NSP Termination Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. CASTOR of Florida. Madam Chair, my amendments are very simple. They say that 90 days after enactment of this bill, we will commence a Government Accountability study to determine the impact of Neighborhood Stabilization rounds 1, 2, and 3 on communities all across the country.

Now, I have to tell you, Madam Chair, I do not need a study to tell me that in my community Neighborhood Stabilization has provided terrific benefits. Neighborhood Stabilization in the Tampa Bay area in Florida, a community that was very hard hit by predatory lending, subprime mortgage, and the foreclosure crisis, Neighborhood Stabilization has given us the tools to create vital housing in the midst of this horrendous crisis and it has created jobs.

Things have been tough in my neck of the woods, and Neighborhood Stabilization has given communities in our neighborhoods and our nonprofit agencies a little bit of hope. Property values in the Tampa Bay area have plummeted by over 40 percent since 2007. Neighborhood Stabilization has helped us to stop the bleeding. Neighborhood Stabilization has helped us protect our property values. And Neighborhood Stabilization has turned some of the worst abandoned and foreclosed homes that were causing blight all across our community into rehabilitated properties. And here are just a few examples of what Neighborhood Stabilization has done in Tampa and in Hillsborough County.

First, with the help of our local nonprofit partners, in East Tampa we have taken an abandoned, dilapidated residential property and we are turning it into housing for 18 homeless female veterans and their families. If you come down to my neck of the woods, unfortunately, you will see folks out on the street corner. We have a panhandling problem like never before--nothing I have ever seen in my lifetime in my hometown--and it's very difficult to deal with. A lot of the homeless are veterans, and some of them are female veterans. So we've taken that Neighborhood Stabilization money and plugged it into buying an old abandoned residential property, and we're now providing housing for those homeless veterans. We broke ground last fall, and all of the construction workers, the architects, the engineers, they were there to thank us because they also needed the work.

Here's a second example. We also breathed new life into a new downtown redevelopment mixed use initiative. Years ago, the Tampa community tore down what was the worst public housing project anywhere around. It was named Central Park Village. Well, thanks to Neighborhood Stabilization, next week we are going to break ground on the first residential piece of this new community. The first residential piece will provide affordable apartments to seniors. Neighborhood Stabilization did that. We did not have the funds and our local partners did not have the funds to continue on that mixed use public-private partnership. And it gets even better, because that big mixed use project is going to create 4,000 construction jobs in an area that really needs them and 1,000 permanent jobs once the new redevelopment is finished.

Third, through our community, we have targeted those ugly, abandoned, dilapidated houses and duplexes on the street or boarded-up apartment complexes. We put people to work cleaning them up. We've sold them or rerented to a family that met eligibility standards. A renovated home can sometimes set off a chain reaction of home improvement throughout your neighborhood, and that is what we're seeing.

The alternative would be letting houses stay vacant, continuing to drag down property values in my community even further. We're putting families back into these homes. Our local nonprofit partners are returning them to the fabric of the neighborhoods rather than just having them sit there or seeing them flipped by out-of-town investors.

In addition to the meaningful tools Neighborhood Stabilization gives to local communities like mine and the thousands of jobs it has helped create, I would like you to take one step back and consider the modest investment Neighborhood Stabilization has provided--overall, $7 billion over the past few years. I can't help but compare that to the $700 billion that was provided to Wall Street through the Wall Street bailout that I did not support because that was not directing the big banks to provide any help to our local communities. Well, Neighborhood Stabilization, this very modest investment--1 percent of the Wall Street bailout funds--now is providing greater stabilization throughout our communities.

So I urge my colleagues to support my amendments and oppose H.R. 861.

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Ms. CASTOR of Florida. I thank my colleague very much for agreeing to accept my amendments.

My point on comparing neighborhood stabilization to the Wall Street bailout was just to point out--and I know both sides of the aisle were involved in the Wall Street bailout. It was the Bush administration, but a number of Democrats worked to do that, and I'm not here to criticize that. It's just to compare the scale. There was $700 billion provided to Wall Street banks, just to compare, and 1 percent of that to communities under neighborhood stabilization.

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