Charlotte Delgado
President, National Alliance of HUD Tenants
On behalf of the National Alliance of HUD Tenants I am pleased to testify before this committee today. Founded in 1991, NAHT is the Nation’s only membership organization representing the two million families who live in privately-owned, HUD-assisted multifamily housing. Our membership today includes voting member tenant groups and area wide coalitions in 27 states.
I have been a NAHT Board member and Vice President for most of the past fifteen years. I now serve as President. I also serve as the President of the Statewide Alliance of Tenants in California. I am also the President of the Washington Square I & II Tenant Association where I live in Sacramento. Washington Square is a 103 unit complex where the owner prepaid their HUD mortgage and converted to high market rents, with some residents, including myself, able to stay in our homes only with the aide of Enhanced Vouchers. My complex was the first complex lost to prepayment in Sacramento. Today, only 29 families with Enhanced Vouchers remain at the complex.
“I was being so overcharged that my rent was 49% of my unadjusted income rather than 30% of my adjusted income”
Enhanced Vouchers may sound like a great solution, because it means the difference between safe and decent housing and being out on the street. Yet for me and more than 180,000 others who receive Enhanced Vouchers to date, and the currently unprotected 101,000 or more families who could lose their homes when HUD mortgages mature, this is not necessarily so, because we must wait and worry from year to year to see if the money will be voted in for vouchers.
Additionally, there have been a number of problems with the Enhanced Voucher program, which is administered by local housing authorities. In my case, our housing authority continually made mistakes on calculating tenants’ rents and five years after receiving Enhanced Vouchers we learned that nearly all of the tenants at Washington Square I & II were being overcharged by the housing authority for a number of years. I was being so overcharged that my rent was 49% of my unadjusted income rather than 30% of my adjusted income.
There is an old saying: If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Well, HUD says if it ain’t broke lets break it so it can never be fixed. Let’s see, these are 40 year mortgages so lets let the owner pay them off in 20 years and get out of the program, and then hope that Congress votes the money to cover more and more Enhanced Vouchers each year. Then the Bush Administration proposes to abolish Enhanced Vouchers after one year and reduce the Section 8 Voucher Program by 600,000 families by 2009. This will inevitably lead to tenant displacement, increased homelessness and the further destruction of the nation’s affordable housing system, which seems to be the ungodly strategy of the Bush appointees.
As far back as October 2002, a NAHT report documented a permanent loss of 199,764 units because of these opt outs between 1996 and 2001. NAHT’s report also showed that the Mark Up to Market program, which Congress adopted in 1991 failed to slow the loss of housing. The GAO report on expiring mortgages notes that in the next few years project-based Section 8 contacts aiding 1.1 million families will expire. Even in the absence of the expiring mortgage problem, the steady erosion of affordable housing will likely continue at the rate of the 41,000 units each year.
My own state, California, has the highest number of developments affected by the crisis – 278 apartment complexes, fully 12% of the national total. The superheated housing market touches all corners of my state: people making $85,000 a year are living out of their cars in the Silicon Valley because they can’t afford the rent. We can expect a huge number of these apartments converting to high rents as soon as their owners have the chance.
Clearly while Congress may not be willing to regulate these buildings, it should not prohibit state and local governments that do. You can do this by asking your federal officials to amend or repeal Section 232 of the now defunct LIHPRHA statute, which makes it difficult to enact tenant protections at the local level in the event that federal ones are ended through prepayment or expiring mortgages.
In Sacramento and in other states, tenants are working hard to get local ordnances passed to save at-risk housing. I would ask that you make this a priority this year in your state. HUD’s leadership wants us to go away so that our voices won’t be heard when they try to dismantle affordable housing in our communities. But we will continue to strive.
We hear a lot about homeland security. Let this be our rallying call: Homeland security begins with home, a home they us secure, affordable and accessible!
Thank you for allowing me, on behalf of NAHT to submit these views.