Date: 1984-10-02
Speaker: ST GERMAIN (democrat)
Chamber: H

Mr. Speaker. on September 11. the House of Representatives approved an amendment to S. 2819. a bill whose primary purpose is to make technical amendments to the Housing and Urban Rural Recovery Act of 1983. I am very pleased to return to the House today with a conference report which in all major respects reflects the policies approved by the House 3 weeks ago. I urge passage of this conference report so that urgently needed clarifications of our housing and community development laws may be implemented quickly. Before I highlight the major provisions of this conference agreement. I would like to thank my colleagues on the Banking Committee on both sides of the aisle for their helpful cooperation in developing legislation that solved a number of awkward problems. The bipartisan support provided by the chairman of the Housing Subcommittee. Mr. GONZALEZ. by the ranking minority member. Mr. WYLIE. and by the ranking minority member of the Housing Subcommittee. Mr. MCKINNEY. helped me to persuade the Senate to resolve our differences very quickly. The most significant changes to the Community Development Block Grant Program include a provision permitting metropolitan cities and urban counties to have areawide community development activities counted as benefiting low- and moderateincome residents if those activities are either located in an area where over half of the residents are low- and moderateincome or in an area which isamong the top 25 percent of all areas within a communitys jurisdiction having the greatest concentration of low and moderate income residents. In addition. in order to assure that communities may continue to commit the same percentage of CDBG funds to eligible public service activities as they have in the past. a community may either maintain the same percentage they used in fiscal year 1982 or 1983. The conference report also clarifies certain requirements for urban county status and permits Denver and Baltimore to use certain urban renewal proceeds according to the requirements of the CDBG program. Several of the more significant clarifications in the assisted housing programs include: requiring the Secretaries of HUD and Agriculture to consult and agree upon appropriate and similar income levels for lowincome families served by both agencies in rural areas. permitting cities containing at least 450.000 residents and having a rental vacancy rate of less than 10 percent to apply for the rental development grants. permitting the cost of attendant care and auxiliary service for a handicapped person which are necessary to permit either that person or a member of his or her family to work to be deducted from income in the assisted housing programs. Unfortunately. Congress has been forced to legislate one more time to assure that HUD does not establish different requirements in the section 202 program that have the effect of favoring one method of contractor selection over another method. With respect to the public housing program. I must stress once again my dismay that HUD is proceeding. through a notice issued in August 1984. to apply retroactively to public housing budget estimates made as long ago as 1979. new. very specific directions for recalculating projections of investment income. While modified guidelines. if specified in regulations. may be reasonable if applied to budgets prepared in the future. a retroactive application is inequitable. If a public housing authority made a good faith effort to follow the regulations in effect at the time the original budget was calculated. no recalculations and no reductions in future operating subsidies should be required. The conference report requires 40 percent of the funds available for the Farmers Home Administration 502 homeownership program to be set aside for families whoqe income is 50 percent of area median or below. in each State at least 30 percent of the section 502 funds must be made available for those families. In addition. the Secretary of Agriculture may not transfer any of the loan authority provided for the housing programs of the PmHA into any other program. Title II of the conference report contains a series of purely technical corrections to outdated references. misspellings. and grammatical errors. In addition. it exempts advances on openend lines of credit secured by real estate from certain rescission rights. restores the authority for Federal credit unions to make unsecured home improvement loans and clarifies the types of investments a thrift institution may make for liquidity purposes. In summary. the conference report on S. 2819 is in essence a housekeeping bill: eliminating technical glitches. clarifying policies agreed to in our 1983 housing law. and correcting inaccurate or outdated references. I urge you to support me in approving this conference report. Mr. Speaker. at this time I would like to thank the chairman of the subcommittee. the geitleman from Texas