Barney Frank

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I just want to reemphasize the point my friend just made, this is the only program which you can get into, basically, if you are 50 percent and below. There are other programs, not as much. There is the low-income housing tax credit which helps people at 70 and 80 and 90 percent and 60 percent. There is the home program. We have traditionally had in housing programs what we call deep subsidy programs and shallower subsidy programs. The problem we have is this: There is no way people at 30 and 40 percent can work their way into the lower subsidy programs. They cannot work up to that. They will never have enough money. So what you are doing is excluding to a great extent many of the poorest people from the only program they can afford. We have a range of programs, and you are skewing what has been a more balanced mix. I never wanted this to be only for the very poor, and I fought some of the Federal preferentials that made it only for the very poor, but the point is when you talk about the exclusion of working people you are forgetting the low-income housing tax credit, you are forgetting tax-exempt bonds for State housing finance agencies, you are forgetting the home program, elderly housing programs, you are forgetting a whole range of other things which provide only for people at the upper end of eligibility, and you are denying it to people for whom it is the only resource.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, this notion of a work disincentive, given the existence of the welfare bill, would cut you off just comes out of thin air. The notion that people quit jobs or refuse to get jobs because they might get a section 8 when they would have no other means of support simply does not make any sense at all. Do the Members on the other side not remember what they did in the welfare bill? I thank the gentleman for yielding to me.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, reclaiming my time briefly, and I will yield back, but I regret that the Rules of the House do not allow us to yield to staff, because we could probably, by cutting out the middleman, have a more cogent debate; but given that is the rule, I will yield again to the gentleman from Iowa.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. I would say to the gentleman I will not. The fact is that there has been no 602(b) allocation this year. The fact is that the gentleman from New York comes up here on the wholly inaccurate premise that this must come from HUD, VA, EPA or the unstated NASA, which he has implicitly abolished, but that assumes there has been a 602(b) allocation.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. That would be acceptable.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, if the gentleman will continue to yield. Yes, I will take 30. The gentleman can take his 5 and 30 after that, sure.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I would just say to the chairman of the subcommittee, I hope he is not upset at any little confusion, it is just that being that agreeable will sometimes catch us off guard. But we will adjust to it, and we certainly do not want to discourage him from the pattern. So it is very much appreciated. This is an amendment, Mr. Chairman, that deals with another piece of what we debated last week. We debated thoroughly last week the 8-hour work requirement. There is another requirement in this bill, in the same provision, and it has to do with a requirement that every housing authority in the country get into a negotiation, except it is really a mandate, with most of their tenants by which the family and the agency enter into an agreement. Included pursuant to subsection (D)(2)(c), as a term of agreement under subsection (D), Establishing a target date by which the family intends to graduate from, terminate tenancy in, or no longer receive public housing or housing assistance under title III. This section may not be construed to create a right on the part of any public housing authority to evict or terminate solely on the basis of the failure to comply. Obviously, we want to try to encourage people to get out of housing. And my amendment says, which I have worked on with the gentleman from Illinois, that we will make this option; that is, we will empower the housing authority to do it if they want to, in case there was any doubt as to their legal authority, and we will even make it mandatory if we appropriate the funds for it. CBO has said this will cost millions of dollars. Exactly how much we cannot be sure because it was lumped in with another provision together that would cost $35 million. But I would urge Members to think about what they are doing. If this amendment is rejected, we are ordering every housing authority in the country to take on an added burden in which no more services are provided, no more is asked of the tenant except more paperwork. What it says is that every tenant who is covered by this will have to sign an agreement in which they will agree to work toward termination of living in public housing. I do not know quite what it will mean. I do not know how valuable anyone can think this will be. If an individual is in a housing authority and they go to every single tenant and say let us talk about when you are getting out, I cannot for the life of me see the value of it. I am prepared, however, to allow this to be done on an optional basis, but this is a mandate to every housing authority and it is unfunded. However, while it is a mandate that is unfunded, the ruling is that it is not an unfunded mandate. So we should distinguish. An unfunded mandate, apparently, is only to be the case where we require something which we have not previously provided any funds for. Here funds are provided to housing authorities, and this adds to the burden of the housing authorities with no additional money. Particularly for small and middle-sized housing authorities, this is a very considerable burden. These are authorities which have all manner of things to worry about that now have to go and sit down with all the tenants who are covered, the large number of tenants, and work out this agreement, this self-sufficiency agreement. Mr. Chairman, I think it is a good idea for people to get out of public housing, but the notion people can write themselves contracts that will get them out seems to me to impute a power to contracts that do not happen. Are we thinking that people will be sitting there and saying, gee, I am going to live in public housing forever; and then we say, no, no, we want you to sign a contract saying when you will get out, that that will be the first time it will occur to them to get out? How does this add to the motivation for people to get out? Presumably we want people to be motivated to make more money. We want people to be motivated to be more successful. There are housing projects to live in which are not all that attractive. I think people already have incentives to get out. And if they do not, this adds nothing to it. It is simply a whole lot of paperwork. And I will just say to the Members, Mr. Chairman, that if they vote for this, I think it is fairly easy to predict that 2 and 3 years from now they will have some pretty angry housing authority directors and personnel to account to and some pretty angry housing authority members. People are going to wonder why this is going to come down from Washington and order every housing authority to sign a contract of self-sufficiency with every member. It is a useful goal, but it does not seem to me this accounts for it. Frankly, I thought Republicans were in the mode of cutting bureaucracy, and this goes exactly in the opposite direction if we do not make it optional.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I have already used up 5. I did not know that. Thirty in addition?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I wanted to ask, because these are laudable goals to help them get out, I assume that means a job, what are the housing authorities going to do? How are the housing authorities going to do job training? Then we are talking about a lot more. What is it that the housing authorities are going to do through this piece of paper?

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Kennedy].

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Let me just say that is only for these two programs, not the whole panoply. Let me just say, if I thought this was going to work, I would not begrudge it. Read it. It is the most Rube Goldberg-esque scheme. What we are going to do is talk these people out of living in public housing, get them to sign a contract. It is a lot of bureaucratic gobbledygook that will not work. Mr. Chairman, I yield 5 minutes to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Jackson].

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. I want to respond and say no, I can see that the gentleman has defined it as not an unfunded mandate. It does require them to spend more money out of the same pot they are getting. My experience with a lot of housing authorities is they are underfunded already. But it also requires them to spend money on a lot of bureaucracy and paperwork. It does not provide one job trainer. It does not provide one person to find anybody any employment. What it does is mandate them to sit down and sign contracts with people, people who have no particular knowledge about this, and to say here is when I promise to move out of public housing. I promise to do this. I am all for these goals, but they ought to be treated as real. This notion that wishing will make it so and that having an overburdened housing authority administer of people, sign these contracts with the tenants when nothing in here adds anybody a job, it does not create a job, it does not provide a job counselor, it is just a feel-good bureaucratic requirement of the sort that if it were not dealing with poor people and housing, Republicans would be belittling. But because it deals with the poor people and housing, they are all for it. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Jackson].

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield 3 minutes to the gentlewoman from Oregon [Ms. Hooley].

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 1 minute. The gentleman could not be more wrong. We are not objecting to efforts to help people find jobs because there are not any in here. This has nothing to do with finding jobs. This has to do with having everybody sign a contract that has no meaning, no particular force apparently, and it is simply a lot of bureaucratic paperwork. Apparently the notion is that earning a living never occurred to these poor people, that they were living in public housing and it never occurred to them that a job would be better than not a job because this does not provide job training, it does not provide job matching, it provides no services. It simply mandates that every housing authority sign a contract. Now, some housing authorities might find that useful, but here is the point that I want to just reiterate. As the gentlewoman from Oregon said, this is a mandate from the Federal Government that every housing authority in America will go about that job in exactly this way. If they decide they have got to concentrate on 20 to 30 percent of the people who have a chance of being employed and they would do better working with them than with others, they cannot do that. They have to equally sign one of these pieces of paper with everybody. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Watt].

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina, and I concede he is a man of his minute. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 20 seconds to say that I hope in his closing remarks the gentleman from New York [Mr. Lazio] will tell us what those tools are. As far as the tools for getting better in the self-sufficiency, I have not found a tool. I did find an old tool catalogue that they are allowed to kind of read through, but nothing in here gets them any closer to a tool. Mr. Chairman, I yield the remaining time to the gentleman from Massachusetts [Mr. Kennedy].

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I demand a recorded vote.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, we ought to remember that for the 12 years before 1993, the Republicans controlled HUD, and for 8 of those years, under President Reagan, the most corrupt and inefficient Cabinet secretary in recent memory, Secretary Pierce, was in charge of HUD. Yes, there are serious problems there, but they are not the fault of the poor. They are not the fault of the people who have tried to help the poor. And the solution is not to say: You poor people are too much trouble, and we are going to deal with a better class of low-income people.

Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. Mr. Chairman, as we proceed with the majority's rope-a-dope strategy, I hope we can focus on the serious importance of this issue. Obviously public housing requires great change. The question is, in what direction? It is also important to inquire as to how it got to be a problem. Public housing came to be a problem in substantial part because of inadequate resources. No one, certainly not the poor, thought it was a good idea to take the poorest of the poor and put them in very large buildings with no services and inadequate construction, in many cases not near any other facilities. Society decided to provide housing but, having decided that, decided a little later it ought to do it as cheaply as possible. So we created public housing which was destined to deteriorate. But we should also remember that, as bad as the public housing is, no one lives there by force. As bad as public housing is, people live there voluntarily because it is the best they can get. As we denigrate and criticize and belittle public housing, remember that, when we do people the service of freeing them from this housing they live in voluntarily, we send them someplace worse. Unless we think they are totally insane, they live here voluntarily. It is relevant to note that because the housing budget that will come forward, in addition to what it does about public housing, will deteriorate our alternative housing resources. So we will be critical of public housing, we will be calling for a diminution of public housing units, but at the same time we will be reducing any alternatives. Indeed, I read in the New York Times Sunday that the chairman of the Committee on Ways and Means thought that one good way to raise taxes to offset some of the tax increases in the budget deal would be to kill the low income housing tax credit, so that it will produce even less housing. That is the context of the amendment of the gentleman from Massachusetts. What the majority apparently says is this: We are not prepared to spend even as much on housing as we have. We know spending what we have spent has not been enough. How do we justify to ourselves spending considerably less? The answer is we will try to do much less. One way they are going to try to do much less is by adopting the Lester Maddox theory of social service. Lester Maddox once said that he could not be expected to bring about prison reform until he was given a better class of prisoners to work with. Our Republican friends believe that there is not much they can do with poverty stricken people unless they get people who are not poor. With the people who are not suffering from poverty, they are quite confident of their success. I am also confident. I am also confident that we will do better with people who have not been in the circumstances of poverty. Some people are in poverty because of circumstances; some of them, because they have got defects. There are people who do not work hard, who have disorganized personalities. I do not think the penalty for that ought to be homelessness. It certainly should not be the penalty for their children. Because when we restrict the ability of the poorest of the poor to get into public housing, and, remember, we are cutting back in virtually every other housing program in this, and we are about to adopt a budget deal, I probably will not vote for it in the way it now looks, but we are going to adopt a budget deal that is going to restrict our ability to do housing in the future. So we are going to improve public housing not essentially by structural improvements, not by more resources for the poor. We are going to serve a better class of poor people, and by serving a better class of poor people, we will have better results. If the end of this process was to judge how well housing authorities did, that would be rational. If the end is to be humane and compassionate to the poorest of the poor, it is not. This country is too well off to victimize that small number of people who will be victimized by this bill.