To the head of Aurora city government’s neighborhood redevelopment office, a long-running federal effort to make life better for people in lower-income neighborhoods is worth more than the money it brings to the state’s second-largest city.
Michael Kamon, Aurora’s redevelopment chief, credits the Community Development Block Grant program with helping the city build connections. It helps Aurora officials work with a vast network of support agencies and with residents. “With that money reduced or eliminated,” Kamon says, “all of these relationships, all of this knowledge would be wiped away” as those support agencies court other funding sources.
This year, Aurora received $1.26 million through the federal grant program. That’s down from $1.47 million two years ago. Under the budget President George W. Bush submitted to Congress in February, that number could dwindle even further next year — down to $947,000 by one estimate.
The Bush Administration is trying to tighten domestic spending, and several poverty-related programs are feeling the pinch.
Entitlement programs such as Medicaid and Medicare consume a greater portion of the nation’s budget every year, but administration attempts to curb those costs have met stiff resistance. Meanwhile, the expense of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, plus the lost revenues from Bush’s signature tax cuts, is making federal dollars for social programs scarce. And the effect is being felt in Aurora’s neighborhoods, in Chicago’s food pantries and in downstate’s housing projects.
The decline in spending on Community Development Block Grants offers a good example. Administration officials regularly tout the importance of the program, which, in more than 30 years, has distributed more than $113 billion to local governments.
In Illinois, 41 cities received money directly from the feds through the community development grants. So did Cook and each of the collar counties, plus Madison and St. Clair counties in the Metro East region. Smaller cities and towns get a piece of the action, too, by applying through the state.
Two years ago, Illinois communities collected $207 million through the block grants. This year, they took in $177 million. According to projections by the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials, they would receive only $132 million for the year that starts October 1. That’s a 36 percent drop in three years.
Nationally, the block grants cost $3.7 billion this year; in the president’s budget for next year, they would cost $3 billion. That includes the $300 million pool to reward high-performing government recipients. But, all told, Bush’s plan would cut $1 billion in a single year — or more than a quarter of the money devoted to the traditional grants.
A top official of the Department of Housing and Urban Development told members of the U.S. House in April that the program is “the federal government’s primary vehicle for assisting state and local governments in undertaking a wide range of community development activities aimed at improving the lives of low- and moderate-income families.”
But at the same time, Assistant Secretary Pamela Patenaude called for an overhaul of the program because, she said, “the program’s impact has become diffused over time.”
Patenaude said the formulas for deciding how much towns, cities and counties receive from the grants are outdated and need to be overhauled. And she promoted an administration initiative to take some of the program’s money and direct it to the best-performing local governments.
In all sorts of domestic programs, the Bush Administration has called for better targeting of resources, even as it has scaled back many popular programs.
It’s an approach that calls on federal agencies to measure the success of their programs. For initiatives that don’t perform well — or haven’t shown that they do — the administration has regularly recommended reduction, consolidation or even elimination.
Though the process can be painful, there are few alternatives that are politically palatable. Cities such as Aurora, which have already scaled back their support for redevelopment projects, will have to cut even more. That’s bad news in many corners of Aurora because the block grants sustain so many efforts.
The program helps support two local homeless shelters, a domestic violence program, mental health services and a health care clinic for the poor.
The city uses it to remove lead paint from older houses. It spends money to help poorer property owners insulate their homes and make them more energy-efficient. The funds enable the city to spruce up parks and to fight crime by installing better lighting in some of its older neighborhoods.
And Aurora has used the grant program to help nonprofit organizations build additions to their buildings or make their facilities accessible to the disabled.
In one instance, the money is paying to air condition a 45,000-square-foot building that houses the state’s largest homeless shelter outside Chicago. The project requires replacing five heating and air-conditioning units, each weighing at least 3 tons. The project will allow the building that houses Public Action to Deliver Shelter (or PADS, as it’s usually called) to go at least a decade without having to upgrade its ventilation units. More important, it will prevent situations like one last year when carbon monoxide leaked into the men’s sleeping area, says Ryan Dowd, PADS’ executive director.
The grant program provides “funds for things that are not as politically popular to fund but are incredibly necessary,” he says. In the case of PADS, the federal money makes it easier to house an average of 200 homeless people a night and provide them with food, job training, legal services and health care as they make the transition out of the shelter.
While cuts in community block grants may hurt such programs as PADS that provide temporary shelter, another Bush Administration proposal would eliminate funding for a major initiative designed to help those who need housing permanently.
This year, as he has done four years in a row now, Bush is trying to eliminate the HOPE VI initiative, which led to one of the biggest transformations in the urban landscape over the past decade. Approved by Congress in 1992, HOPE VI led to the destruction and renovation of such dangerous public housing units across the country as the Robert Taylor Homes on Chicago’s South Side.
In its first 12 years, the program used $6.1 billion to move people from “severely distressed” public housing units into better quarters, often in mixed-income neighborhoods. The federal funding played a role, for example, in the transformation of Cabrini-Green, Henry Horner Homes and Rockwell Gardens in Chicago.
But the program’s effects have been felt in smaller communities, too. It provided for new houses at Champion Park Apartments in Rockford and RiverWest in Peoria, plus the replacement of the John Hay Homes in Springfield with Madison Park Place. It even paid for the destruction of 20 public housing units in Greenview, a Menard County village of some 840 people 12 miles northeast of Petersburg.
The Springfield Housing Authority’s transformation of Madison Park Place was completed six years ago. It now offers 194 units of low-income housing — including 44 units sold to private owners — on the city’s northeast side. Normally, public housing is geared toward people making less than 30 percent of an area’s median income, but Madison Park Place is open to people making up to 80 percent of the region’s average income. That means the new project creates a more diverse neighborhood that also caters to the working class, says Jackie Newman, the housing authority’s executive director.
Newman says the agency won’t necessarily suffer if HOPE VI is eliminated because it has no such projects under way. But she says there’s no denying how much it helped replace the John Hay Homes. “We would have to have been extremely creative to raise that sort of capital, especially as a public housing authority.”
Still, the program has earned mixed reviews. A 2003 federal Government Accountability Office report found that, in the program’s first decade, only 15 of the 165 HOPE VI projects that were started had been completed.
The Bush Administration has decided it’s time to pull the plug on the program. In its budget, the administration noted that HOPE VI “has surpassed its goal of funding the demolition of 100,000 nonviable public housing units and replacing them with new, less dense public and privately owned mixed-income housing. However, the program has been excessively costly when compared to other programs proposed for funding that produce new affordable housing.”
Public housing advocates successfully defended the program from previous administration assaults, though its funding has dropped off. They say there’s still plenty of work to be done in upgrading dilapidated public housing projects. The Council of Large Public Housing Authorities estimates that another 46,000 to 82,000 units would qualify for rehabilitation.
Another effort targeted for elimination is the Commodity Supplemental Food Program, which distributes excess food bought by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, primarily to needy seniors.
The Bush Administration says the program overlaps with other government outreach efforts, specifically the Food Stamp Program and the Women, Infants and Children [WIC] program.
In fact, supplemental commodities is more limited in scope than the other two programs. But it still gives out food to 420,000 people in 32 states every month. About 88 percent of those recipients are seniors. The packages are designed to offer a healthy supplement to their diets; they include canned fruits and vegetables, juices, tuna, cereal, pasta, cheese and peanut butter.
In Illinois, the operation serves more than 15,000 individuals, all in Chicago and Cook County. The program depends on food — not money — delivered by the federal government, so it’s difficult to expand.
Dennis McSwain oversees distribution of the federal foodstuffs to charities in Illinois as the director of Catholic Charities of Chicago’s community development and outreach services. He says while the food isn’t enough to get someone through the whole month, it’s a valuable resource for seniors, especially those who have the packages delivered to their homes. Eliminating the program “would be devastating for low-income seniors,’’ he says, “who have to make difficult choices on a daily basis as far as buying medicine, paying rent and buying food.”
The fallout could be even larger, warns Maura Daly, a spokeswoman for America’s Second Harvest, a Chicago-based organization that collects and distributes 2 billion pounds of food every year to 50,000 local charities across the country. Without the program, about 420,000 seniors nationwide would have to find another way to get food, and they would inevitably turn to the charities in Second Harvest’s network, Daly says. “Our food banks are always the ones picking up demand.”
And Daly says the other two federal programs won’t be as good a fit for the people now receiving the supplemental commodity packages. Only 12 percent would receive WIC benefits, she says, and food stamps don’t offer the variety of foods that the supplemental program does.
The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that advocates on behalf of the poor, noted in a February report that food stamp qualifications are more restrictive than those for supplemental commodities. And the group points out that people who get the supplemental packages already receive information on how to sign up for food stamps.
“Seniors can find the food stamp application process long, intrusive and time-consuming. The program remains stigmatized for low-income seniors, who fear uncomfortable experiences at the food stamp office and believe that the forms and notices are written in a way that makes them feel guilty or ashamed to apply for food stamps,” the center’s analysts wrote.
Congress will have the last word on whether to enact Bush’s proposals. So far, it has put the brakes on some of the administration’s more drastic ideas. But years of budget cuts are taking their toll.
Three years ago, Mutual Ground Inc., a domestic violence shelter in Aurora, lost $223,000 in government support, primarily because of federal cuts. While that left $1.7 million for the year, the group had to lay off 13 of its 62 staff members, says executive director Linda Healy. Funding remains flat, but Mutual Ground’s caseload has been growing steadily. Last year, it provided shelter and assistance to 1,800 women and children who were victims of domestic violence. It took care of another 400 victims of sexual assault — more than half of them children.
Budgets are so uncertain there that Healy says she can’t offer her staff regular raises. Instead, she keeps salaries flat and splits up whatever remains of the agency’s budget in end-of-year bonuses. But there’s no guarantee there will be money left over for those bonuses.
Healy says the Community Development Block Grants help Mutual Ground keep going, but it’s still not enough. “They’re still not paying for every Aurora woman that needs shelter.”
And there are some grounds for Kamon’s worries that reduced funds could mean fewer ties between the city of Aurora and community organizations as those groups seek other sources of funding.
Theodia Gillespie, president of the Quad County Urban League, an organization that promotes education and jobs in the black community, says the league has already felt the squeeze from federal budget cuts and is looking for ways to support its mission that don’t depend on the government. For example, it’s considering charging for the referral when companies use its work trainees, Gillespie says.
Now the group receives block grant money for building renovation and operation of employment programs. But this year, support for the work-training project dropped from $18,000 to $5,000.
And the Urban League isn’t alone, she adds. “Nonprofits are not focusing on government funding so much now because it varies year after year.”
Daniel C. Vock, a frequent contributor to Illinois Issues, is a reporter for Washington, D.C.-based Stateline.org and a former Statehouse bureau chief for the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin.
Illinois Issues, June 2006
