Gone are the days when Uncle Sam footed most of the bill for affordable housing.
Public financing is scarcer as the need for cheaper homes is greater. Nonprofits trying to provide accommodations that low- and moderate-income people can afford to buy or rent have increasingly turned to the people who spend their time trying to turn a profit - developers and bankers.
"More and more of what's going on in community development has come from the private sector market," said Clarence Snuggs, Baltimore office director for the Enterprise Foundation, a national neighborhood revitalization group based in Columbia. The foundation has built or renovated 144,000 homes since it began in 1982.
The foundation is holding its annual conference at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel today through Friday, and its theme, "Reinventing Community Development," reflects the slow shift in financing affordable housing.
"Everybody's had to be more creative," said Chickie Grayson, president of Enterprise Homes Inc., a development arm of the foundation. "I think almost every development we do has private financing in it."
Enterprise Homes joined with A&R Development Corp. to create Heritage Crossing, a community of 260 townhouses and semi-detached homes in West Baltimore that replaced two public housing apartment towers. Construction was completed in the summer of last year at a cost of about $47 million, financed by the federal HOPE VI program, the state, the city, Fannie Mae and Bank of America.
"You basically try to put together as many sources as you possibly can, which results in developments having eight to 10 sources of funding," Grayson said. "It's harder to put it all together."
Stockton Williams, vice president for public policy at the Enterprise Foundation, said new partnerships are good but that he is distressed by the waning role of government, whose participation he considers critical.
Federal financing for affordable housing has been slowly decreasing for years, he said. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the Department of Housing and Urban Development's budget decreased by about 40 percent from 1976 to last year after being adjusted for inflation.
"We are barely keeping pace with the number of affordable homes that we lose every year to abandonment and conversion to market-rate housing, let alone making a dent in the housing needs that we have," Williams said. "One in seven households in the country - one in seven - pays more than half its income for housing or lives in substandard conditions."
