Housing woes

The city and county governments need to cooperate on an affordable housing program.

Houston once had a well-deserved reputation as a haven of affordable housing, a place where people of modest means could find a decent place to live at an economical cost. A generation ago, a newcomer could rent an inner-city apartment for a couple hundred bucks a month — even in popular neighborhoods like Montrose — and start saving money for a down payment on a reasonably priced home. Compared to New York, Los Angeles or Chicago, the nation’s fourth-largest metropolis was a big-city bargain.

Today, headlines about rising housing prices may buoy the spirits of longtime homeowners, but they’re also evidence that Houston has a problem with affordable housing. Last month, the Houston Housing Authority reports, about 43,000 families found themselves on a waiting list for subsidized housing.

That makes what our City Hall reporters exposed last weekend all the more aggravating. (“Lost Money,” Page A1, Sunday) After a 10-month investigation painstakingly following the money through labyrinths of local and federal bureaucracies, Chronicle reporters Rebecca Elliott and Mike Morris concluded that Houston collected $130 million in local taxes over the last decade to provide affordable housing for low-income families. As it turns out, the city has little to show for it.

For all that money, Houston can claim it lowered the price of building, buying or renting only 2,007 homes over the course of a decade. Just 463 of those homes can still be classified as affordable. In one program that produced 1,122 homes, the city reimbursed developers more than $3 million, but the buyers didn’t have to be low-income and they were later allowed to sell their homes at market prices.

The record-keeping was such a mess it took our reporters months to sort it all out. But it seems almost half of the $96 million spent since fiscal 2007 has been spent on bankrolling administrative costs, paying federal fines or keeping projects going after the city lost state and federal grants. Only after the Chronicle kept asking detailed questions did the city discover it had $46 million available for new projects, which was tens of millions more than officials originally assumed.

The biggest disappointment amid all this expensive confusion has been the Land Assemblage Redevelopment Authority, known around City Hall as LARA, under which the city intended to buy tax-delinquent real estate, clean it up and sell it to developers who would build affordable housing. The city has spent $10 million in LARA money during the last decade buying and marketing 1,403 pieces of real estate in low-income neighborhoods, but homes have been built on just 362 of those lots. What’s especially galling is that some of the remaining 805 vacant lots have become neighborhood eyesores blighted with weeds and trash.

With results like this, it’s no wonder housing advocates complain about Houston’s lackluster efforts. Even top local officials tacitly admit they’ve done a lousy job and that the city’s performance is unacceptable.

Houston has stumbled along for years without a clear strategy on affordable housing. Indeed, the city hasn’t even defined what price point constitutes an affordable home; the fact that this basic detail has been neglected says plenty about how the city’s housing efforts have been fundamentally mismanaged.

What’s gone wrong with Houston’s affordable housing efforts can’t be blamed on a single individual.

Mayors, housing directors, city controllers and council members all could have done more.

Mayor Sylvester Turner needs to take the lead in cleaning up this mess, calling everybody involved in these efforts together in one room to collaborate on a single coherent strategy. It’s clear one of the biggest problems here is a lack of coordination and consistency among all the bureaucrats and elected officials involved in spending this housing money. Indeed, there’s no reason why the city and county governments shouldn’t cooperate on an affordable housing program for the entire metropolitan area.

What this investigation revealed is not only an ongoing waste of millions of taxpayer dollars, but also a failure to adequately address a growing problem affecting thousands of low-income Houstonians. It’s infuriating, and it needs to be fixed.