Newswise — Faced with the daunting challenge of providing housing for hurricane victims, FEMA has focused on a slow, expensive, cumbersome method: ordering up temporary housing units from manufacturers or building new housing.
But there is a better way. Expanding the current federal program for public housing vouchers would be a faster, easier and cheaper solution. In addition, it would take account of the current economic reality in the south central region of the United States: vacancy rates of rental units at record highs.
Edgar Olsen, a professor of economics at U.Va., has studied public housing issues in depth for the past 35 years. He worked on a Department of Housing and Urban Development task force that led to the creation of the Section 8 housing voucher program, reviewed the final reports of the influential Experimental Housing Assistance Program as a visiting scholar at HUD, and more recently has testified on low-income housing policy before Congress and served as a consultant to the federal Governmental Accountability Office (GAO).
His take:
"The immediate need of most people displaced by Hurricane Katrina is permanent housing. This need is especially pressing for the poorest people who have no savings to use in an emergency. Now located in temporary housing throughout the south central region, these families cannot wait for new housing to be built.
"Fortunately, new construction is not necessary to solve the immediate problem. Enormous numbers of vacant units in the region are available for immediate occupancy by families with the ability to pay rent — and a simple expansion of the Department of Housing and Urban Development's largest housing program would provide even the poorest families with the means to rent these units. The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program currently serves about two million families throughout the country. It enables participants to occupy privately owned units renting for up to, and somewhat above, the local median rent. Enormous numbers of vacant units could be occupied immediately by families with these housing vouchers."
RSS