HUD proposal would benefit poor areas

I respond to the May 25 Dispatch article “Hilltop low-income-housing project moving forward.”

The Homes on the Hill community-development corporation has been active in the Hilltop area for many years. It started out as a grassroots group of neighbors that would buy a rundown property, fix it up and sell it to a worthy family. Today, its main purpose seems to be developing low-income rental units in an already depressed area using state tax credits and HUD dollars.

Everyone has mostly ignored language in the 1968 Fair Housing Act that requires communities receiving federal funds to “affirmatively further fair housing,” but last year HUD proposed a new rule, 24 CFR Parts 5, 91, 92, et al., which might help turn around housing policies that have kept poor neighborhoods poor.

The new rule will require that groups like Homes on the Hill take steps to proactively address concentrated areas of poverty and promote integrated communities if they want to keep getting tax dollars. Unfortunately, many community-development corporations have become just another developer rather than fighting for the social change necessary to support sustainable communities.

These new rules will certainly give us a weapon to fight CDCs that only want to profit from the concentrated poverty of areas like the Hilltop. JOHN ROBACK

Columbus