BANKING, HOUSING AND URBAN AFFAIRS NINETY-FOURTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION ON S. 1988 TO PROVIDE, ON A DEMONSTRATION BASIS, EMERGENCY John B. Williams, executive director, Oakland Redevelopment Agency- Fred Cooper, chairman, Board of Supervisors, Alameda County.. Gene Jarnagin, loan guaranty officer, Veterans Administration_. Henry Cohn, general counsel's office, Veterans Administration_. Gary Schmidt, chief of property management section, Veterans Adiminis- Michael Salzman, executive director of the Los Angeles Housing Authority- Joseph Korpsak, executive officer of the Valley Association of Cities.. Henry B. Dotson, head of the Assistance Initiative Participation Coordi- Ralph Fertig, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Community Ellen Kastel, research director for the Center for New Corporate Priorities_ Professor Frederick Case, Graduate School of Management at UCLA... Professor Frank Mittelbach, Graduate School of Management at UCLA. Professor John Clapp, Graduate School of Management at UCLA.. Jonathan Lehrer-Graiwer, Western Center on Law and Poverty. Valarie Pope, executive director of the San Bernardino Westside Commun- ADDITIONAL STATEMENTS AND DATA Page From the East Oakland Housing, November 6, 1974 37 Article from the McGraw-Hill News, Chicago, Ill City of Oakland, letter from Cecil S. Riley, city manager, to the city council... 45 45 Housing advisory and appeals board, Resolution No. 2850-- 46 47 95 Bank of America News, "Unique Bank Programs To Aid Blighted Areas of Three Cities". 104 Preliminary report by Michael L. Grigoni, housing foreclosure and abandonment. - . 114 HUD, Housing Management, H. R. Crawford.. 127 Veterans Administration, letter to Senator Cranston regarding abandonment... 140 TABLES Critical path of defaulted home_ HUD aquisitions by FHA program.. 57 116 Cities with over 25 HUD-acquired properties as of March 12, 1975. 118 118 122 Calculations to determine greatest net dollar return for programming consideration.. ABANDONMENT DISASTER DEMONSTRATION RELIEF ACT OF 1975 THURSDAY, AUGUST 28, 1975 U.S. SENATE, COMMITTEE ON BANKING, HOUSING AND URBAN AFFAIRS, SUBCOMMITTEE ON HOUSING AND URBAN AFFAIRS, Oakland, Calif. The subcommittee met at 10 a.m. at Melrose School, 1325 53d Ave., Oakland, Calif., Senator Alan Cranston, a member of the subcommittee, presiding. Present: Senator Cranston and Congressman Pete Stark. Also present: Carolyn Jordan, assistant counsel, Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, and Jerry Buckley, minority counsel, Housing Subcommittee, Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee. Senator CRANSTON. The hearing will please come to order. Congressman Stark will join us shortly but in order to assure we have plenty of time, we are going to start now. I will make an opening statement and then we will have three panels that will appear before the committee. OPENING STATEMENT OF SENATOR CRANSTON Senator CRANSTON. Last year Senators Hart, Mondale, and I introduced S. 3115, the Housing Abandonment Disaster Demonstration Relief Act, a bill to test a new mechanism for acquiring and disposing of abandoned property and to develop new financial resources for localities afflicted by the disaster of large scale housing abandonment. Because of the urgency of this problem we have introduced this bill again this year as S. 1988. Housing abandonment is still a major menacing housing problem in our urban cities. Housing abandonment is a problem of poor people concentrated in overcrowded, unsafe, and unsanitary housing units, of streets scarred by vandalism and fire, of neighborhoods shunned by businesses and investors, of cities with dying central cores. Housing abandonment is creating housing, crime, health, and tax crises in many of the Nation's cities. The last national survey in 1971 completed by the Library of Congress on national levels of housing abandonment indicated the growing magnitude of this problem. Conservative estimates on the number of nongovernment-owned abandoned units for example, run around 100.000 in New York, 12,000 in Baltimore, 10,000 in St. Louis, and 5,738 in Oakland. (1) |