Low-income Housing Program – Houston, TX

Empty homes and promises, By Yang Wang, April 3, 2011, Houston Chronicle: “The simple brick veneer place on Cairnleigh Drive was supposed to be the home of a low-income family who – through the good graces of the Houston Housing Authority – could conquer the unimaginable and buy their own house. But there is no family graced enough to live there. And likely never will be. The windows are boarded up and a sign warns trespassers that violators will be prosecuted. No one has lived there since 2007, when its public housing renter, Sheena Johnson, and her six children were evicted and the house put up for sale – one of some 174 vacant homes owned by the HHA and taxpayers. The house squats in a northwest Houston neighborhood, its screens torn and windows broken, an empty testament to faltering promises by the HHA to provide affordable homes to the economically disadvantaged. The ‘scattered sites’ housing program has done little more in the last four years than frustrate potential buyers and reject others, leaving properties neither occupied nor sold – the profits of which could benefit the public agency or help other housing programs, a Houston Chronicle investigation shows…”