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Current Editorial
March 15, 2010
By Mark Fogarty
Going Backwards
Housing assistance to American Indians got a nice boost last year when the federal stimulus bill added $510 million to the kitty, making $1.2 billion available to help ameliorate some of the most atrocious housing conditions in the country. This year's budget request for fiscal 2011, however, would cut last year's amount by more than 50%, to $572.2 million.
Whoever came up with this idea ought to be taken out to the proverbial woodshed by President Obama (as President Reagan famously did with his budget director). Congress in its wisdom should immediately restore Indian housing block grant money to this year's level of $700 million, or the $875 million advocated by the National American Indian Housing Council.
Even $1.2 billion is just a drop in the bucket against a need estimated at more than 200,000 new housing units immediately and the repair and upkeep of many thousands more existing units. And $25 billion would make a good start at solving this intractable problem, which continues to be a disgraceful commentary on the willingness of government and business leaders to turn their backs on truly shameful housing conditions.
The current government, heir to a legacy of countless broken covenants with Native people, needs to act now in good faith toward fulfilling generations-old commitments to provide housing assistance and more recently, mortgage assistance. Financial institutions, which have blithely drawn red lending lines around Native homelands, need to take advantage of federal programs that will guarantee 100% of their outlays (like the HUD 184 program, which has guaranteed thousands of mortgages made on reservations and even more to Indians off-reservation) and reverse the lending drought that has seen mortgages to Indians fall by more than two-thirds in the past several years.
Zeroing out the HUD 184-A program, which guarantees mortgages to Native Hawaiians, is another wrongheaded move that Congress should swiftly move to annul.
NAIHC chair Marty Shuravloff told the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs Oversight "should Congress accept the president's budget proposal, it would be the lowest, single-year funding level since NAHASDA (the Native American Housing Assistance and Self Determination Act) was enacted in 1996."
"Reduced funding would result in the loss of jobs for our people, the deterioration of existing housing units, and the curtailment of many housing projects that are currently under development," the chairman testified.
Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who chairs the Senate Indian Committee, told NAIHC's annual legislative conference he would challenge the lower amount. "There must be ample and robust funding for Indian housing," he told them.
NAIHC is asking for a big boost in Native Hawaiian housing money, to $20 million. That would be double what the president is proposing. It also seeks $1 million to fund guarantees for the Section 184-A program, which is the Hawaiian version of the Section 184 program. Those should also be implemented.
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