Since 1860 the federal government has been actively involved with the housing industry, specifically the low-income housing industry. In 1860 the government conducted the first partial census of housing—by counting slave dwellings. Twenty years later the U.S. census focused on the living quarters of the rest of the population, conducting a full housing census. Since then the federal governm…
Widespread public outcry over the plight of the homeless in the early 1980s prompted Congress to pass the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act of 1987. Congress renamed the act the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act in 2000 (H.R. 5417) to honor Representative Bruce Vento's service to the homeless. The range and reach of the act has broadened over the years. Most of the money auth…
The national effort to provide housing for those in need is far more massive than would be indicated by the expenditure of about $1.5 billion on assistance to the homeless. HUD's expenditures on public and Native American housing were projected to be $23.8 billion in FY 2005. (See Table 5.2.) If these funds are added to projected expenditures on homeless programs, total spending on subsidiz…
HUD's FY 2005 budget anticipated funding for 1.2 million public housing units. Public housing has been decreasing in numbers (1.37 million in 1998, for example), in part because of an initiative to remove, modernize, and refurbish many poorly constructed and dilapidated public housing units. An estimated 3,150 public housing authorities manage the 1.2 million units. In FY 2005, $2.7 billion…
As a result of the 1992 recommendations of the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, Congress authorized $300 million for an urban revitalization demonstration program in the FY 1993 Appropriations Act. The program came to be named HOPE VI. The acronym stands for Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere. Up to that point, HUD had four different HOPE initiatives; no HOPE V w…
Voucher programs pay a portion of the rent for qualifying families. Only low-income families are eligible, specifically those with incomes lower than half of an area's median income. Under some circumstances, families with up to 80% of the local median income may also qualify; such cases may involve, for instance, families displaced by public housing demolition. The family pays 30% of its i…
The two biggest low-income housing programs in the United States are public housing and the Section 8 programs. Section 8 funds are distributed under HUD's Housing Certificate Fund. Other HUD programs fund housing for people living with AIDS (Housing Opportunities for Persons with AIDS, or HOPWA), elderly people, Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, and persons with disabilities. A new 20…
Please include a link to this page if you have found this material useful for research or writing a related article. Content on this website is from high-quality, licensed material originally published in print form. You can always be sure you're reading unbiased, factual, and accurate information.
Highlight the text below, right-click, and select “copy”. Paste the link into your website, email, or any other HTML document.
User Comments Add a comment…