As you may have noticed, Congress and our new president have been pretty busy lately pulling together the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
For those of us who follow the political theatrics in Washington, D.C., the past couple weeks have taught a valuable lesson in how far we have yet to go before the change we all worked and voted for starts to materialize.
The bill that started out with great hopes of beginning a new New Deal has ended up looking disappointing and frustrating. Bold pronouncements were silenced and desperately needed funding was cut out of the bill's earlier versions by discredited Republican party stalwarts. We learned an incredibly important lesson. The change that turned us out in record numbers, that had us donating even though we are broke, that had us volunteering in spite of our crazy-ass schedules, will NOT magically materialize just because a new president gets sworn into office.
And it's not going to happen with e-mail alerts or voicemail messages on Congressional representatives' answering machines. One example: 547 housing and community organizations sent Congress a plea for affordable housing and community development to be included in the bill, yet, at the end of the day, only 2 percent of the stimulus will be directed to housing programs benefiting poor people.
Among the notable measures are the one-time $250 payment to Social Security beneficiaries, SSI recipients, and veterans; a 13 percent increase in food stamp benefits; $1.5 billion for emergency shelter; a couple billion dollars for tax-credit financed housing projects trying to overcome the credit squeeze; and another couple billion for the redevelopment of abandoned and foreclosed homes. ANd $4 billion to enable local public housing agencies to address a backlog in capital projects -- a backlog that's $32 billion long.
Put these figures in the context of nearly three decades of budget cuts and recent increases in poverty and homelessness, and they appear as they are: only slightly better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.
We must not stay silent while a nationwide economic catastrophe is supposedly averted with a stimulus plan that is blind to the needs of the poorest among us. It's a plan that continues to see the housing crisis as affecting homeowners only. Once homeowners lose their homes, they seem to fall off the political radar screen. Have they become invisible or have our politicians become blind?
At the very least, we must demand support for local community development corporations and housing development corporations that already exist in many communities. These organizations have struggled to survive since the federal government all but abandoned them in the early '80s, but by being of