National Housing Task Force

Housing is "unavailable, unaffordable or unfit" for most poor Americans, a private task force said while recommending a 12-year federal support program to increase the supply of low-income and rental housing. The first-year goal of the National Housing Task Force is establishment of a "Housing Opportunity Program" with an appropriation of $3 billion.

Housing is "unavailable, unaffordable or unfit" for most poor Americans, a private task force said while recommending a 12-year federal support program to increase the supply of low-income and rental housing. The first-year goal of the National Housing Task Force is establishment of a "Housing Opportunity Program" with an appropriation of $3 billion.

The government will have to spend $6.5 billion more a year on housing over the next 15 years if every American is to have a decent, affordable place to live, an industry-backed study said Wednesday. The study, financed by the National Assn. of Realtors, estimated that the nation will need to spend $41 billion to help build or renovate 36 million housing units over the period because many Americans now live without adequate plumbing, sewage disposal, electricity or in overcrowded conditions.

James W. Rouse, a master urban developer who coined the terms "urban renewal" and "shopping mall" in the 1950s, invented the "festival marketplace" to renovate decaying downtowns, and then turned his attention to providing low-income housing for poor people, has died. He was 81. Rouse died of Lou Gehrig's disease at his home in Columbia, Md., a planned suburban community that was another of his innovations in the 1960s.

Flanked by bipartisan elected officials and leaders of the real estate and lending industries, Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.) announced Thursday that he will seek major legislation to create affordable housing for the poor and middle class and fight the growth of homelessness. Cranston, chairman of the Senate subcommittee on housing and urban affairs, speaking at the second day of public hearings in Los Angeles, said he hoped to introduce the bill in July.

Without fanfare, the groundwork is being laid at City Hall to pressure banks and savings and loans to increase lending and improve consumer services in low-income neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The city's leverage would come from a new ordinance being developed to place deposits of millions of dollars in city funds in financial institutions with good records in serving low-income communities.

When the imposing Bay Towers apartments were built on a grassy field overlooking Boston harbor in 1974, they seemed to be an ingenious solution to an old urban problem: decent housing for low-income people at a price that developers could afford. The harbor-side high-rise, constructed with private funds backed by federal mortgage subsidies, offered rents of $200 to $300 for working-class tenants, largely of Irish descent.

The winners and losers are easily distinguished. As home owners reap enormous economic rewards from booming property values, low-income renters find their situation deteriorating. "America is increasingly becoming a nation of housing 'haves' and housing 'have-no" William C. Apgar Jr., director of the Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Joint Center for Housing Studies, warned a Senate panel last year.