Housing plan must be found

The furor about the plan to rebuild 569 units of public housing in Galveston missed a remarkable point.

There are 1,200 families in Galveston today that qualify for public housing. There are another 700 in other parts of the county. Some of those 700 are displaced islanders who want to come home.

Those numbers are about a week old. They reflect families in what housing people call Tier 4. These are folks who have several factors — the loss of a job or an accident involving a breadwinner, for example — that might lead to a loss of their homes.

A typical family includes a father, mother and a couple of children. This typical family got to Tier 4 because the father’s place of work was wrecked by the storm. The mother has a job that pays minimum wage. The family is living on her salary.

Only 267 of those families lived in public housing before the storm. The others lost homes or jobs in the storm or got caught in the recession.

If you’re wondering about the numbers, they come, mostly, from the Disaster Housing Assistance Program. To qualify for benefits, you have to provide evidence. All these folks qualify.

That program originally was to expire March 31. But there is no plan for putting people who qualify for help into housing they can afford. The deadline was extended, averting a mess.

But all that raises an interesting question: What is the plan for putting those folks into housing?

Obviously, they are not all going to fit into 569 units that we’ve been arguing about for months.

In other parts of the country, communities have developed affordable housing by contracting with large homebuilders. About 10 percent of the units in those developments typically are reserved for families that make less than $20,000 a year. About 40 percent of the units are for families that make $20,000 to $50,000. The rest are reserved for families with incomes of greater than $50,000 a year.

The developers are interested for several reasons. Two obvious ones: tax credits and a guaranteed income stream on units dedicated toward the lowest income groups.

If Galveston did have a plan for providing housing to 1,200 families who qualify for it, the federal benefits paid to those families would total about $10 million. Not many companies left on the island put that much money into the economy.

Maybe a big affordable housing development is wrong for Galveston. If so, what’s the alternative? What’s the plan for those 1,200 families — and perhaps a few hundred more?

Heber Taylor is editor of The Daily News.