Clinton Announces Steps to Put Roofs Over More Americans’ Heads

President Clinton, invoking what has become a traditional Christmas theme, on Saturday announced a series of measures to better integrate the nation’s public housing and to help new home buyers and the homeless.

The most sweeping action would require public housing authorities to look at tenant incomes and find ways to add residents who would expand the economic diversity.

Although the focus is on income, the likely effect would be to produce more racial integration.

“In addition to expanding opportunity for more Americans, this will also help to break down destructive barriers of race and class,” Clinton said in his weekly radio address in announcing the housing initiatives, a message he has espoused for the last four Christmases.

The rule implements the Public Housing Reform Act, although President-elect George W. Bush has pledged to scrutinize all existing rules, and his administration could act to change them.

Clinton has unveiled a series of possibly controversial rules in recent weeks, including a final safety standard on workplace repetitive motion injuries and regulations designed to prevent federal agencies from contracting with firms that break labor and environmental laws.

Housing and Urban Development officials stressed that the public housing rule was based on income concentration and not on race. But they said that the effect of “deconcentration” would be to achieve greater racial diversity.

“Surely, public housing should be a model of integration,” HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo told reporters during a telephone briefing Friday. “If we can’t live together, we can’t come together.”

Although the incoming administration had no comment, Cuomo said he did not expect Bush officials to oppose the effort, adding: “A new administration would have to change the law. This is the implementation of a law we requested but was passed by Congress.”

Clinton also announced that the government would raise by 9% the maximum amount that individuals can borrow from the Federal Housing Administration, up from $219,000 to $239,250.

He also said the administration would award $1 billion in grants to help more than 200,000 homeless people find shelter and become more self-sufficient. The money is not new money but part of the current budget.

California will receive $146.4 million under a 1993 program, which provides emergency shelter for the homeless, then moves them to transitional and eventually permanent housing.

Of that, Los Angeles city and county will get $47.5 million, and Orange County will receive nearly $4.3 million.

“Too many Americans . . . will be spending this Christmas without a roof over their heads,” Clinton said. “That’s why we’ve helped to move thousands of families off the street. Yet there still are more than a half-million men, women and children whose only home every night is a neighborhood shelter or park bench . . . we must do more to help them.”

The new income rules could affect as many as 130,000 families who enter the public housing system annually, although families already living in such housing would not be asked to relocate, Cuomo said.

There are 1.3 million families in public housing and, “for them, nothing changes. New families will move in when there are vacancies but will come in in a way that furthers integration,” Cuomo said.

Cuomo stressed that the policy is not a quota system but a way to improve the economic and racial balance.

“We have worked this through with the housing authorities, and the directors overwhelmingly believe that the best housing is integrated housing,” he said. “Public housing should be the strongest case for integration.”

Kansas Gov. Bill Graves, in the GOP response, talked about another topic: the incoming administration’s promise to create an “office of faith-based action” in the White House. He noted that faith-based programs in his state and in Texas, where Bush was governor for six years, develop “innovative partnerships.”

In Kansas, the state’s social service agency turned its foster care and adoption programs for abused and neglected children over to private, nonprofit religious groups in 1996, he said.

Bush promised during the presidential campaign to make it easier for religious organizations to help the poor, and he said government money should go to such groups. Critics have said such an arrangement could raise constitutional issues of church-state separation.

Graves also said that Bush’s choices for the Cabinet and other major positions in the administration reflect a commitment to diversity.