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Nominations of Alphonso R. Jackson, Linda Mysliwy Conlin, and Rhonda N. Keenum: Hearing Before the Committee on Banking, Housing
Original publisher: Washington: U.S. G.P.O.: For sale by the Supt. of Docs., U.S. G.P.O., 2005. LC Number: KF26 .B39 2005d OCLC Number: (OCoLC)61822942 Excerpt: ...11 ACKSON Mr. J. I am in a very unique situation, and I have to con-fess to the Senators today that I have a bias in the sense that I was one of the four people who spent one night and basically helped write up the legislation that eventually became the HOPE VI legislation as we know it. I must tell you that I think we have to have levity to this, that after a second glass of wine, I came to name it Housing Opportunity for People Everywhere is what HOPE stands for. I believe that when we were empowered as a commission, we came to the conclusion that we had about 89,000 severely dis-tressed public housing units in this country. It really had to be ad-dressed, and we could no longer permit people to live in the squalor or in those huge monstrosity of buildings that they had done for almost 30 or 40 years. What we said would be the ideal circumstances would be to inte-grate low-and moderate-income people, both socially and economi-cally into the fabric of this country, and that is what we wanted to do with the HOPE VI program. I believe that the HOPE VI pro-gram, as stated a few minutes ago by Senator Bond, is a great pro-gram. My concern with the program is that we have allocated to date, $ 5 billion. Today in the pipeline, we still have over $ 3 billion unspent. The program has been in effect now for almost 10 years. But the other thing that I think is so important, Mr. Chairman, is that we have only had about 21 successful HOPE VI projects completed out of almost 200 that have been funded in the last 10 years. HELBY Chairman S. What is the problem? Mr. J. The problem has been, in many cases, the Housing ACKSON Authorities have not necessarily fulfilled their obligations. We have given them money, through the HOPE VI grants, with the under-standing that they would leverage those monies to develop ... Hide synopsis
