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Houston's Housing

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So Whitfield stays at Star of Hope, just as Vanida Lyons, a 24-year-old receptionist, has been staying at the SEARCH homeless agency since leaving her husband last year. She's applied for public housing, but she's not hopeful of getting it: she's on a list of 10,000 people waiting for one of the city's 4,443 subsidized units to become available.

In Houston, like in many places, the numbers of those without a place to live have become almost impossible to take to heart: 10,000 homeless; 150,000 doubled up with friends or family. And those are 1990 numbers. Shelter workers say the problem has gotten worse, with fewer and fewer of the thousands who pass through their doors the drunks, drug addicts or mentally ill they're often imagined to be and more of them being like Whitfield and Lyons -- working people making $12,000 to $15,000 a year who are struggling to find an afford place to rent.

This is not a new problem to Houston's housing officials. The city's Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy, a long-term housing plan published last year, noted that 28 percent of Houstonians make less than $15,000 annually. The number of people living in poverty may have nearly doubled since 1980, but the low-cost housing shortage is more accurately understood when one realizes that eight of ten renter families "experienced cost burden," a phrase meaning they spent more than 30 percent of their net income on rent and utilities.

Lanier claims that his administration has attacked the housing problem faced by the working poor by adding 5,000 low-cost, privately owned housing units a year through acquisition and rehabilitation, compared to about 400 a year that were added under the previous administration.

Those numbers, however, have been disputed. And that Lanier points to the RTC program as one way he has put new units on-line for the working poor makes it clear that not everyone sees the working poor in the same way. Yolanda Cortes, a member of the board for the Houston Housing Authority, is one who wonders why, rather than sell its RTC properties, the city didn't use the apartment complexes to address the severe shortage of public housing units in the city.

"When you've got [thousands of] people on the waiting list, you know the need is there, no doubt," says Cortes. "To me it seems odd. Why would the city buy property and then resell it?"

You can add that query to the list of unanswered questions that dog the recent history of affordable housing in Houston.

In 1991, housing advocates led by state Senator Rodney Ellis lobbied to have $20 million from a $500 million bond referendum set aside for homeless and housing initiatives. Following the bond vote, City Council passed a resolution dedicating $10 million to be split between homeless programs and the repair of public-housing units. The other $10 million was to go toward increasing the stock of privately owned low-cost housing.

But it wasn't until last month, almost four years after the money was supposed to be available for use, that the bond funds bore any fruit. That happened when SEARCH opened up a new facility. And though several other homeless projects are now under way, as are repairs to the public-housing units, the issue of the $10 million reserved for low-cost housing initiatives is another matter. Despite voter approval in 1991, there has been no attempt by the city to allocate it or even to suggest ways to spend it. The city's Margie Bingham claims that her office is accepting proposals for use of the money from housing groups. If so, that's news to advocates such as Sally Shipman, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, who say they're discouraged by the city's lack of initiative.

"This was a major victory," Shipman says of the 1991 bond measure, "and we thought this means they'll get busy and issue the requests for proposal and we'll see our bond money spent. To the city's credit, they are moving along with the homeless projects. But what concerns us are the affordable housing bonds. Nothing has happened that we're aware of. That bond money is just sitting there."

The idea of $10 million "just sitting there" makes housing advocates edgy. They've seen unused funds disappear before. In 1986, in the midst of a severe economic downturn, city housing officials were ordered to return nearly $3 million in unspent Community Development Block Grant funds to the federal government. In 1990, it forfeited $1 million more, according to a study by the League of Women Voters.

While the city's record of making use of the federal funds available to it has improved in recent years, more and more of that federal allocation has gone not to build or rehabilitate housing, but rather to demolish substandard buildings, particularly apartment complexes. Block Grant funds have also been used in lieu of money from the city budget to make improvements in infrastructure, not housing, in certain areas.

The effect of this can be seen in the explosion of families who are seeking subsidized housing through the city's housing authority.

"Houston has been very unaggressive in getting low-income housing, and it gets worse every year," says Texas Low-Income Housing's John Henneberger. "If you look at the per capita number of public-housing units in Houston and compare it to other cities, [Houston is] way down there on the list. And it's true of the privately owned units as well.

"The gap between the number of units available and the number of people who need and qualify for them just increases at an exponential rate."

That trend will likely continue. Shipman says she appreciates the effort the city has made to increase shelter beds and services for the homeless. But that only begs the question of what is the city doing to keep people from becoming homeless?

"I'll tell you, I'm concerned and the [Coalition] board is concerned," says Shipman. "These are the folks who are going to be making minimum wage, and maybe, if we're lucky, in three years they'll be making $6 an hour. But they will not get into the housing market because there is nothing for them."

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