Authority's vision deserves support

Imagine a neighborhood North of Broadway where people owned their own homes, where they had a grocery store and a new YMCA. Imagine the decrepit buildings that make up public housing were gone and that in their place were new apartment buildings, some of them erected by private developers. The folks at the Galveston Housing Authority have done precisely that.

They put forth that vision in an application for funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. The feds turned down the application, but the housing authority staff is hard at work putting together a new proposal for next year.

Sharon Strain, the authority’s, executive director, has vowed to keep trying until she succeeds. She needs the help of the community.

There is a chance, perhaps, that Galveston’s application fell victim to election year politics.

Among the dozen or so states receiving the grants was presidential candidate Al Gore’s home of Tennessee, which took home nearly $70 million. Other battleground states – California and Washington – each received about $70 million. But Texas, a state written off by Democrats, got nothing, according to HUD records.

If politics did play a role in the awarding of grants, federal officials ought to be ashamed of themselves.

Strain, however, prefers to look elsewhere to find an explanation. She says the housing authority failed to show HUD that it would get some bang for its buck. Some of the successful grant applicants were able to come up with $10 in local money for every dollar from HUD. Galveston managed to come up with 85 cents for every federal dollar.

Strain’s office is working now to line up more local support, to get a broader segment of the community involved in this effort.

We would encourage individual organizations to answer the call.

It’s appropriate that the Galveston Housing Authority play a leadership role in addressing the issues North of Broadway. It was the housing authority, after all, that made the decisions that led to the concentration of public housing in that neighborhood, and it is the housing authority that now finds itself under a court order to spread out that public housing.

Still, the housing authority did not create this situation on its own.

The problems North of Broadway date back generations. Sixty years ago, a committee was looking at ways to address a pocket of poverty in this same neighborhood. To date, efforts to address conditions in the neighborhood have met with limited success, but the plan put forth by the housing authority has promise.

Sharon Strain is right.

What happens in the poorest parts of the city should matter to everyone. That which diminishes the least of us diminishes all of us.

History should certainly be our guide here. If we do not strive to make things better, they will almost certainly become worse.