A ROUGH CUT Trump budget plan would rip into affordable HUD housing
A few years ago, I met a resident of Tempe’s Apache ASL Trails apartments built for deaf senior citizens. Using sign language and an interpreter, she told me how much she loved living at the complex next to light rail with other people who understood what it’s like not to be able to hear.
Apache ASL won a national award for affordable housing and has become a model for developing homes for people with special needs.
Without funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Apache ASL wouldn’t have been built.
In Mesa, hundreds of victims of domestic violence and their children have found a safe home at the Autumn House.
That safe haven was developed with funds from HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program.
About 30 families with parents or children with disabilities wouldn’t be able to call an affordable-loft apartment complex in Glendale’s Orchard Glen neighborhood home if its developer hadn’t received backing from HUD.
And tens of thousands of homeowners across metro Phoenix wouldn’t have been able to buy or at least would have had a much harder time without HUD-funded counseling programs.
All the federal programs that helped these people find safe, housing they can afford will be chopped under the current $6 billion proposed cuts for HUD.
Some feel the cuts are ‘nonsense’
To say many Valley housing advocates are in anguish over the potential massive hit to housing
is an understatement.
“The HUD cuts will devastate affordable housing and other much-needed housing aid in Arizona,” Patricia Garcia Duarte, CEO of Phoenix-based housing non-profit Trellis, told me from Washington, where she is fighting against the HUD cuts.
She also points out that the many projects built with HUD money aren’t entirely funded by the federal government.
Much of HUD’s funding is leveraged with more in private funds to develop affordable housing. The federal money stakes a project or gives developers a tax credit, so they can get a loan or make enough on a project so it’s feasible to build. After the budget cuts were announced last week, Arizona Republic/azcentral reporters Laura Gómez and Maria Polletta canvassed the Valley for reactions from the cities that count on the HUD funding to help residents.
Tempe Mayor Mark Mitchell told Polletta, who covers diversity, that neither Apache ASL nor the affordable-housing community for veterans and their families called Valor on Eighth would be there without HUD funding.
Arizona and 15 cities and counties across the state get about $60 million a year from the Community Development Block program. The funding was set up to be flexible, so a community can use it for what its residents need most. Cities in the northeastern U.S. were able to use Community Development Block funds to clean up and repair buildings after deadly Hurricane Sandy in 2012. But most often, the money is spent on building affordable housing, community centers and shelters as well as rehabbing rundown neighborhoods.
The Trump administration’s budget document justified the HUD cuts with a statement saying states and cities are in a better position to serve their communities.
Tolleson Mayor Anna Tovar told Gómez the rationale behind the HUD cuts is “nonsense.”
I think the residents of Apache ASL and the many other housing development helped by HUD might agree.
“The HUD cuts will devastate affordable housing and other much-needed housing aid in Arizona.” PATRICIA GARCIA DUARTE CEO OF PHOENIX-BASED HOUSING NON-PROFIT TRELLIS