2.18.2005
Pain at Home (WashingtonPost.com)
Friday, February 18, 2005; Page A28
ONE NEED NOT embrace the incendiary rhetoric of the mayor of Baltimore, Martin O'Malley, who likened the Bush administration's proposed budget cuts to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to agree that their impact will be felt in counties, cities and neighborhoods -- in some cases severely. Under President Bush's fiscal 2006 budget plan, non-Medicaid grants to state and local governments would decline by $10.7 billion, or 4.5 percent, to $225 billion. In the Washington region as elsewhere, what is hidden in the abstraction of those numbers are the effects on communities of reducing or eliminating funding for programs in job training, adult education and affordable housing.
In this region there is particular concern about proposed reductions in Community Development Block Grants, which have attracted bipartisan support as a means of helping rejuvenate older, poorer and struggling neighborhoods, in part by providing affordable housing. In Arlington, for instance, the grants account for more than 12 percent of the county's $18 million annual housing budget -- this in a jurisdiction where the stock of affordable housing units is being rapidly depleted. The grants have provided aid to Arlington's Columbia Heights West neighborhood, home to a melting pot of immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. The Nauck neighborhood of South Arlington, a historically African American enclave, also has benefited.
(More ... Pain at Home (washingtonpost.com)) ¶ 23:31
ONE NEED NOT embrace the incendiary rhetoric of the mayor of Baltimore, Martin O'Malley, who likened the Bush administration's proposed budget cuts to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, to agree that their impact will be felt in counties, cities and neighborhoods -- in some cases severely. Under President Bush's fiscal 2006 budget plan, non-Medicaid grants to state and local governments would decline by $10.7 billion, or 4.5 percent, to $225 billion. In the Washington region as elsewhere, what is hidden in the abstraction of those numbers are the effects on communities of reducing or eliminating funding for programs in job training, adult education and affordable housing.
In this region there is particular concern about proposed reductions in Community Development Block Grants, which have attracted bipartisan support as a means of helping rejuvenate older, poorer and struggling neighborhoods, in part by providing affordable housing. In Arlington, for instance, the grants account for more than 12 percent of the county's $18 million annual housing budget -- this in a jurisdiction where the stock of affordable housing units is being rapidly depleted. The grants have provided aid to Arlington's Columbia Heights West neighborhood, home to a melting pot of immigrants from Africa, Eastern Europe and the Caucasus. The Nauck neighborhood of South Arlington, a historically African American enclave, also has benefited.
(More ... Pain at Home (washingtonpost.com)) ¶ 23:31
