Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. BARR. I thank the chairman.

Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of H.R. 3700, which is a modest but important first step to improving Federal housing policy through several commonsense reforms.

For the first time in HUD's 50-year history, there will now be a flexible formula directing over-income families to pay greater shares of their subsidized rents or to move out of public housing. Incomes and assets will be reevaluated to target assistance to those who are truly in need.

There are wait lists across the country for scarce public housing resources and Section 8 vouchers. I have listened to homeless advocates and to my constituents at the Lexington Housing Authority in Kentucky about the waiting lists that exist in my own district. A 2015 HUD audit found that 25,000 families had incomes too high to qualify for assistance; yet the families remained in taxpayer subsidized housing. Some of those families actually derived income from renting other residential properties that they, themselves, owned. One family highlighted in the report had a combined income of $498,000.

Policy failures such as these not only waste taxpayer dollars, but, more importantly, they hurt those in need who might otherwise have roofs over their heads. I hope this bipartisan initiative is a down payment on the further reform of Federal housing programs.

Several of my colleagues and I are developing an empowerment agenda to holistically reform Federal assistance programs from housing to nutrition to workforce development. We start with the recognition that the Federal Government now runs more than 80 different antipoverty programs at an annual cost of nearly $1 trillion; yet, after 50 years of this strategy, the poverty rate has barely budged from where it was in 1965. The goal is to assist Americans to achieve their God-given potential and to restore the American Dream to where the condition of one's birth does not determine the outcome of one's life.

I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle and with members of this subcommittee in leveraging the empowerment agenda to craft additional reforms to Federal housing policies, which will improve outcomes by recognizing that poor Americans are not liabilities to be managed by some remote bureaucracy in Washington but who are untapped assets who can achieve the American Dream.

I congratulate Chairman Luetkemeyer and Ranking Member Cleaver for their work on this bill.

I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of H.R. 3700, and I invite my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to join in additional efforts to reform HUD and to more effectively combat poverty.

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