$1.25 Billion 5 Year Plan to displace the poor in Oakland, and elsewhere

HUD has said that CNI “would expand on the lessons of the HOPE VI program and help revitalize neighborhoods of high poverty through transformative investments in distressed public and assisted housing and closer linkages with school reform and early childhood interventions.” However, HOPE VI has been criticized by many low income housing and resident advocates. Begun in 1993, HOPE VI has resulted in the demolition of about 155,000 public housing units, according to numbers from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and only about 50,000 of these units have been replaced with public housing units. While about 47,000 vouchers have been issued to displaced HOPE VI public housing residents, NLIHC’s position is that vouchers are not an adequate replacement for the loss of a hard public housing unit. As NLIHC has testified in Congress on various proposals to reauthorize the HOPE VI program, vouchers can be more costly for extremely poor residents to use and can be very difficult to maintain if the resident has to move to a new apartment./ Letterman sex scandal