Everyone except Professor Fischer, please ignore this post

[More Than A Feeling]

my school really needs to get its email fixed.

Public housing successes hurt by high costs, U.S. funding cuts
Job programs to help tenants homeowners losing out, say officials

By Charles Levin, [e-mail]
March 29, 2006

Victor Meraz never dreamed of owning a home in 1998 when he was raising three kids on little more than minimum wage and living in The Courts, Oxnard's public housing project in the Colonia neighborhood.

http://www.venturacountystar.com/vcs/ox/article/0,1375,VCS_238_4578879,00.html


Analysis

One of the fundamental components in any attempt to solve the affordable housing crisis is administration. Any such programs need leadership and the ability to offer the kind of comprehensive services that public housing residents need. In a word, they need money. The lack thereof no doubt lessens the impact. One recent example of this is in the city of Oxnard, California. “Public housing successes hurt by high costs, U.S. funding cuts” by Charles Levin details a very successful jobs training program run by their housing authority that is being threatened by rising housing prices and declining federal funds. Another threat, one that should have been given more emphasis in the article, is the decline of unionization.
The program being described was not for every public housing denizen. According to the article, most residents are seniors on a fixed income. However, the self-sufficiency program was able to use a $250,000 federal grant to offer classes in computer skills, child care, and construction, among other things. Until last year, that is, when there was no funding available. The article points out that rising housing costs make it very difficult to move public housing tenants into the private market in the first place, and if they can’t get the skills to get jobs through this program and others like it, it will be even harder.
The individual focus of the article is on a man named Victor Moraz, who was able to parlay a class on construction into a job that earns 25-30 dollars an hour. The reason why it pays so much is that it’s a union job. There aren’t that many union jobs left in America, with roughly one in ten American workers in a union where before it was closer to one in four. The division between African-Americans and white unions was one of the barriers to opportunity during the first Great Migration.