Frank Melville Supportive Housing Investment Act of 2009

FRANK MELVILLE SUPPORTIVE HOUSING INVESTMENT ACT OF 2009 -- (House of Representatives - July 20, 2009)

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Representative Grayson for his graciousness in allowing me to control the time on this bill.

As he mentioned, this bill is the Frank Melville Supportive Housing Investment Act of 2009. This bill is a reauthorization and improvement of our Nation's existing section 811 supportive housing program. This House passed a nearly identical bill last year. It unfortunately didn't get past the United States Senate. So we reintroduced it and hope to see it through the full extent of the process this year.

Before I talk a little bit about the underlying bill and the importance of the issue which it addresses, let me thank a few people. First, Chairman Frank and Subcommittee Chairwoman Waters have been instrumental over the last 7 years in helping us bring this very important bill to the floor, as well as Ranking Member Capito on the Republican side. But really the largest thanks is to my cosponsor in this legislation, Representative Biggert of Illinois. She has, for the full extent of her career, been a supporter of supportive housing, which I will describe as our Nation's most important housing program for individuals with physical and mental disabilities. I'm really honored to have been able to cosponsor this legislation with Representative Biggert and am very pleased that it's back before the House today.

Mr. Speaker, what is the 811 program? The 811 program is this Nation's supportive housing program that allows for Federal funds to be used to build supportive housing for individuals with physical and mental disabilities. It is a program which has meant a great deal to an unfortunately limited number of individuals that have benefited from it.

What is supportive housing? Supportive housing, very simply, is housing for individuals that have certain disabilities that allows them to live independently on their own leading full, productive lives in the communities with a small amount of community support around them. A unit of supportive housing, either on site or in the community, will have connected to it the job skills, the social work, the medication-adherence individuals and support services that are necessary for people that have complex physical or complex mental illness to be able to live on their own. These people can live in the community; they just need a little bit of help to do it.

The measure of this government, the measure of this Nation is how we treat those amongst us who, through no fault of their own, have been born with a certain illness--whether it be mental or physical--that doesn't give them the access to the apparatus of opportunity the rest of us have. Supportive housing, which gives that fundamental life building block--a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in at night--to those individuals is one of the most important things that we can do as a compassionate Nation.

The problem is that over the course of the last 5 to 10 years, the 811 program just has not been working. HUD tells us that there are 1.3 million individuals with disabilities in this country who are living in substandard housing. The 811 program, over the last several years, has only built about a thousand new units despite all of the resources that it has. And it is taking right now upwards of 6 years for a supportive housing project funded with 811 dollars to move from the application stage to the completion stage. This is unacceptable. Representative Biggert has been a great spokesperson for this for years, and the culmination of her work and the advocacy community's work is this legislation.

This bill fixes the 811 program as well as reauthorizes it. It does this in a number of ways. First, it takes all of the vouchers that have traditionally been used to fund individuals who are looking for supportive housing, it takes those vouchers, which have been very inefficiently administered by the 811 program, and moves them to the broader section 8 program. The section 8 program is much better equipped to track these vouchers and make sure they are actually being used by people with disabilities. That has been a big problem through that program within the section 811 program.

That money that is now freed up by moving those vouchers over into the section 8 program is now going to be used to build new units. That's really what we need to do here. We need to build more capacity in the system--1.3 million living in inappropriate living; we need more of it for them.

It also will use that money in more creative ways. Instead of just building a full apartment complex with supportive housing in it, it's now going to work with developers who might have affordable housing projects currently underway to have them build in to that complex two or three or four or five units of supportive housing to allow for more scattered site housing throughout the community leveraging existing affordable housing projects to build in scattered site supportive housing projects.

And lastly, it cuts a lot of the red tape and bureaucracy that has restrained applications from moving forward, chiefly by allowing State affordable housing agencies to do a lot of the bureaucratic work that right now is being performed by Housing and Urban Development here in Washington, D.C. We think that through the passage of this Act, we can triple the number of supportive housing units that are built across the country with this 811 program. And I think by doing so, we will do justice by the individual whose name is on this Act.

Mr. Speaker, this Act is called the Frank Melville Supportive Housing Investment Act. Frank Melville was a constituent of mine. He and his widowed wife, Ellen, started the Melville Charitable Trust which funds much of the affordable housing and supportive housing advocacy work in the Northeast and throughout this country. Frank Melville is no longer with us, but this bill--which we hope to pass today and bring to the Senate for its consideration--does justice to his legacy.

I commend this bill to the House for passage. I think it is going to do so much to live up to the initial promise of this Nation's commitment to individuals with physical and mental disabilities.

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Mr. MURPHY of Connecticut. Mr. Speaker, just briefly to close. In Connecticut during the course of my work in the State legislature, a lot of us would occasionally don a button that said ``keep the promise.'' That was a reminder to us that when we deinstitutionalized those with mental illness, that we had a promise to them to make sure that they had humane and responsible housing in the community. This bill I think does just that. It helps us keep that promise to those people living with mental and physical disability that we are going to find them appropriate and supportive housing in the community.

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