Certain FReepers may need this
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Posted on 03/22/2004 8:05:34 PM PST by writer33
Theresa Anderson has lived on the street, and she wants never to go back.
If you haven't been homeless, it is difficult to imagine how frightening the Bush administration's proposed cuts in the nation's principal housing assistance program are to people like Anderson who depend on housing vouchers.
"Without housing help, I wouldn't have been able to get back on my feet," Anderson said. "There would have been no way to get a roof over my head."
President Bush's fiscal 2005 budget calls for cutting the voucher program by more than $1.6billion next year and $4.6billion by 2009. That's 30 percent of the entire program, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research organization.
Such a cut would confront the Spokane Housing Authority with the choice of eliminating 540 families from the program next year or raising their annual rent an average of $569. Five years from now, the choice would be starker: 1,296 families cut off or a $1,480 annual rent increase.
The Spokane Housing Authority administers vouchers for 4,485 families now, and there is a waiting list of 4,080 families. These are the very poor, the elderly and the disabled.
Anderson, 35, pays $145 a month in rent. Housing vouchers make up the difference for her $475-a-month Browne's Addition apartment.
Her only income is a $422-a-month Supplemental Security Income check that has to pay her share of the rent, her other bills and the $100 a month she is paying in child support.
Like many in her situation, her place in society is the result of a combination of circumstances out of her control and bad choices that she readily admits.
"I had a family once and used drugs and lost them," said Anderson, who has been diagnosed with bipolar and post-traumatic stress disorders.
But when her name came up on the waiting list for vouchers two years ago, things started to fall into place for her. She has kicked drugs and received treatment for her mental health problems.
The vouchers are vital, Anderson said.
"There's no way I could have a career or go back to college if I didn't have a roof over my head."
But even with housing vouchers, she still had to convince her landlord she was a good risk.
Joe Blumel owns and operates 17 apartment buildings in Spokane with 150 living units. As many as 15 percent of his tenants are on vouchers.
"They are trying to re-establish their lives," Blumel said. "You can't forever hold them responsible for their bad choices."
He said whether Spokane knows it or not, the voucher program -- Section 8 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 -- "is the best thing we've got going" for poor people, and he has seen his share.
"I've had a lot of these folks that started out on Section 8, and they got off it and got their lives together," Blumel said. "As they start making money, they get themselves in order and go to school, get some training and get in the job market. Some of them get to the point they can make their own rent."
His regard for the program is backed up by the final report of the Millennial Housing Commission, a bipartisan committee created by Congress in 2000:
"Because the program is flexible, cost-effective and successful in its mission, the MHC believes housing vouchers should continue to be the linchpin of national policy providing very low-income renters access to the privately owned housing stock."
Jaynele Kenney pays $163 a months for a two-bedroom apartment on the South Hill. Vouchers make up the difference of her $575-a-month rent. A single mother, she works part-time and goes to Eastern Washington University full-time to earn a degree in social work.
She wants to help people like herself, she said.
"If I lost the vouchers, I would probably have to start working full-time in addition to going to school," Kenney said.
She said she might have to consider not going to school for a while so she could work more. That would thwart her climb out of poverty.
She waited 21/2 years for the vouchers, living with friends, doing what she had to do to keep herself and her little girl out of homeless shelters.
"I don't think that people are aware of the magnitude of the cutbacks we are experiencing in this area," Kenney said of recent cuts in child-care assistance and Medicaid. "Spokane's low-income population is in serious trouble. The effects of this cutback would be devastating."
It also would dash the hopes of those waiting for vouchers -- people like Lisa Swofford, a single mother whose been on the waiting list for five months.
A recovering drug addict, Swofford came in from the cold when she lost her front teeth to the ravages of methamphetamine. Now she is in a transitional home for people like her. She has one test left to get her general equivalency diploma.
Before that, she lived in a home with no floor, no running water, no hope.
The voucher program "means I'll finally have some stability for me and my son," she said. "There's no way I can pay rent for a decent two-bedroom apartment."
She wants to enter a single-parent program at Spokane Falls Community College, maybe save some money. But if housing doesn't come through, she doesn't know what she will do.
With more than 24,000 people in Spokane unable to afford a two-bedroom apartment, said Megan Farley of the Washington Low Income Housing Alliance, "now is not the time to cut" the Section 8 program.
"When you cut assistance without raising earning power, it's a recipe for failure."
Blumel, who said he has subsidized several tenants on his own with mixed success, put it another way.
"We have a segment of the population that needs help," he said. "No matter how they got there ..., it's one of those things we have to face as a responsible society.
"Improving the human condition is the basic responsibility of every person in the world," Blumel said.
The housing voucher program "is one place that we really get our money's worth."
"If you haven't been homeless, it is difficult to imagine how frightening the Bush administration's proposed cuts in the nation's principal housing assistance program are to people like Anderson who depend on housing vouchers."
Here we go with the homeless theme again. It's all Bush's fault because of her bad choices earlier in life.
"Improving the human condition is the basic responsibility of every person in the world," Blumel said.
So keeping people on entitlements are helping them advance. My question is how many tenants do you still have on vouchers that were on them five years ago? My bet is the number has increased, not decreased.
Whatever happened to people doing things on their own? I know it's a lost art, but it can be done.
But I guess it's okay to forever hold taxpayers responsible for PAYING for their bad choices.
You know that was the only worthwhile sentance in the whole damn article.
Click the Pic
Oh, so, Kenney would be forced to live like the rest of us except the rest of us also take responsibility for raising our children to become productive members of society.
Your life is NOT my responsibility!!
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