Reflections on the Low Income Housing Issue (Commentary)

Between fiscal years 1979 and 1986, the low income housing sector has borne the brunt of the "Reagan revolution." During this time, annual funding for low income housing programs declined by more than twothirds in current dollars (from $32 billion a year to $9.9 billion), and by three-quarters in inflation-adjusted dollars. Housing advocates across the country have been numbed by these draconian cuts in low income housing programs, by repeated Administration claims that housing resources are best produced and allocated through the market mechanisms, and by government plans to privatize the FHA and get out of the housing business. Not surprisingly, much of the energies of these housing advocates have been devoted to preserving whatever programs they can rather than systematically rethinking what an appropriate federal housing role should be in the contemporary policy environment. What creative thinking is taking place among low-income housing advocates tends to be premised on the need for an even greater federal commitment to low income housing than existed either before the Reagan victory or during the 1960s, the height of liberal housing policy-making and program implementation. Rather than addressing the more practical and difficult issues of how increasingly scarce federal housing resources should be strategically allocated among a number of competing uses, housing advocates behave as if a Democratic administration in 1988 would eagerly embrace their ambitious housing agenda. Unfortunately, this is just wishful thinking