Posted on Tue, Dec. 16, 2008

How do you chose between a house and a job, especially when the choice involves potentially thousands of homes and tens of thousands of jobs?

That is the question raised by the lawsuit seeking to take money now allocated for the visionary expansion of the state port facilities in Gulfport and use it to help South Mississippians put — or keep — a roof over their heads.

The Sun Herald has not only endorsed the plans for the port, it has enthusiastically embraced them. The possibility of South Mississippi becoming home to one of the largest container ports in the nation and generating jobs from the coastline to the Tennessee state line is an opportunity not to be missed. It has the potential to be the largest economic development project in the state’s history.

But that enthusiasm for the port project has not diminished this newspaper’s appreciation of the need for, and campaign to get, more affordable housing for South Mississippians — all South Mississippians. It has been an ongoing focus of our news and editorial staffs since Hurricane Katrina. Indeed, our concerns prompted us to sponsor our own housing summit this spring to try to help identify and solve the problems in our housing market.

A disheartening turn of events

So when a lawsuit is filed threatening one of the priorities of our recovery — more and better jobs through an expansion of the port — without any guarantee of helping another — more and better housing for our neighbors — it represents a disheartening turn of events.

Even if the plaintiffs in this lawsuit are successful in taking nearly $600 million away from the port project, there is no assurance that the money will be shifted over to a housing program.

That money is not sitting in a bank on the Coast drawing interest. These hundreds of millions of dollars are still very much under the control of Congress and could wind up being used to bailout yet another troubled aspect of the national economy.

One of the most heartening aspects of the recovery process was seeing indications that bridges were being built between sectors of our society that were unimaginable prior to Katrina. One of the worst outcomes of this lawsuit would be for some of those bridges to be burned.

Is a compromise possible?

We do not know if the possibility for an out-of-court settlement exists. Since the lawsuit alleges that the secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development “violated his statutory duties,” the prospects of a compromise are not promising.

We do know that we all need a place to live and a way to make a living. We thought that housing programs now in place and a port of the future were complementary means to reach those ends.

It would be ruinous for South Mississippi to wind up with either plenty of housing units but no jobs, or with plenty of work but no place to live.

We can only hope that this lawsuit is not a step in either of those directions.

The editorial above represents the view of the Sun Herald editorial board: President-Publisher Ricky R. Mathews, Vice President and Executive Editor Stan Tiner, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Flora S. Point, Opinion Page Editor Marie Harris and Associate Editor Tony Biffle. Opinions expressed by columnists, cartoonists and letter writers on these pages are their own.

Article from the Clarion Ledger newspaper

December 14, 2008

Port battle: Housing and jobs go together

Sid Salter
ssalter@clarionledger.com

In the fifth chapter of the book of Matthew, Jesus delivers the "Sermon On The Mount" and from it The Beatitudes got most of the ink from Bible scholars and from the faithful alike - in which Jesus tells us that the poor will receive the "kingdom of heaven."

But later in that passage, in Matthew 5:45, we are left with one of the greater truths in the scriptures - the notion that God allows people to suffer the havoc of disasters without regard to virtue or vice.

Matthew 5:45 reads: "That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust."

So, what does any of that have to do with whether $600 million in federal funds gets spent rebuilding the Port of Gulfport?

Lawsuit over the port

Gulf Coast housing advocates - with the support of the Mississippi NAACP - filed a lawsuit Wednesday in as Washington, D.C., federal court challenging the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's approval of the state of Mississippi's plan to spend $600 million in Hurricane Katrina recovery funds on rebuilding and expanding the Port of Gulfport.

The lawsuit contends the $600 million of the state's total $5.4 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds was diverted from housing programs in violation of requirements that at least 50 percent of HUD funds be spent on lower-income residents.

But the Barbour administration has said that of the $5.4 billion in the federal Hurricane Katrina Recovery Package, $3.8 billion was dedicated to housing recovery, including almost $2 billion already disbursed to more than 27,000 households in the three coastal counties .

Mississippi Development Authority spokesman Lee Youngblood has said that over $611 million of the $2 billion has already been given to low-to-moderate income homeowners and that another $700 million was being spent on low income housing construction.

 

Matter of priorities?

In supporting the lawsuit, Mississippi NAACP state president Derrick Johnson - who Barbour appointed vice-chairman of the the Governor's Commission for Recovery, Rebuilding and Renewal after Hurricane Katrina - said: "Though the storm did not intentionally discriminate, the damage did reveal the impact of decades-long discrimination against poor, African-American people who were already living in substandard housing. For the first time in our state's history, we have the resources to right this wrong. It is a matter of priorities."

While Johnson's heart is in the right place, he shrugs off the fact that Katrina hit everyone on the Gulf Coast, rich and poor alike, and all suffered. (See Matt. 5:45.)

Congress did not appropriate $5.5 billion to cure Mississippi's historic low-income housing ills. While great progress has been made toward that noble, worthy goal since Katrina, it was never the primary focus of storm recovery.

Rebuilding and expanding the Port of Gulfport will provide good jobs now and into the future and provide a key building block for an economy that can lift the economic boats of low-to-moderate income people on the Gulf Coast.

Quality housing for the poor must be a priority, as Johnson suggests. But so, too, must jobs and the dignity jobs extend to those who will dwell in better homes be a priority in rebuilding the Coast.