The following is the transcript of an edited conversation Kentucky Public Radio’s Justin Hicks had with the Kentucky Housing Corporation's Winston Miller, executive director, and Wendy Smith, deputy director of housing programs.
HICKS: The Kentucky Housing Corporation is called a quasi-government agency. Wendy, what does that actually mean? What’s your "elevator pitch" explanation of that?
SMITH: So we're not in the state budget, and we're not state employees, but we are answerable to the state to get a whole lot done on behalf of the state in the area of housing. We do everything from home mortgages for first time homebuyers to homeless programs to funding Habitats for Humanity and running Section 8 for counties that don't have their own housing authority. So we do a little bit of everything for the state.
HICKS: Speaking of Section 8, the White House’s budget wants to eliminate that program along with some other grants that help build new housing and develop community projects. Instead, the White House would cut the housing budget nearly in half and just give the state that chunk of money [in the form of a block grant] to administer itself.
Winston, that’s a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars to Kentucky. How do you think that’s going to affect us?
MILLER: It's a disaster. I mean, it really is. Those numbers are just too huge. So the state is not prepared to absorb those types of spending cuts and to provide alternative funding and without that, you're going to have many, many disabled, elderly people who will not have the funding to pay the rent. Importantly, not only will they not have the funding, the landlords will not be receiving the rental payments, which they depend upon for making their mortgage payment and and and paying taxes and other expenses for operating the property. There are over 10,000 landlords that would be adversely impacted by in the state of Kentucky.
JUSTIN: This isn’t just a city thing for folks in like Louisville and Lexington right? There’s housing programs all over the state.
MILLER: Our numbers indicate over 149,000 Kentuckians in about 85,000 households would be substantially impacted by the proposed budget cuts. This is going to impact people all over the state of Kentucky, even many of the small rural towns have public housing projects there. So this is not a minor thing, this is a big thing.
JUSTIN: In that budget ask document, the White House said it wanted to eliminate several of those HUD programs because they were "dysfunctional." Does that feel like the right approach or does this feel like they want to throw the baby out with the bath water?
SMITH: Heck, the Section 8 voucher program, we would love to streamline it. While we would wholeheartedly agree that there is a lot of room for efficiency and improvement in HUD programs, and would love to offer a lot of ideas about how it could work better, this feels like such a radical cut. It's going to be so disruptive at so many levels across Kentucky.
Just to slash and burn them and then leave the states, kind of holding the bag to figure out who wins and doesn't with so much less money, it doesn't feel fair.
JUSTIN: Putting aside the financial impact — and perhaps the impossibility of the state being able to make up that gap — do you all have any thoughts about the political impact these cuts would have on Kentucky lawmakers?
SMITH: We did see in the last legislative session a flurry — the most housing proposed legislation that I've ever seen at the state level — and our hope was that some of those ideas would carry forward to the next legislative session. Our worry is that the budget, as proposed by the White House is going to just put a wet blanket on aspirations... and really put our state just in a, you know, batten the hatches and let's try to survive. When you're looking at a potential cut to HUD programs in Kentucky of $286 million just to stay level, how are we going to get aspirational about accelerating construction in our state?
