Part One: The State of America's Cities

Cities Face a Jobs Gap

While cities are making significant economic progress, they lag behind their suburban neighbors on key measures of economic health. The mismatch between the number of low-skilled jobs and the number of urban residents with low skills who need and want to work is a critical challenge for cities, particularly as families transition from welfare to work. It is little wonder that city officials across the country welcome the Clinton-Gore Administration efforts to close the job gap that confronts urban America.

Employment Opportunities Limited for Low-Skilled Workers

Limited entry-level job opportunities keep unemployment rates relatively high in cities -- especially large cities. The unemployment rate for central cities in March was 5.3 compared with 3.9 percent for suburbs. In some metropolitan areas, the difference was more pronounced: in the Detroit and New York metropolitan areas the city unemployment rate was more than twice the rate of the suburbs.

Unemployment is also high for subgroups that tend to live in cities. Minority youth unemployment (ages 16 to 19), for example, was 26 percent in central cities in May 1998 -- five times the Nation's overall unemployment rate. These disparities result in substantial labor shortages in key suburban areas and industries at the same time many urban residents are without work.

There is a wider wage gap. While progress has been made on the wage gap over the past few years, we haven't regained what we lost over the past 20 years. Over the past two decades, earnings inequality widened as the inflation-adjusted wages of low-skilled workers declined and the wages of high-skilled workers increased. According to a recent report by the U.S. Department of Labor, from 1982 to 1996, the inflation-adjusted hourly wages of workers in the top one-tenth of the workforce increased from $24.80 to $25.74 an hour. In contrast, over this same period wages for workers in the bottom one-tenth of the workforce fell from $6.28 to $5.46. Adjusting these wage figures for the value of employer-provided benefits added further to the growth of earnings inequality. For example, more than 80 percent of all workers received paid holidays and vacation, but less than 10 percent of low-wage workers received paid leave of any kind. Adjusting for benefits, from 1982 to 1996 highly paid workers gained $1.73 an hour in inflation-adjusted total compensation, while low-end workers lost 93 cents an hour. While 1997 earnings data for low-wage workers show a significant increase, it is too early to know whether this gain will continue.

The Welfare Reform Challenge -- Cities Must Create More Jobs

While hundreds of thousands of welfare recipients are already making the transition from welfare rolls to payrolls -- indeed, the percentage of the U.S. population on welfare is at its lowest since 1969 -- big challenges remain. Half of all households that receive public assistance income live in cities. This concentration of welfare recipients means that cities will need to produce more low-skilled jobs and do a better job of connecting city welfare recipients to jobs throughout the metropolitan economy.¹⁹ These challenges call for sustained work by private-sector employers, community-based organizations, and government at all levels working together.

Urban caseloads remain relatively high. According to a recent report issued by the Brookings Institution, caseloads in large urban counties have been declining, but at a substantially slower rate than for the remaining portions of their States. The Brookings Institution found that the slowest reductions in caseloads occurred in urban counties with high-poverty neighborhoods. As a result, urban caseloads are accounting for an increasing percentage of total State welfare rolls. For example, while caseloads in Milwaukee County declined by nearly 30 percent between 1996 and 1997, as of March 1998, Milwaukee County households accounted for fully 86 percent of all households receiving cash welfare in Wisconsin.

There is a job gap in America's cities.

While projecting job gaps is difficult, one effort to do so is a forthcoming report from the U.S. Conference of Mayors (USCM). This report estimates the need for jobs for welfare recipients and other low-skilled job seekers and compares them with the projections of job growth in 74 urban counties. These job projections were compiled by Regional Financial Associates (RFA):

• USCM/RFA estimates that there could be 353,000 fewer low-skilled jobs than the number of current welfare recipients who need jobs over the next 5 years in 74 urban counties.

• The Conference of Mayors estimates that over 1.2 million current welfare recipients in these 74 urban counties will need jobs over the next 5 years and that these welfare recipients will be competing with an additional 409,000 low-skilled job seekers. However, RFA projects that these 74 central counties will only produce 856,000 low-skilled jobs.

• As a result, these cities could face a total job gap -- the difference between total low-skilled job growth and total number in need of those jobs -- of more than 760,000 over the next 5 years.

There will be two job seekers for every low-skilled job. The new Conference of Mayors report also notes that when welfare recipients are combined with other low-skilled competitors, there may be two job seekers for every low-skilled job added over the next 5 years. In just 12 of the 74 cities, there could be more jobs than job seekers. On the other hand, the ratio of low-skilled job seekers (including welfare recipients) to low-skilled jobs may be as high as 10 to 1 in cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and Newark and 4 to 1 or greater in Chicago, Memphis, New Orleans, and New York City.

The Conference of Mayors report confirms earlier studies projecting job gaps for low-skilled workers. For example, researchers at Northern Illinois University estimated that there would be between 4 and 7 low-skilled job seekers for each low-skilled job in the city of Chicago in the year 2000.²⁰ The same ratio for Minneapolis-St. Paul was estimated to be between 1.7 and 3.2 workers for each low-skilled job; in Milwaukee the range was between 3.6 and 6.9 to 1.0 job. The California Budget Project estimated six to eight public assistance recipients for each available low-skilled job in several large urban California counties (Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Bernardino).²¹

Barriers Limit Access to Existing Jobs

The job gap facing city residents is compounded by the lack of transportation access to available suburban jobs and lack of affordable, high-quality child care and affordable housing. For a regional labor market to work efficiently, job seekers must have access to all the jobs for which they are qualified, wherever they are located in a metropolitan area.

People cannot get to the jobs. The rapid growth of jobs in the suburbs has created a "spatial mismatch" that prevents many relatively unskilled residents of distressed urban neighborhoods from reaching the entry-level jobs in the suburbs. Few welfare recipients own their own cars. Cash-strapped urban mass transit systems find it difficult and expensive to expand into lower density suburban job centers, and most do not provide adequate service for those with nontraditional work hours. In Boston, for example, 98 percent of welfare recipients live within one-quarter mile of a bus route or mass transit stop, but only 32 percent of potential entry-level jobs in the Boston metropolitan area are within this distance. Only 58 percent of these entry-level jobs are within one mile of the nearest mass transit.

However, the construction of new or expanded transit rail lines in Dallas, St. Louis, San Diego, and other cities, as well as growing interest in various "reverse commuting" models like those being tested in HUD's Bridges to Work program and those to be funded through the U.S. Department of Transportation's recently enacted Access to Jobs program, offer a hopeful sign that new urban-suburban transportation linkages will be forged.

Limited housing choices block job access. Housing discrimination and the Nation's critical shortage of affordable housing in the suburbs further limit the ability of low-skilled workers -- and particularly low-skilled minority workers -- to access jobs in the suburbs. By concentrating many poor and minority families in central cities and aging inner-ring suburbs, housing discrimination contributes to the reality that areas with the weakest tax bases are home to the greatest needs for investment, stronger job connections, and the education and other services that prepare people to seize opportunity.

The lack of affordable child care hits cities hard. Safe and affordable child care is necessary to allow parents to work. Child care is especially important for those moving from welfare to work. It enables adults to leave home for training and full-day work. Quality child care provides a healthy, nurturing environment, safe from the dangers of the streets and staffed with positive adult role models. It can help young children prepare to succeed in school, reinforcing the academic and social lessons they learn there. While a stay-at-home parent may also be beneficial for young children, many inner-city families cannot give up any adult income, so quality child care becomes essential to providing one's family with basic needs.

Unfortunately, affordable, quality child care remains out of reach for many working families, including single-parent families and the working poor, who are concentrated in cities. Only 10 percent of the families who qualify for Federal child care receive help. Many cities have tens of thousands of families on waiting lists for child care assistance. While the average family pays about 7 percent of its income for child care, such care consumes one-quarter of the income of low-income families, on average.

The challenges of welfare reform confront the already overburdened networks of licensed child care providers. A recent U.S. Conference of Mayors survey of 34 cities confirms that in many communities, both the number of child care slots and the available subsidy funds provided by the State fall far short of meeting even the needs of former welfare recipients, to say nothing of low-income working families. Los Angeles, for example, reported that in the 43 code areas with the heaviest concentrations of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) recipients, there are approximately 78,000 children of TANF families -- but only 30,000 licensed child care spaces available.²² More than 70 percent of cities responding reported that State reimbursement rates would not cover the average cost of full-day, center-based child care.

Cities Face a Large Skills Mismatch

Workforce development will be critical for upgrading skills and earning power. The evidence is clear -- education and training have a significantly greater impact on earning power today than they did a generation ago. Holding other factors equal, a 2-year post-secondary degree raises earnings by 20 percent (on average), and a 4-year bachelor's degree by 40 percent, over a high school diploma alone.²³ Leaving high school before graduating, on the other hand, substantially lowers one's earning power relative to those who have a diploma or higher credentials. Ninth grade dropouts earn one-quarter less, on average, than workers with diplomas and no higher degree.

The cost of low skills is greatest for women with young children, suggesting the vital role of skill building and job readiness as part of making welfare reform work. According to a recent report, while 41 percent of all women work steadily in "good" jobs by age 27, only 22 percent of mothers and 15 percent of women who have not completed high school do so.²⁴ While some women who make the transition from a "bad" job -- one with low wages, low or no benefits, and few prospects for advancement -- to a good job do so quickly, many do not. The least skilled are at greatest risk of working only intermittently and of being mired in bad jobs.

Together with schools and colleges, training organizations of many kinds must raise skills for workers who are more mobile than ever, changing jobs and even careers many times over the course of decades.²⁵ Urban workers who are more likely to face other barriers to employment need these skills all the more.

Cities Face Barriers to Business Development

Although cities offer important advantages to businesses -- proximity to clusters of related companies and knowledge-based services, direct access to underserved urban markets, highly developed infrastructure, a motivated workforce, etc. -- these are too often overshadowed by the problems that new entrepreneurs and existing enterprises encounter in trying to do business in large cities.

Businesses face obstacles to assembling capital. Capital has tended to follow the movement of people and jobs to the suburbs. Lenders and investors, nervous about urban problems and prospects, have been reluctant to back even the most promising business ventures in inner-city neighborhoods. Disinvestment has had a devastating impact on many urban areas, leaving temporary economic setbacks to turn into long-term decline. Public spending alone cannot reverse this downward spiral -- that solution has been tried. However, cities can help make central cities more attractive places for investment by lowering the barriers that make business development riskier.

Environmental hazards pose a barrier to redevelopment. One of those barriers is the very land on which cities -- and the Nation's economic prosperity -- were once built. Many cities have large inventories of underutilized land, but key parcels are often "brownfields," former industrial sites which may have low-to-moderate levels of hazardous contamination which would need to be cleaned up before they could be redeveloped. The General Accounting Office has estimated that there may be as many as 450,000 brownfields nationwide, with the majority in urban areas.²⁶ These sites, which are likely to be otherwise attractive commercial and industrial sites, represent a tremendous resource for cities. However, this resource has remained largely untapped, because developers and lenders concerned about liability for cleanup costs have opted instead for suburban "greenfields" and thus contributed to costly sprawl. Meanwhile, urban brownfields stand vacant -- a blight on the surrounding neighborhood.

Closing the Job Gap: Administration Response

The President's FY 1999 budget request includes several important initiatives to close the low-skilled jobs gap. The first element of any job creation strategy is to restore local economies as thriving places for retail, commercial and industrial activity that puts community residents to work. That can only be achieved through private-sector business investment in distressed communities, and the availability of competitively priced business financing.

To stimulate job development, the President proposed a $400 million Community Empowerment Fund, continued funding for the Treasury Department's Community Development Financial Institutions; a second round of Empowerment Zones that will be implemented in 15 new communities; and a new Brownfields Initiative that will combine cleanup funds through the Environmental Protection Agency with $50 million in HUD economic development grants to redevelop and rebuild contaminated sites. Included in those initiatives are the already enacted Tax Incentives for EZs and an extension of the Brownfields Tax Incentives.

The second key element of the Administration's jobs strategy is to connect former welfare recipients to jobs in employment centers wherever they are located in metropolitan regions. The Administration fought for and is now implementing the $3 billion Welfare-to-Work Grant program which targets long-term welfare recipients in high poverty areas. A substantial portion of these funds will be administered by local communities. The FY 1999 budget proposes HUD's 50,000 new Welfare-to-Work housing vouchers for families that need housing assistance to get or keep a job. In addition, the TEA21 transportation bill recently signed by the President authorized up to $150 million annually for Access to Jobs grants that will help close the transportation gap for inner-city job seekers. Each of these proposals is further described in Part Two of this report. If enacted by Congress, these initiatives will significantly improve cities' chances of success in meeting the challenges of welfare reform.

Cities Face an Education Gap

Many city schools are failing to prepare America's youth -- the Nation's workers, parents, and citizens for the 21st century. Failing schools not only frustrate the aspirations of young people but the competitiveness of cities in a fast-changing global economy.

Urban Schools Face Extraordinary Challenges

The larger social needs bearing down on cities continue to converge on their public schools -- and some are collapsing under the weight. City schools serve much greater concentrations of poor and minority children -- who face countless disadvantages -- than do suburban schools. In four out of every five large central city schools, at least 70 percent of students are poor and more than half are members of minority groups.²⁷ Inner-city students are also more likely to come from single-parent families and to need instruction in English as a second language.

Urban youth face extra hurdles -- and fewer resources. Children from low-income urban neighborhoods often start with educational and social deficits that their schools are ill-equipped to remedy. Although many big-city schools spend about as much per student as the average district in their State, a weak tax base prevents them from finding the extra resources they need to help their students overcome these disadvantages.

Many urban schools confront management and staffing problems -- along with weak standards. Some urban schools are burdened with bloated, unresponsive bureaucracies. Recruiting highly qualified teachers is very hard for schools where morale is low, setbacks are many, and the violence of the streets -- or literally on school grounds -- is never far away. A shortage of teachers, in turn, keeps class sizes large, making urban classrooms more disruptive and making it difficult for students to get the attention and mentoring they need to learn and grow. Finally, educational standards have eroded in too many districts, with a system of "social promotion" that graduates young people who lack even the most basic reading and math skills needed to function in the world of work.

School violence is concentrated in large urban schools. Though news reports confirm that school violence is not just an urban problem by any means, violent fights and attacks are more common in city schools, especially big ones, than they are in suburban schools. In a national survey, 1,800 city schools reported over 5,400 fights in which weapons were used during the 1996-97 school year -- and those data only include crimes serious enough to be reported to the police.²⁸

Many Urban Schools are Crumbling

One of the most serious problems facing central city students and educators alike is that their schools are literally crumbling around them. Attempting to meet crushing needs with meager resources has forced many schools to spend more of their limited funds on instruction and less on maintaining an already aged building stock. Many inner-city schools must spend sizable portions of their facilities budgets on emergency repairs. The result is deferred maintenance and escalating capital costs. The need to repair and replace inner-city school buildings is reaching crisis proportions: a recent study by the General Accounting Office found that 38 percent of central city schools, serving more than 5.5 million students, had at least one inadequate building. Two-thirds (with more than 10 million students) had at least one inadequate building feature, such as a leaky roof or inadequate plumbing.

Achievement and School Completion Are Lagging in Inner-City Schools

Basic achievement -- especially in high-poverty urban schools -- lags behind that in suburban schools. Like the physical plant, the quality of education being offered in many urban schools is poor. In both 1994 and 1996, 60 percent of the children in urban school districts failed to achieve basic levels of competency in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. For children in high-poverty urban schools, outcomes were even worse: 77 percent failed to achieve basic competency levels in reading, and 67 percent failed to achieve basic levels of competency in math. The Nation cannot afford for its students to fail these basic tests. As America's mayors agreed in the White House Education Summit in May 1998; however, it is the lowest-performing schools that represent our greatest and most urgent challenge.

School completion is low in urban high schools. Too many students simply are not getting the help they need at school, at home, or in the community to keep up. In an age in which dropping out of school -- and not securing some post-secondary education -- is costlier than ever, graduating from high school and attending college seem an impossible dream to millions of urban youth. Although dropout rates have been falling and test scores rising in key large urban districts, including Los Angeles, approximately half of the high school class of 1994 did not graduate on time. Indeed, about half of all students in big-city school districts fail to graduate in four years.²⁹

Source: Education Week on the Web, January 1998

* The attrition rate is the percent of an entering freshman class that fails to graduate at the end of 4 years. It includes permanent dropouts, temporary dropouts who fail to graduate on time, and students who repeat one or more grades. For this analysis, "attrition" is measured as the percent decline in the size of the class of 1994 from enrollment in the fall of 1990 to graduation in the spring of 1994 minus any decline in the district's high school enrollment during the same period. An adjustment is made for decline in enrollment to reduce the effect of population changes in the district.

Closing the Education Gap: Administration Response

Urban education is a major priority in the President's budget submission to Congress. Education is primarily the responsibility of State and local governments, families and individuals, and the private sector. Nevertheless, the Federal Government has a crucial stake in supporting education, from preschool through adulthood. And because it is in big-city districts that unequal educational resources have hit hardest and schools have most often failed their students, responding to the challenges of urban education is at the heart of the President's education policies.

The FY 1999 budget includes $1.5 billion over 5 years for 50 high-poverty, low-achieving, urban and rural school districts, to be designated as Education Opportunity Zones if they adopt tough reforms to hold schools accountable for improving quality, expanding public school choice, ending social promotion, and showing real improvements in school achievement. In addition, the budget request funds for an America Reads Campaign to increase literacy in the inner city; and High Hopes for America's Youth to help middle school students learn what it takes to go to college -- and prepare to get there. Educational Zone Academy Bonds will help school districts in distressed areas leverage private-sector involvement in -- and private-sector capital for -- serious educational reform. Two kinds of School Modernization Bonds will help countless schools to restore the physical foundations that schools must provide our young people to make learning possible. Funding for 100,000 new public school teachers will reduce class sizes in the early grades (1-3), where it matters most. Each of these initiatives is discussed further in Part Two of this report.

Cities Face a Housing Gap

The Nation's affordable housing crisis has reached record levels, especially in central cities. While homeownership is at its highest level ever, the central city homeownership rate continues to lag significantly behind the suburbs.

Urban Homeownership, Including Middle-Class Homeownership, Lags Behind the Suburbs

Despite record growth in homeownership, in large measure the homeownership boom has not closed gaps between cities and suburbs. According to data from the 1995 American Housing Survey presented in the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies' annual report The State of the Nation's Housing 1997, center city residents of all income levels are less likely to own a home than suburban residents with similar incomes. For example, among moderate- income households (those with income between 80 and 120 percent of area median), 71.3 percent of suburban residents own a home, but only 51.8 percent of center city residents are homeowners.

Discrimination Adds to the Homeownership Gap

The spatial gap in homeownership reflects, in part, the persistent gap in homebuying opportunities for racial and ethnic minorities. The Harvard University Joint Center data document that African-American and Hispanic households of all income levels are less likely to own a home than white households of the same income group. This racial gap persists, even among households with incomes that are 20 to 50 percent higher than area median. While 78.3 percent of white households in this income group owned homes, the share for African-Americans is only 62.7 and for Hispanics only 64.5 percent.

While the spatial and racial gaps in homeownership reflect many factors, the Joint Center report concludes that they are the legacy of "decades of discriminatory practices." Worse yet, the Harvard study concludes, "Prejudicial lending and housing market practices still plague some areas of the country." Mortgage lending information gathered by the Federal Reserve Board under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) shows that minority households applying for mortgage credit were much more likely to be rejected than white households with similar income. Similarly, denial rates -- for whites as well as minorities -- were highest in central city and in minority neighborhoods.

Housing Needs Are at Record Levels

Despite strong economic growth, the number of very low-income renter households with worst case needs (paying at least half their income in rent or living in inadequate housing) remained at its record-high level of 5.3 million 1995.³⁰

Central Cities are Hardest Hit. The housing affordability crisis remains most acute in America's cities, where half of all very-low-income renters (almost 7.3 million households with incomes less than half of the area median) live. Twenty-eight percent of these households receive some type of rental assistance.³¹ The majority of the 5 million unassisted very low-income urban renters, however, experienced severe housing problems in 1995.³² Over the period 1991 to 1995, the number of renter households with worst case needs in central cities grew by 219,000 to 2.8 million, with particularly sharp increases occurring in the Northeast and West.

Worst Case Needs Increasingly Affect the Working Poor. According to HUD's April 1998 report, Rental Housing Assistance -- The Crisis Continues, worst case housing needs grew fastest among the working poor. Between 1991 and 1995, worst case needs for families with at least one person earning a full-time paycheck rose by 265,000 -- an increase of 24 percent.

Worst case needs are particularly concentrated among city households with incomes at or below 30 percent of the area median -- a level that roughly corresponds to the Federal poverty threshold.³³ An analysis by the Harvard University Joint Center for Housing Studies found that five out of every six unassisted renter households with such extremely low incomes paid half their income in rent or lived in structurally inadequate housing.

The number of elderly households with worst case needs remained above 1 million in 1995, while more than 2 million families with children had worst case housing needs. Among households with very low income, both families with children and households with an elderly head but no children had almost a one-in-three chance of having worst case needs. Families with children represent the largest group of households with worst case needs -- more than 2.1 million households of the total 5.3 million worst case households. Just over 1 million elderly individuals or heads of households without children have worst case housing needs. This situation occurs despite the fact that housing assistance has been heavily directed toward these two groups -- 37 percent of very-low-income elderly and 29 percent of very-low-income families with children receive housing assistance.

There has been a sharp decline in affordable housing. The private rental housing stock affordable to these households has been shrinking rapidly: between 1993 and 1995, there was a loss of 900,000 rental units affordable to very-low-income families -- a reduction of 9 percent. The largest losses of private rental stock, in percentage terms, were for units affordable to extremely-low-income renters (households with incomes less than 30 percent of area median) -- a 16-percent reduction.

There have been no new housing vouchers for families on the waiting list for housing assistance since 1994. The ongoing housing affordability crisis has been aggravated by Congress' refusal to approve new rental assistance to families on the waiting list. Since 1995, Congress has denied the Administration's request for new rental assistance to mitigate worst case needs. Indeed, Congress rescinded funding for vouchers that had been appropriated in 1994. This represents a historic reversal of Federal housing policy. From the Great Depression until 1994 -- under both Democratic and Republican Administrations and in periods of economic boom and recession -- Congress has always expanded the availability of rental assistance. In light of the substantial reduction in affordable rental housing, the failure to increase housing assistance further exacerbates the housing crisis in the Nation's cities.

The need for homeless assistance remains acute. Beginning in the 1980s, the number of homeless people in America increased to its highest level in 50 years. Research found that as many as 7 million Americans experienced homelessness at least once in the latter half of the 1980s. Of the total homeless population -- some 600,000 are literally homeless on any given night -- some suggest that the number of families with children now exceeds 30 percent of the homeless population, increasing the need for stable, long-term housing with access to day care, decent education, and other family support. Others are single adults. Some homeless persons who suffer from mental illness or substance abuse, who need a variety of services beyond immediate shelter. As a result of HUD's Continuum of Care program, which coordinates Federal, State and local resources and services for homeless people, an increasing number of formerly homeless families and individuals are moving into transitional or permanent housing. Nevertheless, there remains a shortfall between the scope of the homeless population's need for assistance and the level of resources that are available.

The consequences of the lack of affordable rental housing spill over into other areas of concern. Each day families with worst case needs must make the difficult choice between paying for housing and buying other necessities such as food, medicine, transportation, and child care. A recent report from the Doc4Kids Project at Boston Medical Center estimates, for example, that almost 18,000 inner-city children are hospitalized each year for asthma often caused by infestations of roaches.³⁴ Other problems reported include slow mental development from lead poisoning, stunted growth and anemia from malnutrition, and injuries from living in unsafe housing. And the consequences show up in the damaged lives of untold numbers of the Nation's children who are at increased risk of violence, psychological disturbances, infections, and poor school performance.

Closing the Housing Gap: Administration Response

The President's budget includes a range of proposals to increase homeownership, promote fair housing and fair lending, expand rental housing assistance, and reduce homelessness. To help thousands of hard-working middle-class American families qualify to become homeowners and expand homeownership opportunities in higher cost central city neighborhoods, the FY 1999 budget proposed raising the FHA home mortgage insurance loan limits used by the Federal Housing Administration to a single national standard of $227,150. The budget also proposes an additional 100,000 Section 8 rental assistance vouchers; a new HOME Bank that will expand the use of HUD's successful HOME housing block grant funds; another round of Homeownership Zones; record funding for homeless assistance programs; a $1.6 billion expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit; and a doubling of funding for fair housing enforcement. Together, these proposals will help central cities expand homeownership opportunities for middle-class families, while providing needed resources to address the critical shortage of affordable housing that undermines the well-being of low-income, central city families. Last year, the Administration and Congress worked together to pass historic legislation to ensure that families currently using housing vouchers are able to remain in the program. This year, working with the same bi-partisan spirit, Congress can pass the legislation providing the resources needed to address the housing gap that confronts our Nation's cities.