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Earlier in 1977, the Community Reinvestment Act passed to reduce discriminatory credit practices, called redlining, by requiring banks to sell mortgages where they operated. As a result, low-income families got them while home values rose, mostly with low or nothing down. That ended, however, when the housing crisis began along with the home ownership dream for millions.
Today, government help for affordable housing is needed more than any time since the 1930s. Then it was forthcoming. Now it isn't or not enough to matter for millions losing their homes, victims of predatory lenders and Wall Street bandits creating a crisis that persists and worsens at a time nearly two-thirds of low-income households face severe housing cost burdens, and about 12.7 million children (over one in six) live in households spending more than half their income on housing, leaving little for other essentials.
In addition, since the 1980s, low-income housing assistance was significantly cut, and by the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of public housing units were dilapidated, resulting in 170,000 abandoned. Yet from 1999 - 2006, federal public housing funding dropped 25% while, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
"Each year, the federal government spends more than three times as much on tax breaks for homeowners - with a large share....going to upper-income households - as it spends on low-income housing assistance."
In other words, wealth is being redistributed up the food chain to those least needing it, leaving others on their own and out of luck because federal low-income funding cuts led to a decrease in quality subsidized housing when it's most needed.
Chicago's Cabrini Green is instructive, about a mile from this writer's residence. When completed in 1962, it had 3,114 units for 15,000 people. Now it's mostly demolished. What remains will be gone before yearend 2010. Other projects are also disappearing, and only 305 new units have been built in mixed-income developments, leaving many of Chicago's poor on their own with no aid forthcoming.
The 2009 Making Home Affordable program has been largely ineffective for lack of teeth, so banks do as they wish because provisions are voluntary. In addition, few modified loans are permanent, most ending after five months so foreclosures remain high, homelessness increases, and two other federal programs are doing little - the Emergency Food and Shelter program (EFSP) and Emergency Shelter Grant.
The Bush and Obama administrations' one-sided priorities (for Wall Street and imperial wars) leave little for America's poor and disadvantaged when they're most in need, including the growing hungry and homeless populations, largely invisible because little about them is reported and nothing on television where it counts most.
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