Anniversary Category: News Clippings

“many of the cuts would hit rural America hard, on items ranging from telephones to electricity to bus service, housing, water and sewers…”

The USDA is using its funds to subsidize rents and not build more apartments.

Plans to spend $1.4 billion on low-income rural housing this fiscal year are reported to have been cut one-third by the Nixon administration. Advocates of the program say it has no budgetary impact and such a cut is unnecessary.

Ten Texans are among the more than 100 founders of a National Rural Housing Coalition, organized Friday to work for better conditions for the more than six million rural American families.

The NRHC was incorporated in the District of Columbia on December 17, 1969. Among the signers on the articles of incorporation: Clay Cochran and Jim Hightower, who was the first NRHC employee.

Critics charge the bill would devastate the rural poor and sound “the death knell of rural housing construction.”

Federal housing loans for poor, rural, families were cut nearly in half by the House Friday.

Rural advocates say that while the funding is more generous than it might have been, given the budget cutting mood in Congress, rural America will suffer.

“Federal support for rural development was cut by nearly 70 percent during the Reagan administration. Yet the majority of the remaining funds failed to reach the neediest rural communities. The federal response to these communities has been plainly inadequate.” -Robert Rapoza