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Kemp Promises to Push for U.S. Housing Funds, Decries ‘Barbaric’ Cuts

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Saying that federal budget cuts affecting the poor and homeless “would be barbaric,” U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Jack Kemp pledged Thursday during a visit to Orange County to push for continued funding of federal housing programs.

“From my standpoint,” Kemp said during a news conference, “I think it would be barbaric to try to balance the budget off the backs of poor people, or off the backs of the family, or off the backs of abused women and children.”

Before the news conference, Kemp toured Human Options, a shelter for battered women in Laguna Beach. The shelter is seeking federal funds to establish a one-year transitional housing program for battered women.

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He praised Human Options’ approach to coordinating its services for women and children with other local and federal programs. It is the most cost-effective way to spend public funds for social problems, he said.

Saying the shelter could serve as a nationwide model, Kemp agreed to help the agency secure federal funds to purchase a small apartment complex for temporary housing for battered women.

Kemp was invited to visit the shelter by his sister-in-law, who serves on the nonprofit agency’s board of directors.

During his tour of the shelter, he heard from former clients who eventually moved into federally subsidized housing under a separate program.

A former client named Leigh, who did not want her last name used, told Kemp that 3 months after her premature baby was born, she left an abusive husband and sought help at the shelter.

Through help from a housing voucher--she pays 30% of her income toward her rent and HUD picks up the rest--and money from the Aid to Families with Dependant Children program, she said, she was able to afford college and day care for her children.

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“I’m trying to achieve some goals,” Leigh told Kemp. “There’s no way that without housing, that I could do this.”

Human Options Executive Director Vivian Clecak said women and children often leave home without money or documents and only the clothes on their backs.

“Fifty to 60% of the women who go back (home) do so because they cannot find decent, affordable housing,” she said.

Less than 40% of the agency’s revenues come from state and county sources, Clecak said. The 11-year-old organization serves an estimated 3,000 clients each year, provides temporary housing for women and their children for up to 45 days, operates a crisis intervention hot line and offers post-shelter counseling.

Until recently, federal Section 8 housing vouchers had been available to shelter clients through a program administered by the city of Huntington Beach.

Kemp said that money to restart the voucher program, as well as other housing programs, is in an appropriations bill pending in Congress.

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He restated opposition to laws prohibiting illegal immigrants from receiving emergency services.

HUD has threatened to withhold community development block grant funds if the city of Costa Mesa carries through the policy proposed by Councilman Orville Amburgey.

“I think frankly, if applied nationally as the councilman wanted to apply it in Costa Mesa, it would be discriminatory, would be a violation of civil and human rights, and frankly, I am not going to participate in anything that denies people their basic human right to emergency treatment and compassionate social services,” Kemp said.

He said the housing department is preparing a regulation that would bar “discrimination on the basis of (legal status) in connection with certain emergency public services.”

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