The past decade has witnessed both steep reductions in federal housing assistance and an intensification of local housing problems including homelessness. In light of these trends, this study explores alternative means available to municipalities of meeting the housing needs of low-income households.
The methods chosen to accomplish this were two-fold: a literature review and a case study. The literature review revealed that in response to the Reagan administration's 1981 cutbacks to housing programs a new low-income housing delivery system, based largely on public-private partnerships, has emerged from the grass roots level in communities across the United States. In the new production system efforts have focused on preservation rather than new construction, and large for-profit developers have been replaced by nonprofit community-based development corporations and local public agencies. With the assurance of federal subsidies gone, local governments and nonprofit developers have sought to increase the effectiveness of current resources, direct more general revenue to housing activities and have raised new resources. Today, financing packages for low-income projects are usually built upon customized and creative financial packages that are difficult to replicate, and as a result, no definitive solutions have yet been found.
Despite the hard work and creativity that has gone into developing low-income housing in the U.S. over the past decade local programs have been able to meet only a fraction of the country's housing needs.
The case study method was chosen to focus on the City of Seattle, Washington's specific housing initiatives. The City's response has closely followed the national experience. A new delivery system has emerged which depends largely on the efforts of the City's municipal government, through its Department of Community Development, and the community's growing nonprofit sector. As a
matter of policy Seattle has chosen to spend most of its low-income housing dollars on preserving the downtown's remaining 7,311 low-income units. The City does not. build housing itself, but instead, acts as a "bank" loaning money generated, for the most part, by off-budget strategies to nonprofit housing developers to rehabilitate existing low-income units to meet housing code standards.
Seattle's housing programs have had mixed results. Despite their efforts, due to downtown's expansion, the City has continued to lose low-income units in the downtown to demolition and rent increases, no gain has been made on the City's overall housing need, and while the City has replaced the lost federal subsidies, it has not created significant ongoing revenue streams for future housing development.
Results of this study indicate that, only the long term commitment of federal funds to a national housing strategy can stem the growing tide of homelessness across the U.S. and avert, a deepening of the country's housing crisis. / Applied Science, Faculty of / Community and Regional Planning (SCARP), School of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/29996 |
| Date | January 1990 |
| Creators | Millward, Alison J. |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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