The scatter-site housing technique that avoids concentrating large numbers of low-income people in a neighborhood is being adapted by developers of multi-unit housing for the elderly. Thus, while a project may consist of a number of buildings, they are built in different areas of the city, with social services and management functions, however, grouped in a central "core" and accessible to all tenants.

This pattern of development and central management of housing to meet the needs of low-income elderly people for both shelter and social services is exemplified in the three projects described below.

Satellite Senior Homes

Satellite Senior Homes, Oakland, Calif., is sponsored by the Oakland Council of Churches allied with other religious and civic organizations. The six buildings that compose Satellite Homes range in size from 40 to 200 units and are located on sites scattered throughout Oakland. One of the six buildings, called Satellite Central, is located in downtown Oakland; it includes 150 dwelling units, dining facilities, and considerable recreation space as well as the management, maintenance, food production, and services staffs that tie the entire satellite system together administratively and operationally.

The other buildings located outside the city center, are smaller, with from 40 to 66 units. Mobility for the people served is central to the Satellite Homes concept: thus people can live in the outlying buildings as long as they are able to be completely independent, but may move to the downtown dwellings if they become less mobile and need assistance in preparing meals.

Ceramics classes in the art room
are arranged by the management
with an instructor provided
by the Oakland Adult Educational
Program. Residents and
nonresidents share a creative
activity while they enjoy a
social outlet.

The sponsorship of Satellite Senior Homes is unique for its makeup of several organizations: the Soroptimist Club of Oakland, the Congregational, Presbyterian, and Catholic Churches, and the Jewish Welfare Federation. These sponsoring organizations joined to form the Satellite Senior Homes Corporation which owns and operates all the buildings. Central management and maintenance are provided by the Corporation, with onsite. with onsite resident managers in each building. The central management office coordinates tenant selection to insure an ethnic and racial mix in each building. Five building sites that are currently under development will add 246 dwellings to the present total; and two additional sites are under consideration.

Each church or organizational or organizational unit is sponsor for a single site, and provides seed money for the building. It is entitled to two seats on the Satellite Senior Homes governing board which has overall responsibility for the total project plan and carrying it to completion.

Each satellite building has a tenants' association with two representatives on a general tenants' council for administration of the entire satellite system. One member of the tenants' council also sits on the board of Satellite Homes as a voting member.

Services provided for tenants include food, social services, health counsel and referral (but not nursing or hospital care), building maintenance, central administration, and staff training.

North Side Housing, Boston

The Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, calling upon the experience of Senior Consultants, of Cleveland, has created 321 units in four buildings, one each in Danvers, Beverly, Peabody, and Salem. Using similar architectural concepts, each building is more self-contained than the Oakland structures. Each ground floor provides a large communal room which could serve as the physical base for a

local senior center for the neighborhood, with space for various kinds of activities, including recreation and education, as well as larger social and holiday events.

A foundation grant was originally obtained for organized activities in the common room areas of each building, but this programming never fully caught on in the resident group, or in the community. Today, activities are essentially organized by the residents themselves, to meet their own needs.

North Side Housing Corporation operates as a centralized administrative entity, with a single office staff for the four buildings. Salem, as the largest of the "Fairweather" complex with 127 units, houses the superintendent of maintenance; an assistant custodian lives in Peabody, and a third custodian maintains the two smaller buildings in Beverly and Danvers. Building services common to all are performed by contract, including trash removal, grass cutting, and snow plowing.

Each of the buildings is welllocated, with adjacent shopping, transportation, and community services. The Fairweather buildings demonstrate the effectiveness of the decentralized housing concept.

Salem is planning expansion that will add 155 units to the current building, on the same site.

Wesley Homes

The North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church has created a 35-man Board of Trustees, which to date has built 785 residential units at four different locations, three in Atlanta, and one in Athens. One of the Atlanta projects, Budd Terrace, is congregate housing structure, with all meals centrally provided as part of the living arrangement. In addition, adjacent to Wesley Woods Towers, which serves as the administrative center of the complex, is the Wesley Woods Health Center. This is a licensed nursing home funded by a Hill-Burton grant and pri

vately issued bonds, with 171 beds available to residents of all the Wesley Homes facilities.

Wesley Homes provides development and administrative services for the entire complex. However, each building, once built, is largely autonomous, with its own administrator. Each administrator employs and supervises his own personnel, within. the framework of a single Board's policies and within a Board-approved budget. Food is centrally purchased by a professional food service company, which also hires each Food Service Manager, but all other food employees work for Wesley Homes. Weekly staff meetings are being held by the central administrative staff with the administrators of each build

of

HUD 1969-1972

By

Secretary George Romney

ing cannot be solved by housing alone, but requires remedial efforts for such social ills as broken families, crime, unemployment, transportation, education, health, and others.

Editors' Note: As this issue goes to press and the Department awaits confirmation by Congress of the nomination of HUD Secretary-designate James T. Lynn, it seems appropriate to look back with outgoing Secretary • The demonstration that housGeorge Romney on what the Departing production in this country can be ing production in this country can be ment has accomplished in the last stimulated by sound monetary and four years. fiscal policies, and made more stable through tapping new sources of mortgage money. In the past four years, 60 percent more subsidized housing was financed and started than in the entire history of Federal housing assistance and overall production in the past two years has set records.

The years 1969 through 1972 show an auspicious record of achievement by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Although this record was marred by some serious inherited flaws, the four years have set the stage for significant long range benefits.

Among these are:

The movement of decisionmaking from Washington to the Washington to the States and local communities, which are better able to determine their needs and the priority in which they should be handled, with the financial and technical assistance of the Federal Government.

The growing awareness of the Real City concept, calling for the application of Real City solutions to the problems of the metropolitan, rather than a limited city, area. Coupled with this is the gradual acceptance that the solution to urban problems is not the sole province of the Federal Government, but requires the coordinated efforts of government at all levels and the private

sector.

The slow awakening to the fact that the urban problem of hous

new

• Operation BREAKTHROUGH dramatized the need for basic improvements in housing technology, marketing, land use, and management. BREAKTHROUGH has initiated governmental and trade union acceptance of the concept of industrialized housing and the demonstration program has helped remove the stigma of "prefab" from new housing concepts.

● Institutionalizing fair housing standards needed to overcome racial discrimination and assure equality of housing choice to every American.

• Conversion of a bureaucratic conglomerate to a streamlined Department, which led the way and served as a decentralized organization served as a decentralized organization prototype for the New Federalism and paved the way for interrelated advanced annual firm commitments on the availability of departmental

programs to local communities. Operating decisions now also are being made close to the communities served by 77 Area and Insuring Offices supervised by 10 Regional Offices. More than 90 percent of the Department's program funds now are being committed at the field level. Highlights

Some highlights among the HUD accomplishments are:

Housing Production-In the past two years, overall housing production has attained new heights. In 1972 production is expected to almost three million units, including 550,000 mobile units. In 1971, production was approximately 2.6 million, and in 1969 and 1970 below two million.

Subsidized housing, which was produced at record levels in the past four years, reached 226,400 in 1969, 471,000 in 1970, 465,400 in 1971, and an estimated 370,000 in 1972.

While greater efforts are needed to preserve existing housing, HUD has taken some steps along this line by increasing the volume of substantial rehabilitation through Project Rehab, which is under way in 30 cities. In addition, HUD has launched a demonstration study in the Crown Heights section of New York City designed to conserve neighborhoods through rehabilitation.

Mortgage Credit-Part of the reason for the record-setting housing production in the past four years has been the activity of the Government

National Mortgage Association (GNMA), which developed two new financial devices:

First, the Tandem Plan, whereby GNMA purchases or commits to purchase mortgages at prices more favorable than the market and then sells them at the market price to minimize cash outlays. Purchase commitments in the four years totaled $7.05 billion in subsidized mortgages and $3.28 billion in unsubsidized mortgages, which resulted in assisting more than 510,000 housing units.

Second, mortgage-backed securities, wherein GNMA guarantees privately issued securities backed by FHA/VA mortgages. A total of $5.85 billion in pass-through securities and $2.57 billion in bond-type securities have been issued. (One-third of these issues come from pension and retirement funds, which ordinarily have not invested in mortgages.) These issuances assisted more than 400,000 units.

Operation BREAKTHROUGH-A significant development during the past four years was Operation BREAKTHROUGH, which was launched in 1969 to stimulate basic improvements in the housing industry. About 2,900 units are nearing completion on nine demonstration sites and many of them are already occupied.

As a result of this demonstration, more than 30,000 additional units are in various stages of planning and

development.

There are other ancillary benefits which will have a long range impact:

Twenty-seven States have enacted statewide industrialized housing laws or general purpose building codes- there were none before BREAKTHROUGH.

• Precedent-making agreements have been signed by producers and building trade unions at factory wage

rates.

• Removal of the "prefab" stigma has encouraged many major corporations to enter the industrialized housing field with the result that total industrialized housing production greatly exceeded the number of units involved in Operation BREAKTHROUGH.

Performance criteria developed by the National Academies of Science and Engineering are resulting in superior quality and safety.

New Communities-This program, which began in 1968, has granted guarantees to 13 new community developments, totaling approximately $300 million. These projects will provide more than 250,000 new homes (one-fourth of them for low- and moderate-income families) for more than 800,000 people.

Actions Taken

Related to these developments in housing production were a number of

actions.

settlement costs and the Department is studying the establishment of maximum charges for closing cost items. where such costs are found to be excessive.

The Minimum Property Standards, which formerly only covered units built under HUD mortgage in surance programs, have been rewrit ten to combine the mortgage insur ance programs and Public Housing and to include environmental consid erations. They are expected to be issued early this year.

Steps were taken to protect homeowners financing the purchase through HUD-insured mortgage programs against the activities of specula tors, kickbacks in mortgage trans actions were eliminated, and the nee for quality processing by field office was re-emphasized to assure quality service and quality housing.

The Department took the initi: tive in the widespread national inve tigation now being conducted wit the cooperation of the Department Justice to ferret out those guilty c illegal conduct in the operation housing programs.

Currently 13 target cities an being subjected to intensive investig tive efforts and all other HUD office are or will be subjected to intensiv review by the Office of Inspecto General, which was created and grea ly strengthened in the past two years The intensified efforts to comb

A detailed analysis was made of corruption have resulted in the indic

ment of 28 employees in 1972, in contrast to the seven indicted during the 1968-1971 period. In addition, there have been 601 administrative actions-suspensions, debarments, warning letters, and personnel actions-in 1971 and 1972; 48 persons were sent to prison and another 84 placed on probation.

An effort to enact simplified legislation consolidating similar housing programs has not yet been successful, but would have great significance.

Housing Allowances-Because of the growing burden of subsidies, the Department has been studying alternate means of providing housing. One of these is the Housing Allowance Program. This demonstration program is now getting under way in 10 metropolitan areas to determine the feasibility of making payments directly to needy families, allowing them to select the housing of their choice.

This larger program is an outgrowth of a small scale experiment in San Francisco, which showed that low-income families can become successful homeowners when able to select-with adequate counseling their own homes under Section 235. Another small scale experiment, under the Model Cities Program, was conducted in Kansas City, Mo.

Housing Management-In the area of housing management, many steps were taken to improve and simplify operations and to provide greater pro

tection for those living in assisted housing.

A major long range effort was the creation of the National Center for Housing Management to serve as a national focus for increasing the number of trained housing management personnel to meet the expected increase in the number of assisted units in the future-and to create a professional housing management field.

Another step was the signing of contracts with 13 Local Housing Authorities to serve as "management innovation laboratories" to develop and demonstrate management innovations in public housing.

Three major homeownership counseling programs have been created-an unfunded program through which 252 counseling agencies provide services to Section 237 and some Section 235 applicants, a fee system program in 15 Area Offices, and a default counseling program in 19 cities.

Equal Opportunity-Over the past four years, HUD has been expanding steadily its efforts to assure equal opportunity in housing and equal employment opportunities.

In the wake of President Nixon's historic statement on equal opportunity in housing, the Department took a number of steps:

New project selection criteria for subsidized housing were issued last February to encourage development of subsidized housing outside

areas of minority concentration. The criteria set standards on a priority basis depending on the project's response to housing needs, creation of non-segregated housing, avoidance of concentrations of subsidized housing, and on how well it meets planning, environmental, and performance objectives.

An evaluation of the first five months' use of the criteria revealed that only 13 percent of all proposals were rejected and contrary to early speculation, the criteria did not prevent HUD approval of needed proposals in areas of minority con

centration.

• Affirmative marketing regulations were issued to assure that all segments of the population can be made aware of the availability of HUD-assisted housing. To supplement these regulations, fair housing advertising guidelines were issued.

In the area of equal employment opportunities, HUD-through Executive Order 11246-helped provide opportunities to minority artisans and workers to work on federally funded construction projects.

For the first time, a six-volume Registry of Minority Construction Contractors and Subcontractors was prepared, as was a comprehensive manual on Opportunities for Minority Entrepreneurs in HUD programs.

Community Development-Over the four-year period, greatly improved delivery systems were devel