Building on Faith: Part 2, the bonus material
[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1.]
Much of the NBC-TV documentary “Building On Faith” focuses on the work of faith-based organizations, because they contribute value in volunteer effort (time is money, after all) and through their ability to raise donations.
John Edwards: If you spend a lot of time out in communities where you have lower income families, a huge amount of the help and support system that exists for them comes from the faith community. I think with leadership the country will unite around it.
John Edwards, former
Yet everyone acknowledges that faith-based organizations by themselves are only conduits to capital, and that intervention at the scale desired requires a commitment by government.
Beyond the main program, which takes about an hour and tells a compelling story in its own right, there are several chapters of bonus material, most of it featuring the housing folks:
Leading experts on affordable housing to be featured include:
· David Smith of the Affordable Housing Institute and Recap Advisors,
· Nicolas P. Retsinas of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at
· Moises Loza, Housing Assistance Council,
· David Lereah, chief economist, National Association of Realtors.
Nic Retsinas
including a section entitled What is meant by affordable housing versus poverty housing? where I got the opportunity to say on-camera things I’ve said many times in print:
Smith: I don’t like the phrase ‘poverty housing’ because it implies that poverty is this intrinsic and enduring condition. I prefer the phrase ‘affordable housing’ because what the housing is doing is, it’s being delivered at a cost that people can afford. And we hope — with the exception of the elderly, what people want to do is house them for the rest of their lives in decent and pleasant and humane circumstances — for everyone else, we hope that the housing is a platform; a place from which you can become less poor. Indeed, in many parts of the country, it isn’t just poverty housing which connotes ‘those people’, it’s working people, particularly in coastal areas, in the cities, in any area where the population is growing and the land supply isn’t.
As seen on television — wearing a tie, which I seldom do!
And to distinguish affordable from public housing:
Smith: Affordable housing and public housing are two different critters. Public housing is the older form, the older species. It was created under the New Deal program in 1937 and it’s directly owned by local authorities and run by local authorities with federal subsidy. And over the last thirty-five to forty years, public housing has migrated to being the housing of last resort, the housing of the poorest of the poor, and it’s a feature of those folks, for one reason or another, if they have that little income. What they can afford to pay for housing is less than the cost to operate the housing, even if, as the federal government did, they gave it to the locality. So it’s an intrinsic feature of public housing, that it must have, what’s called in the trade, an operating subsidy; if it’s to continue to serve what are called extremely low-income folks.
Another section, Is home ownership the only answer? deals explicitly with rental:
Smith: Every one of us lives in affordable housing at some time in our lives. Either when we’re growing up, or when we first go to college or high school and move in with roommates, or toward the end of our lives, when we don’t want to live in a great big house any more and the kids are gone and we sell the house and move into something else. Housing is a continuum of tenure and a continuum of consumption. And, either at the beginning or the ends of our adult lives we’re going to need something. Now for ten percent of us, life is cool, no problem. But for ninety percent of us, we need that variety and we need that assistance.
It’s a worthy program. I’m pleased I was able to contribute.
Some contribute their labor, some their ideas, some their money
To order a copy directly from the producer, click here
