Galveston tells Obama Administration where to stick Public Housing

Excerpts:

“Four years ago, Hurricane Ike swept through this island town on the Gulf of Mexico, flooding homes, destroying property and wreaking havoc on the economy.

Now, Galveston has become the center of a different type of tempest, as local officials battle the Obama administration over plans to replace 569 public-housing units ruined by the storm.

The issue has already cost Joe Jaworski his job as mayor of this port city. In June, Mr. Jaworski, a Democrat who supported rebuilding the housing as part of a mixed-income development, was defeated in a run-off election by Lewis Rosen, a conservative businessman who promised not to rebuild the units.”

“This election was a referendum on public housing,” Mr. Rosen said. “The citizens of Galveston did not want to build back the type of housing that was here before.” He said vouchers would allow residents to live “where they have job opportunities, which do not exist in Galveston.”

Irwin “Buddy” Herz, the newly named chairman of the Galveston Housing Authority, said mixed-income developments are “like communities of the poor. They destroy people’s incentives to do better.”

Mark Calabria, an economist for the libertarian Cato Institute, said “there’s a tremendous amount of research that shows that voucher programs are more effective than anything we do in building assisted, affordable rental housing.”

“The Department of Housing and Urban Development, which funds subsidized housing, is demanding that Galveston build 569 low-income units—as part of mixed-income developments, not old-fashioned projects—or risk losing more than half a billion dollars in storm-recovery funds the city needs to rebuild infrastructure, such as a water-treatment plant, roads and sidewalks. The agency has authorized $109 million in federal funds to replace the lost housing.”

Link to full article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443545504577563271568716862.html?KEYWORDS=galveston