Union City was host to the meet-and-greet gathering sponsored by the New Jersey chapters of the National Association of Housing Redevelopment Officials and the Association of Housing Redevelopment Authorities on Tuesday to welcome Marisel Morales, the new Regional Director for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for New Jersey and New York.
Morales, who was appointed on Dec. 17, 2001 and a native of Elizabeth, spoke about the new initiatives that HUD is proposing with their proposed $31.5 billion 2003 budget under the new administration of Secretary Mel Martinez. HUD is the federal agency that oversees subsidized low-income housing and low-income housing vouchers in communities across the United States.
HUD’s 2003 budget has not yet been approved. However, Adam Glantz, Morales’ press officer, said that in past years, the budgets proposed by HUD have been passed virtually unchanged.
The budget is up $2.1 billion from the 2002 budget.
The proposed initiatives in the 2003 budget shows a new emphasis on homeownership for low-income families as well as more money for capital improvements. Morales said that New Jersey has about $1 billion in its annual budget.
Prior to this position, Morales worked with the New York City Housing Authority and the New York City Sherriff’s Office.
As regional director, Morales will oversee the delivery of HUD programs and evaluate their efficiency and effectiveness.
The meeting was held at the Union City Housing Authority’s Hillside Pavilion located at 3911 Kennedy Blvd.
Owning a home
For many communities in Hudson County, housing for low-income families and Section 8 recipients is getting harder to come by. Section 8 is a voucher program that helps pay the rent for low-income families who qualify.
According to Virgillio Cabello, the director of the Union City Housing Authority, there are families on the Union City waiting lists that have been waiting for as long as eight years.
With Section 8 vouchers, the tenants are responsible to pay 30 percent of their rent, while the vouchers pay the rest.
However, the new administration’s emphasis on home ownership for low-income families may change the need for more affordable housing rental units.
“We want these families to see that there are other alternatives,” said Morales, acknowledging the shortage of low-income housing units.
The 2003 budget is looking to set aside initiatives that will make it possible for low-income families to purchase their own homes.
The budget will set aside $200 million for the American Dream Down Payment Fund, which Morales estimated will serve about 40,000 low-income families annually.
This program will give HOME grants of $5,000 to low-income families to be used toward down payments or closing costs on new homes.
The budget also including 34,000 new housing vouchers, equivalent to $204 million, to be used to help recipients with mortgage payments or with a down payment.
This program will authorize Housing Authorities to allow low-income families to use their Section 8 rental assistance vouchers toward their monthly mortgage payments or to give a family a one-time grant equivalent to as much as one year of vouchers to be used as a down payment on a new home.
More money is also being given to HUD’s Self Help Home Ownership Opportunity Program (SHOP). This program will now have $65 million. These SHOP grants allow organizations such as Habitat for Humanity to purchase land to build low-income housing.
However, Bill Snyder, the Housing Authority Director in Secaucus and president of the New Jersey Chapter of the National Association of Housing Redevelopment Officials, says that this new emphasis on homeownership will take the emphasis off of the programs geared at helping low-income recipients gain job-training skills.
“These programs were trying to break the cycle of families remaining in low-income housing generation after generation,” said Snyder.
Making improvements
West New York Housing Authority Director Bob DiVincent said that West New York could benefit from a cash leveraging system that is proposed in the 2003 budget.
According to DiVincent, more than half of the West New York Housing Authority’s eight buildings are more than 50 years old.
“This plan will allow 20 percent of the money to be set aside for debt servicing which could be utilized for improvement plans,” said DiVincent. “We want to be one of the first authorities to utilize the plan.”
DiVincent said that he wants to upgrade all of the Authorities’ buildings’ fire and burglar alarm equipment. The 2003 proposed budget will increased the Public Housing Operating Fund by $35 million to $3.5 billion.
This increase in funding will allow authorities to transfer their Section 8 vouchers to a project-based voucher program that will give authorities extra money to use toward capital improvements.
Unfortunately, with all of the new initiatives being proposed through HUD, some other programs will have to be eliminated.
In the 2003 budget, the Public Housing Drug Elimination Program, from which Union City has received grants in past years, will be eliminated.
According to Snyder, the money used for this program will be disbursed to every housing authority through HUD operational funds.
“This will not help towns like Jersey City who received a large bulk of this money in the past,” said Snyder.