House the poor.

The candidates will spend the year giving poor people plenty of advice--about staying off welfare, finding a job, and raising their kids. But someone should ask another question: Where are these people supposed to live? Housing problems are far more central in the lives of the poor than many of the issues that have made headlines recently, such as immunizations or school lunches. And housing solutions could go far in solving other poverty-related problems, from crime to illegitimacy to educational failure.

Poor people have two kinds of housing problems. The most obvious is financial; rents eat up increasingly large portions of poor families' budgets, squeezing out everything from Big Macs to winter coats, and leaving the most unfortunate homeless. But the second, related problem is even worse: location. Whether they're in public housing or cheap private apartments, poor people tend to get stuck living next to other poor people. The results are predictable and dismaying: jobs disappear; schools fail; guns, gangs, and drugs take over.

The good news is that the government may finally have learned some lessons about how to make subsidized housing work--or at least work better. Conventional public housing is a disaster. But the celebrated Gautreaux housing program in Chicago has pioneered a voucher approach that gets poor people out of the ghetto and into private, middle-class housing. Henry Cisneros, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, has worked creatively to imbue the same principle of income-mixing into other HUD programs. Subsidized housing doesn't have to be slum housing.

The bad news is that no one's interested, least of all Congress. The chairman of the Senate Housing Committee happens to be Alfonse D'Amato. He's held plenty of hearings recently about a housing development, but his interests are somewhat narrow--a modest tract in the Ozarks called Whitewater Estates. Meanwhile, housing aid for the poor has been falling off for more than a decade.

During the Carter years, the government helped an average of 290,000 new families each year find housing. Since then, the average has fallen to 74,000 a year--meaning it would take 72 years to work through the backlog of 5.3 million families with what the government calls "worst case" housing needs. No, make it 73 years, since under the next year's budget the number of new families assisted essentially falls to zero, for the first time in modem history.

As government assistance slows to a trickle, one group of Americans continues to get substantial help with housing: the affluent. The mortgage interest deduction costs the Treasury about $100 billion a year, or four times the entire budget of the Department of Housing and Urban Development; three-quarters of that money goes to the richest fifth of American families.

Housing subsidies in America now work best for those who need them least; let's hear the candidates propose some responsible ways to share the housing wealth.