Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, January 17, 1995                   TAG: 9501200055
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

HUD

With 60 major grant programs, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has grown a confusing maze of bureaucratic priorities bound to look juicy to the hungry, new bureaucracy-eating GOP majority in Congress.

Rather than waiting for slicing and dicing, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros has put his hand to the task and offered a trimmer program he hopes will be an attractive buy in the marketplace, and on Capitol Hill.

Under his plan, the Federal Housing Administration would become a semi-autonomous corporation, owned by the government but free to act entrepreneurially. And those 60-some grant programs? They would be cut to three.

As described in a recent column by Neal Peirce of the Washington Post Writers Group, most HUD building and rehabilitation programs, with the exception of public housing for the poor, would be put under an Affordable Housing Fund, to which localities could apply.

A Community Opportunity Fund would make money available for revitalizing deteriorating neighborhoods. This would encompass many of the efforts now bankrolled by Community Development Block Grants, such as loans for small businesses moving into inner-city neighborhoods.

Most noticeable, though, would be the third grant program, Housing Certificates for Families and Individuals. Cisneros' plan would, over three to five years, end HUD subsidies of public housing projects. Assisted housing and "Section 8" rental assistance also would be gone.

In their place, the secretary proposes a system of housing certificates to be allocated by localities to poor families, who could use them to live where they wanted. What is now government-subsidized public housing would have to compete for tenants and, presumably, would have to meet customers' requirements for safety and livability.

The housing certificates would amount to performance-based grants, giving HUD enough oversight to ensure that fair housing practices are followed and that a locality's homeless are not neglected. But it would be up to a locality to come up with the appropriate strategy to fit its own circumstances, and up to families to find their own housing with the help of vouchers.

Such a mix of federal standards, local operating control and empowerment of individuals ought to be at the heart of all kinds of government reform. In the case of HUD, it's a considerable improvement over the old way, according to which Democrats for decades have protected entrenched city housing authorities and the bureaucratic status quo.

Now, seeking shelter from a coming Republican storm, HUD officials have commendably proposed what could and should have been done a long time ago.