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H.R. 1980, The Housing Assistance Council Authorization Act of 2007.

August 4, 2009
Floor Statement
Rep. Maxine Waters [D-CA]: This bill authorizes $10 million for the Housing Assistance Council, HAC, in Fiscal Year 2008 and $15 million in Fiscal Years 2009-2014. HAC, a nonprofit corporation, is the only national intermediary focused solely on the tremendous affordable housing needs of rural areas and small towns.

HAC assists in the development of both single-family homes and multi-family housing, and promotes homeownership for working low-income rural families. HAC maintains a special focus on high-need groups and regions: Indian country, the Mississippi Delta, farm workers, the Southwest border colonies, and Appalachia. In just the past 8 years, HAC has provided over $105 million in aid to hundreds of organizations in 160 Congressional districts. Since inception in 1971, HAC has helped build 60,000 affordable homes in 49 states and 2 territories.

The funds authorized by H.R. 1980 will allow HAC to continue successfully assisting a national network of rural nonprofit, public and for profit builders. Specifically, HAC could continue providing grants, loans, technical assistance, training, and other support to build the capacity of rural community-based housing development organizations to create and sustain safe affordable housing. The bill also enables HAC to offer vital help to specific housing projects and initiatives these groups undertake.

I am especially pleased that this funding will enable HAC to bring its expertise to bear on the problem of rural homelessness. While my District does not encompass rural areas, it does have as many as 10,000 persons on any given night. And though it may not seem so at first blush, homelessness in central Los Angeles is related to rural homelessness.

Specifically, in the absence of an adequately resourced network of housing and service providers in their home communities, poor rural folks who fall into homelessness often leave their family and social networks and move to larger urban areas in the hope of finding jobs, housing, and social services.

While migrating from the countryside to the city, and vice versa, is an important and time-honored American tradition, these vulnerable households--often with few skills and suffering from disabilities or chronic health problems--too often experience homelessness again in the destination city. There, they enter public and private systems of care already stressed to the breaking point--as tragically exemplified by a recent "60 Minutes" story on so-called "hospital patient-dumping" in Los Angeles.

H.R. 1980 will enable HAC to help interrupt this tragic cycle, by building the capacity of their network of housing developers and social service providers to care for the homeless and at-risk in their own hometowns--where they are most likely to escape homelessness and re-enter the economic mainstream.

Rural Housing and Economic Development Improvement Act of 2007

The United States House of Representative

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