I think in a way that was a strength because now I’m much more aggressive about how important housing is. For most of the time, before and while I was at the Coalition, I always felt that shelter was important, but not necessarily any more important than health care, education, or whatever.

In the early days of the Coalition our primary support wasn’t from the housing community. It was churches, labor groups, civil rights groups. My sense was that we need to get support beyond the housing community, because that’s seen as being self-serving. There were groups like The League of Women Voters, NOW, and Americans for Democratic Action that were involved in the coalition in its first years that have networks and constituencies that we just aren’t tapping anymore.

What are you proudest of, after 50 years in housing work?

I’m enormously gratified and touched by the Heinz Award. But I recognize that all I did was bring people together. The real work was done by all the other people. There are a lot of people who have worked just as hard as I have – though generally not for as long. But, the housing problem is much worse now than it was when I got into housing, so you can’t say I’ve had a successful career in advocacy in the sense of actually making things better. So I don’t know that I have anything to be proud of. I have had a lot of pleasure in the work, though.

Housing Policy

What does it mean when advocates say that there’s no coherent national housing policy?

It’s true, but it’s also true that there’s no coherent national education policy and no coherent national health care policy. Our system of government doesn’t lead to coherent national policies, and if it did we probably wouldn’t like the policies we got. What we need is a coherent framework for understanding housing issues, and I think we’re institutionally muddling into that with barometers like Out of Reach and The State of the Nation’s Housing.

As I’ve learned more about housing, I’ve become more convinced that the people who said that the federal government really shouldn’t be making decisions about what happens in neighborhoods are right. I’ve got a lot of problems with the way the block grant programs work, but I do think we need to have some devolution. What we need is not so much a national housing policy as a national commitment to solving our housing problems, and to a strong federal government role in addressing those problems.

What should that role be?

Pretty much what it is, with more money. One of the major unaddressed needs is [for] tools and mechanisms to provide housing assistance at the scale it’s needed in the places it’s needed. I think the National Housing Trust Fund Campaign is going to result in a substantial piece of housing legislation addressing extremely low-income housing needs, and that will make a major difference.

The first Bush administration started to require that communities identify needs and then relate their programs to those needs. This was really the first chance for low-income people to have some input, but it got dismantled after just a year or so. I think we should go back to that for money that goes to localities through block grants.

Should advocates be concerned about the shift in policy focus toward homeownership?

I don’t think there has been that shift. The rhetoric of federal policy has moved toward homeownership, but not the programs. In the past two years we got a substantial increase in funding for the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, and we got the voucher program to move Fair Market Rents up to the 50th percentile in tight housing markets. I can’t think of anything in the arena of homeownership that has had that kind of impact. When you look at what we’ve actually been doing, rental housing has not gotten lost.

I also think it’s far too simplistic to say low-income housing means rental housing. I don’t think there’s a reason in the world why low-income housing shouldn’t be available to homeowners. In fact I think it’s a scandal that with all of the federal support through the tax system that goes into homeownership [estimated at $107.7 billion for 2003], we have no low-income homeownership program except the rural housing low-interest loan program. One of the big challenges is to get an array of homeownership programs that serve extremely low-income people, particularly families with kids who need single-family housing. One of the frontiers in housing policy is how to enable low-income people to become stable homeowners if they want to. Not by neglecting renters, but not assuming that rental housing is all you look at when you look at low-income housing.

Advocacy

Where do you think the advocacy movement has been most effective?

I think one of the great myths is that low-income housing has no constituency. It’s just that the constituency needs to be serviced, and informed about what’s going on, when and how they should respond, and to understand what the programs and issues are.

In 1974, after the Nixon moratorium on federal housing programs, the ad-hoc coalition that eventually became the National Low Income Housing Coalition had a lot of effect on getting housing back on the agenda. We actually blundered into one of the most successful things we ever did, because Section 8 was being designed as the one-stop housing program that would do everything. We asked for a set-aside of two-thirds of the units for households below 50 percent of median income, because otherwise it would have been a great program for people with incomes between 75 and 80 percent of the median income. They agreed on 30 percent of project-based units.

The housing wage is the first time we’ve had a simple way of describing the need for low- income housing, and that’s very important. People seem to think they need to understand the programs, the details of the issues, before they weigh in on housing, and that’s probably the fault of the housing movement. Sure we’re going to disagree on the details, that’s what people do, but we all know housing is important, we all know you can’t have decent family life without it, we all know neighborhoods are important. We need to just say, “This is what we’re for,” not continuously argue over program details.

I think the National Housing Trust Fund Campaign is really the first time in years that we’ve had a focused campaign that does that. The campaign has succeeded in focusing people on the fact that we’ve got a big low-income housing problem, and this is one of the ways to solve it.

We also need to pay more attention to increasing incomes, pressing for better income support and economic opportunity programs. It’s unrealistic to think that we can solve the housing affordability problem primarily through housing programs. We need to get the non-housing constituency that cares about poverty focused more around low-income housing issues, and we need to get the housing movement to break out of thinking that we’ve got to solve the affordability problem through housing programs, and start working on things like a housing add-on to the Earned Income Tax Credit, or a housing add-on to SSI, which could cover the difference between the SSI grant and the Fair Market Rent in the community.

How does the federal government view the housing advocacy movement?

I’ve been amazed. Back in the Reagan administration, a HUD official told me “the National Low Income Housing Coalition is the most important organization there is in affordable housing, because on the Hill you have the credibility that none of the other housing organizations have, because everybody knows that you’re interested in what’s good for low-income people and not anything else.” I was thunderstruck, because this was not someone who agreed with our politics, and it was unsolicited. Several times in the course of debates NLIHC has been the only organization that has been mentioned by Senators and Congressmen, so I think we have a lot of credibility on the Hill.

The offset to that is that we’re always asking for more, so it doesn’t look like we have many victories. But there have been housing bills that probably never would have been enacted if it hadn’t been for us.

One critique of the housing movement is that there are too many disparate goals among the different groups. Has that hurt the movement?

I don’t see any reason why the housing movement should speak with one voice. The interests of the National Association of Home Builders and National Association of Realtors and ours are going to overlap on some things and they’re not going to overlap on others, and that’s fine. The problem is less that we do that, and more that we haven’t been able to explain to Congress why there are these differences, or focus on the need to expand federal support for low-income housing rather than on our differences.

How does that affect the movement’s credibility when we’re trying to advocate for legislation?

The housing debate on the Hill is never about the reality. It’s always about the crumbs. If you have 7.5 million rental households with critical housing needs, and another 7.5 million homeowner households with critical housing needs, it’s ridiculous to limit our advocacy to 37,000 new vouchers, or 50,000, or whatever seems feasible. Somehow we’ve got to get the dialogue into the “what’s real” dimension. To me the biggest problem is that we never ask for what we really need. One of the biggest mistakes advocates make is trying to figure out what they can get before they decide what they’re going to ask for.

The housing movement hasn’t gotten itself to the scale where we can ask for something that’s big enough to make a difference. And that’s where the Trust Fund Campaign is making a big contribution, because it’s broken that mold.

With such a major, ongoing crisis, why hasn’t affordable housing gotten the same kind of attention or publicity as other issues, like gun control or health care?

We’ve had some real handicaps. For roughly two-thirds of the households in this country, we’re the best-housed country in the world. People know that guns kill people, and with health care you know you’re going to get sick. It’s harder to get people who have never been exposed to the need to suddenly decide that low-income housing might be important.

The other thing is that we made a lot of mistakes in the Great Society, but housing is the only program where those mistakes are still visible – you still have high-rise public housing. People think low-income housing equals public housing equals Pruitt Igoe or Cabrini Green. If people see a lousy-looking building they’re likely to assume it’s subsidized housing, whether it is or not. And if they see a really good subsidized housing development, they assume it’s not subsidized.

What do advocacy groups need to do to change these perceptions?

We need more funding. If you compare the Coalition’s budget with the budget of the environmental groups, or gun control groups, we’re tiny. I think we would have had more momentum if the non-housing groups that care about low-income issues and lobby about housing had put those resources instead into the Coalition. If the Coalition had the resources to work with local groups at the same level we now work with state coalitions, we could have a tremendous impact on the affordable housing movement. We need to bring back more non-housing national allies.

Copyright 2002