Editorial: A tiny dent in the need for housing

Wednesday, April 6, 2005 | 9:30 a.m.

In a community of 20,000 people it might be altogether welcome news that a new building containing 60 federally subsidized apartments would be opening in a couple of years. The building might actually go a long way toward accommodating the need for low-cost housing. In Las Vegas, however, with its urban area of more than 1.5 million people, the news is both welcome and discouraging. Any dent in the need, however tiny, is welcome. But we have 2,680 people on waiting lists for subsidized housing, and thousands more who need the housing but see signing a waiting list as an exercise in futility.

There are other discouraging aspects as well to the news that was announced last week by Michael Liu, an assistant secretary of the Housing and Urban Development Department. He said 54 boarded-up apartments at 3901 E. Charleston Blvd. would be torn down and replaced with the 60 new units at a cost of $13 million. What's discouraging is the snail's pace of both the local and federal governments. The 54 apartments were locally declared unfit for habitation in 2002. Now, three years later, there's a federal plan for replacing them -- by 2007. Five years to replace a lousy 54 apartments.

And this is in a town where a growth task force, which spent more than a year analyzing public policy, announced last month that affordable housing is the greatest need.

Even more discouraging is the $4 billion cut in HUD funding contained in President Bush's proposed 2006 budget. This includes more than $2 billion from the Community Development Block Grant program, the source of funding for much of the affordable housing around the country. The cut would cost the Las Vegas Valley more than $16.2 million, which covers rent subsidies for 1,500 families.

The federal government's interest in building subsidized housing projects, overseen by local housing authorities, waned years ago. And now federal rental subsidies for low-income people living in private homes and apartments are threatened. A local plan to build low-cost housing with money from the 1998 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act, which says proceeds from the sale of federal land in Nevada must be spent in Nevada, is also jeopardized -- Bush's budget proposes to grab most of those proceeds

Congress should reject the president's plan for HUD as well as his plan to swipe Nevada's money from the land sales. That would at least maintain the status quo. But given the bleak outlook for any meaningful federal help, the state and local governments should begin preparing their own plans for funding badly needed affordable housing.