Houston's Housing

"The whole idea," says Marty Leary, a former staffer at the Southern Finance Project, a nonprofit group that helped draft the program, "was that as long as it was taxpayer money, something should go back to the taxpayer."

Still, even after it was refined, the Affordable Housing Disposition Program was never intended to provide subsidized public housing. Instead, at a time when federal, state and local money for such needs were drying up, it aimed to increase housing options for the working poor.

These are men and women earning not much more than minimum wage. Or single parents and down-on-their luck families struggling to support their children. In other words, people who could be living up the street one day and on it the next.

People such as Shelley Whitfield, for example. A year ago, Whitfield finally left her abusive husband, walking out with her three small girls in tow. She made a few calls to friends and family, but it was 4 a.m. and no one offered to take them in. After sleeping in her car, she packed the kids off to school and found a shelter, where they stayed for a month. They then moved to Star of Hope, a transitional housing center downtown.

Whitfield has been steadily employed, first as a telemarketer, now as a bank teller. But despite that, she and her daughters have been unable to find an affordable apartment. Desperate at one point, she visited a public housing site, but turned around and walked out. "It's not," she says, "something I would move my children into."

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.