This is more or less a follow up to my last post. I hadn't intended to offer up these thoughts so soon (I'm trying to pace myself here), but a fairly remarkable piece from this past Sunday's Detroit Free Press has incited me to blog onward.

A quick preface: what's remarkable about this article isn't its content (at least to me) but its timing. Just check the headlines. Citigroup bailout. Obama's unenviably tasked economic team. The trillions of dollars being pumped from the fed fire truck. Housing market numbers still going south, and not in a sweet tea and sunny clime kind of way. Who has time to care about "low-cost housing" these days?

Well, I do, for one. And I think you should too. It's a piece in the puzzle before us, a crucial one in fact. But more below. On to some key points in the Freep piece:

From 2000-06, the number of families with housing costs exceeding 50% of their income increased by 2 million, or 34%. Because of a lack of funding, however, federal housing assistance programs serve only one in four of eligible low-income families.

This is endemic to several of our social programs. You can be fully eligible today, but it may take months or even years to avail yourself of such opportunities, with no other obstacle but a waiting list standing in between. Some manage alright in the meantime. But many others might be further along their path if they had that hand up when they needed it.

The nation has already lost an estimated 350,000 of its 2 million units of subsidized housing over the last decade. They either deteriorated or owners converted them to market-rate housing.

This is not so good. More to be said in the coming weeks and months.

Making matters worse, over the next five years, contracts between the government and landlords on more than 900,000 Section 8 units will expire, reports the National Housing Trust.

Ditto.

Again, it is rather remarkable to see a newspaper article promoting things like "public housing preservation" at a time when pretty much all we hear about housing-wise involves burst bubbles, mass foreclosures, the subprime fiasco, and "toxic" debt (a horrible metaphor, by the way---we're not talking about EPA Superfund sites here; but another post for another day...).
 
But this issue really does matter, a lot, and it needs to be addressed in the forthcoming stimulus package. I'll sum up why with three points, which I hope to elaborate upon in subsequent posts.

• ELI renters have been detrimentally impacted by the current crisis in several ways (see my previous post and comments). I understand fully that home foreclosure is a traumatic experience for many families. But ELI renters are the workplace equivalent of "last hired, first fired". There are a lot of them. And their housing vulnerability leaves them disproportionately exposed to the current crisis.
  
• In my previous post, I emphasized expanding the supply of affordable housing in order to make it more affordable. As important as this is, it alone won't suffice. Owners of rental housing, who often play a crucial role in affordable housing availability, have to stay afloat and make a profit too. This is where federal housing subsidies come in. These need to be expanded. Significantly, if not dramatically.
  
• And then there is public housing. Well over a million American households live in it and depend upon it to provide the roof over their heads, including many elderly. Recent estimates suggest that there is a backlog of repairs and upgrades totaling roughly $20 billion. This is money that, if spent, would maintain a public investment seven decades in the making. Local construction contractors probably wouldn't mind the work coming their way either. Roofing? Plumbing? Heating and Cooling? Interiors? This is a relatively cheap and easy avenue of economic stimulus.