By Eugene T. Lowe
August 5, 2002

At the opening session of the Conference of Mayors Leadership Meeting in Boston, Nicolas P. Retsinas, Director of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University, facilitated a nearly two-hour session that focused on selecting recommendations to pursue a national housing strategy from the more than fifty recommendations developed at the National Housing Forum in May. Retsinas also asked the mayors to offer preliminary thoughts on media strategy and partners that could help to achieve the selected recommendations. The mayors were asked to divide themselves up to consider the five issue areas of the National Housing Forum report: homeowneship, preservation of affordable housing, public housing, special needs, and rental housing.

After twenty minutes of discussion, the mayors came back together to hear and comment as a whole on the recommendations selected in each issue area. Conference President Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino said that some of the recommendations are likely to be the focus of lobby day planned for September 26.

The recommendations for each area included:

Homeownership: Pursue a homeownership tax credit, and create a modern version of the GI bill for housing. Predatory lending practices should be strongly opposed. The mayors also suggested that a case be made that housing is one of the best responses to a weak economy, noting that housing has remained strong even in a bad economy. A media strategy should play up the important link of housing to the economy and local success stories should be highly touted. Important partners include the faith community, homebuilders, mortgage companies and non-profits.

Preservation of Affordable Housing: Exit tax relief should be pursued and the federal government should get out information where and when contracts are expiring in localities. Partners should include property owners, churches, law enforcement, social agencies, tenants, civic and business organizations, developers, and mortgage bankers. It was suggested that a fact sheet be developed for mayors in this issue area.

Public Housing: It was suggested that mayors strongly pursue the reauthorizattion of HOPE VI, the program for severely distressed public housing, and that funding for the program be increased as well. Operating and the Capital funding should also be increased for public housing. A new public and private housing development program should be pursued that would create 150,000 units per year. Rules and regulations should provide more flexibility so that the cost per unit of housing could be lowered.

Special Needs: The nation should move toward the closing of temporary shelters and replace them with permanent housing with supportive services. An effective media strategy should help reverse the public perception of homelessness as a problem to show that homelessness is actually the symptom of a much larger problem. As for elderly housing, the policies to pursue include preserving existing senior housing and expanding the stock of senior housing. There should be an increased focus on assisted living. The elderly should be connected to supportive services and community services such as Meals on Wheels, Volunteer Drivers and others should be strengthened. A significant partner in all of this would be AARP A media strategy for homelessness would include developing local action plans that would get attention. For the elderly, mayors should partner with senior groups to develop strategies.

Rental Housing: Mayors suggested that revitalization and economic development funds be targeted to cities that are moving forward with a rental housing production program; expand the low income housing tax credit to create mixed-use development; and, current federal programs supporting rental housing production (CDBG), HOME, the low income housing tax credit) should be fully funded, increased, and redesigned to work together easily to meet a more diverse array of local housing challenges. The media message pushing rental housing should center around economic development. The argument is that there should be housing for workers, and in order for business to expand, they need new housing stock and a variety of housing options to recruit workers.