The Housing Rebuff

President Johnson's low-income housing subsidy bill received a new blow this week when a House Appropriations subcommittee cut the President's request of $30 million by 60 per cent. The proposed $12 million can only prove disastrous to what is an adventurous and worthwhile experiment.

The President's plan has basically a twofold purpose: to bring decent living conditions within the reach of poor families and to begin clearing up urban slums and breaking up ghettos. Under the proposal, a family whose net worth does not exceed $2,000 a year (or $5,000 for the elderly) would be asked to spend one-fourth of its income on rent; the Federal government would make up the difference on the rent charged. Only buildings owned by non-profit or limited dividend organizations (unions or churches, for example) would be subsidized. By thus supplementing its existing public housing and subsidy programs, the government hopes to encourage such groups to undertake more projects.

While the appropriation cut will seriously endanger any such plan, there is yet another damaging feature of the subcommittee's action--the proviso that prevents rent supplement funds from going to communities lacking community development projects. This proviso, in effect, will make the envisioned suburban dispersion impossible or ineffective. Suburban communities could decide against long-range planning altogether or determine locations of projects which would be rent-subsidized, thus creating new ghettos.

Last year Congress voted only $450,000 for "administrative purposes," prompting Johnson to announce in his State of the Union message that he would again seek the funds. The $12 million allocation, then, is hardly encouraging, since it will not enable the low-income housing project to proceed on any reasonable basis, and since it once again constitutes a rebuff to Johnson. In its meager appropriation and its virtual prohibition of supplements to suburban areas, the House subcommittee could very well bring the program to an end.