives communities the flexibility they need to address their most pressing housing challenges, ranging from homeownership to rental to rehabilitation in urban, suburban, and rural areas alike. It also plays a critical key role in leveraging other federal, state, and private investments because it often provides the gap financing necessary to make affordable housing developments financially feasible. In fact, every HOME dollar leverages an additional $4.
 
It is my hope that the House of Representatives and the Senate will thoroughly analyze the benefits that affordable housing provides and meet in the middle to devise a compromise to achieve a balanced budget. Affordable housing provides great benefits to our amazing city, our state, and to our country. 
 
It’s time to lift the damaging spending caps and make smart investments in highly successful, locally driven, and effective federal housing programs, like HOME. Families residing in Greater Chattanooga and the great state of Tennessee deserve better…wouldn’t you agree?

 

David Butler
Executive Director of Habitat for Humanity of Greater Chattanooga Area

 
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