Create housing fund.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Homelessness lurks at the door of nearly half of this country's lowest-income families. Many spend more than half of their incomes on rent, leaving little to spare for food, health care and other essentials.

The federal government has done little to help these people in recent years, as the nation's stock of affordable housing has deteriorated and disappeared at an alarming rate. For every new affordable housing unit that is built, it's estimated that two are torn down, abandoned or converted to higher-cost rentals or condominiums.

A new bill in Congress would do much to end this neglect by financing restoration, maintenance and construction of housing that this nation's poorest and most vulnerable families can afford.

Sponsored by Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass, the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund would be the largest expansion of federal housing programs in decades. It would create a permanent federal funding source to finance the construction, renovation and preservation of an estimated 1.5 million units of low-income housing over the next decade. The fund would also assist first-time home buyers with down payments and closing costs.

Under Frank's proposal, an estimated $1 billion a year would flow from the trust fund to local and state governments, which would be required to match every $2 drawn from the fund with $1 of their own. The fund would increase neither government spending nor taxes; most of the money would come through contributions from mortgage finance behemoths Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, as well as the Federal Housing Administration.

The need for a new federal affordable housing initiative is clear. Harvard's Joint Center for Housing Studies estimates that 200,000 affordable apartments, for which tenants pay less than 30 percent of their income for rent and utilities, are lost in this country each year. In 2005 an estimated 6 million low-income households used most of their monthly earnings for housing or were living in substandard conditions - an increase of 16 percent, or 817,000 families, since 2003.

Frank's bill would ensure that the bulk of the federal assistance goes to those who need it the most. It requires that 75 percent of trust fund money go to help families that earn below 30 percent of area median income, or less than $16,410 for a family of four in Eugene.

Frank has introduced similar bills before with no success. But this time his proposal has bipartisan support, with nine Republicans among the measure's original co-sponsors. That's a welcome change from the past, when many GOP lawmakers opposed affordable housing bills on grounds that the government should keep its camel's nose out of the housing tent. But Republicans are changing their minds because the affordable housing crisis has ceased to be an exclusively urban issue and has become a growing problem in America's suburbs.

Congress should approve the National Affordable Housing Trust Fund. The only matter for debate should be whether to expand the fund from the ambitious, but still insufficient, level Frank is proposing.

Swift passage would herald a long-overdue return to a national mindset that says affordable housing - a decent shelter at a reasonable price - is a basic human need that must not go unmet.