Legislation would help save neighborhoods

The negative effect on neighborhoods caused by vacant homes, foreclosed due to subprime mortgages, was discussed at a joint hearing of the House Domestic Policy Subcommittee and the House Housing and Community Opportunity Subcommittee. Support was expressed for HR 5818, a bipartisan bill that gives $15 billion to communities that have been devastated by increased housing vacancy; a bill President Bush has said he will veto.

In his opening statement, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) stated some of the effects vacant homes can have on a community including decreased property values, increases in crimes, a rise in the cost of law enforcement, and a loss of revenue from taxes. Kucinich expressed his desire to help the innocent victims of the subprime mortgage crisis, the neighbors of abandoned homes. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), the sponsor of HR 5818, said that the bill plans to allocate money to areas with a large concentration of vacant homes.

Frank Alexander from the Emory University School of Law expressed his support for HR 5818 because, unlike a stimulus bill, HR 5818 supports neighborhoods instead of working against predatory loans. Todd Richardson from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development encouraged the use of data from the United States Postal Service to determine areas which areas of a large amount of abandoned homes.. Kucinich urged that both committees further analyze the correlation between home vacancies and minority groups to determine if discriminatory lending practices have taken place after analyzing maps of metropolitan areas.