The Federal Government must give the commissioners and administrators of the local housing authorities some credit for being reasonable people capable of devising a rent schedule that is fair both to HUD and to the tenants whom the program was meant to serve. Therefore, I urge Congress for passage of bills S. 4079, 4049, 4086, 4087, and 4088-except for A under section 1 of S. 4088, which should have the phrase "determined by the Secretary to have an adequate supply of housing" stricken. And subsection 2 under B should be amended by striking out the phrase "prescribed by the Secretary" and inserting in lieu thereof, "prescribed by local laws."

Thank you.

Senator BROOKE. Thank you very much, Mrs. King, for your statement, and I assure you that the entire text will be printed in the record. Has the 25 percent provision been put into effect in St. Louis?

Mrs. KING. That was one of our gains in the rent strike. Ours went into effect in October 1969

Senator BROOKE. So that is provided for in the law, but so far you have seen no improvements whatsoever in the maintenance of theMrs. KING. Maintenance is no better, but then, it is no worse; it is just as it was before.

Mr. STALEY. The next member is Mr. John Connolly, from Boston. STATEMENT OF JOHN P. CONNOLLY, COMMISSIONER, BOSTON

HOUSING AUTHORITY

Mr. CONNOLLY. Mr. Chairman, my name is John Connolly. I am a tenant in public housing in Boston, and I have been a tenant all my life. I am also a commissioner of the Boston Housing Authority. I want to speak to you today as a tenant.

Public housing has existed in this country since 1937. Since that time, public housing programs have grown in complexity. These programs have been designed and administered by professional bureaucrats, the people who have answered all the questions, the people who have had "custody" of the poor these many years.

It is only in the past few years that public housing officials and the public at large have become aware of others who are knowledgeable about public housing and who have a keen interest in the subject: the tenants who live there. This has been a strange and threatening notion to local housing authorities, one they have not accepted willingly.

This new awareness hasn't occurred by accident. In city after city, tenants have organized themselves, working thousands of volunteer hours, to come together as a force to improve their own lives.

Now we have reached a point in many cities where our power has to be taken into account by local auothorities. This didn't come easily. We have spent many years yelling to be noticed. We have met resistance and abuse. But, increasingly, local housing authorities are hearing us and the message is clear. We who are tenants know, in a much more immediate way than any manager, what it is like to be a tenant, what it is like to be victims of bureaucracy, of prejudice, of poverty. We know what should be changed and we insist on control of our own lives.

Public housing administration is a local function. The work we have done, this gains we have made, have been achieved by confrontation

with local authorities. Now we see a threat to our progress, a move by HUD to take local powers away from the authorities and lodge them in the comparative safety of Washington.

By seeking control of the definition of income limits, HUD is reaching out to remove a central responsibility of local authorities. If that power returns to Washington, many of the gains we have so agonizingly won will be swept away. Battles that we fought with local authorities at great cost will have to be fought again, this time with HUD.

I submit that tenants have acted with far greater responsibility than HUD is showing now. I can point to the hours of meetings, the work of organizing, the effort of persuading local housing officials that has brought us to where we are now.

The responsibility and the effectiveness of this vast volunteer effort in hundreds of localities was recognized just this week in a report issued by President Nixon's own Task Force on Low Income Housing. The report calls on HUD "to increase tenant participation in the operation, management, and improvement, of public housing projects."

I can point to many examples of effective and responsible work on the part of tenants in my own community. There is, for example, a national experiment, now underway in Boston to test tenant control of the management of a large public housing development, an experiment firmly in the control of a hard-working volunteer committee of tenants. We are hopeful this will lead eventually to a contract between the authority and the tenant committee turning over management and maintenance of the development to tenants.

Public housing tenants, responding to a State statute prohibiting arbitrary eviction, have acted jointly with staff of the Boston Housing Authority in implementing this law. Three tenants and two staff members now constitute a permanent board to hear appeals from eviction orders. Tenants and staff of the authority also have worked jointly to set down guidelines for transfers within public housing. Tenants and staff have worked out, through long collective bargaining sessions, a new lease between the authority and tenants, a lease which has dispensed with the confusing legal jargon and the fine print of previous leases. The lease, for the first time, spells out the duties of the authority to tenants, as well as the responsibilities of tenants to the authority.

Tenants in Boston have reached out to tenants in other communities in Massachusetts to act jointly in common problems. In January of this year tenants across the State formed the Massachusetts Alliance of Public Housing Tenants. The Massachusetts Department of Community Affairs, which administers State public housing programs, has recognized this organization as the official spokesman for tenants and its adviser on housing matters.

Finally, I can point to my own status as a commissioner. I didn't come to this status easily. I didn't come to it only through my own efforts. It is the fruit of hard work by many tenants in my city who worked through the political system, against hard odds, to seat a tenant on the policymaking board governing public housing in Boston. My appointment by Governor Francis Sargent, was made a year and a half ago, I have been joined, since then, by another tenant appointed by Mayor Kevin White. We and our chairman, who has long

been associated with tenant causes, now constitute a majority of our board.

Despite the authority's serious financial difficulties, we have, I believe, made progress toward a public housing program that serves, not oppresses, its tenants.

I believe other local authorities would benefit from the inclusion of tenants on their boards. And, by this, I do not mean the expansion of boards to include tenants, a move, currently coming into favor, which creates the old title, the "tenant commissioner" and a token office, intended to be permanently in the minority.

In this connection, we want to endorse specifically the final section of S. 4086 authorizing tenants to serve as commissioners of housing authorities, a provision that can put an end to prohibitions existing in many places.

We don't intend to have a minority voice in programs which affect our lives so intimately. We haven't come an easy road. We don't intend to stop now, even if our road now must lead to the doorstep of HUD.

But as we must ask you, as the body which has the power to stop backward steps in Federal programs, to curb HUD now by passing the amendments which can make public housing workable again and to reject provisions of the 1970 housing bill that would remove local controls over our rents.

Senator BROOKE. Thank you, Mr. Connolly, and specifically for endorsing that part of S. 4086 pertaining to tenant participation. I think this is more important every day. I feel very strongly about it. Obviously, they are included in the bill, and we are very pleased to have you, as a tenant commissioner, give your views on how it has been working. Mrs. King, in St. Louis, do you have tenant participation on the authority?

Mrs. KING. Yes; we do have two out of five, but we were able to approve the other three, even though they were not tenants. Our attorney general there said that we could not have any until he discovered that there was one in another part of Missouri, who had been there for 1 year already, so we ended up with two, and we were able to approve the other three. If he had not approved the other three people, who were on the board of commissioners

Senator BROOKE. How do you select these tenants?

Mrs. KING. They were elected by the tenants.

Senator BROOKE. How long have they been serving?
Mrs. KING. Since October.

Senator BROOKE. Has it worked well?

Mrs. KING. It has worked very well.

Senator BROOKE. Have there been improvements?

Mrs. KING. Most definitely.

Mr. STALEY. Mrs. Rosetta Wylie, from Philadelphia.

STATEMENT OF MRS. ROSE WYLIE, PRESIDENT, RESIDENT ADVISORY BOARD OF PHILADELPHIA

Mrs. WYLIE. Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I am glad to be here and to participate in the testimony by the National Tenants Organization on the subject of the financial crisis in public

housing. I am president of the resident advisory board of Philadelphia. In this capacity I represent 100,000 Philadelphians-parents, children, and senior citizens of low income-who live in pubisc housing in our city.

I have been asked to focus this morning on a specific provision of S. 3639, the administration's "reform" bill-I say "reform" with quotes around it and with a lot of skepticism. In this section, the administration attempts to impose a standard rent-income ratio upon all tenants of low-rent public housing. Specifically, the bill calls for every tenant to pay 20 percent of all income up to $3,500, and 25 percent of additional income, as rent in public housing projects. According to the administration, such a nationwide standard would "assure that the operating subsidy made available is allocated on a uniform and equitable basis." The HUD summary goes on to announce that: "The fixing of rents by local agencies is incompatible with the payment of subsidy for operating costs. Since the tenant rental charge constitutes the basis for the subsidy amount, it would, in effect, permit the local agency to control the amount of Federal subsidy."

Those are surprising sentiments, especially about a program which has striven over the years to encourage local autonomy and local responsiveness to local needs. It looks like the administration has really tried to destroy the public housing program by this blatant attempt to seize nationwide control of local public housing policies.

Do not underestimate the importance of retaining local responsiveness in the housing program. Of course we believe that a Federal presence is necessary to insure against local abuses-a federally imposed rent ceiling formula might be very valuable, for example. But we do believe very strongly that elimination of local responsiveness will be a terrible distortion of this program and that chances for tenant power on the local level will be destroyed if Washington seizes control of so vital an activity as setting rents. When tenants come in to say that their rent is too high, what will the local housing authoriy say? I will say, if this bill passes, "We don't set rents go talk to the HUD Regional Office." Is this where tenants should take their struggle? The national bureaucracy? Forget it. It is bad enough through the bureaucracy on the local level-but it would be impossible for tenants, individually of collectively, to have a meaningful voice in the policies that run their lives, if those policies were not made locally. We have a stronger voice today than ever before, and we don't intend to waste it on the Federal bureaucracy. We want to keep local deci sions out of the Federal policy mill. Rent setting doesn't belong in Washington; it belongs with the people and local agencies.

Beside the obvious dangers of big government moving into the realm of local policies in public housing, I've got one thing to say about the administration's proposed rent-income ratio: it is too highmuch too high, and, if it goes through, what you'll see is a moveout of the very poor from public housing and their replacement by what we might call the upper belt of the poor. I'm sure that this is what HUD really wants. And these families, if they are forced to move. have no place to go but back to the overcrowded, substandard housing from which public housing saved them. Is a bigger rent roll to be had at the expense of sending these families back to the slum?

Twenty-five percent, even 20 percent is too much for people to pay for housing, especially when their economic resources are minimal. It is true that many tenants in public housing, until the HUD Act of 1969, were paying more than 25 percent for rent, which was even greater hardship; and happily, the Congress outlawed this in the HUD Act of 1969 by imposing a 25-percent rent ceiling. I might mention that when Congress passed the 25-percent rent-income ratio ceiling, it expressly stated that all rents were not to be raised to that level. The intention that 25 percent be a maximum, not a norm, was explicit. Unfortunately, the HUD policymakers who drafted S. 3639 do not share Congress concern on this point. They have decided that anybody can afford a 25-percent rent-income ratio. And those who can't afford too bad, we'll fill their unit with somebody who can.

it;

I'd like you to think of housing cost the way we think of the progressive income tax. With income tax, the Government adopted a policy of fair play; the more money you have, the higher your tax rate. Those with the very least financial resources pay less, sometimes nothing at all, since to tax them even slightly would explode their fragile system of meeting daily expenses with minimal income.

Unfortunately, in other areas of the American system, and housing especially, the progressive model has long been upside down. In housing, the poor pay more; they pay more, proportionately, out of their small incomes, than do people of the middle class and of the highest income brackets. Look at these figures from a recent study of 1968 rental housing in New York City. They are contained on chart I, attached to this statement. As you see, the median rent-income ratio, excluding welfare families, was 19 percent. But, again excluding welfare families, New York had more than one-half million households paying more than 25 percent of their incomes for rent, and of these, only 20,000 families-less than 4 percent-had incomes above $10,000 a year. At the other end of the scale, at least 360,000 of these familiesmore than two-thirds-had incomes below $5,000.

For a picture of rent-income ratios nationwide I have attached a second chart, prepared by the research staff of the Douglas Commission on Urban Problems and adopted from the 1960 Census of Housing. You will notice that of all families paying more than 35 percent of their income for rent, 95 percent had incomes below $5,000. Meanwhile, 74 percent of the families with incomes above $15,000 paid less than 10 percent of their incomes for housing. According to these figures, more than 90 percent of all families with incomes over $8,000 paid less than 20 percent of their incomes for housing. And yet the administration comes in with a bill to make low-income families pay 20 and 25 percent for rent in federally assisted low-rent housing. The injustice of such a policy is right out in the open. It is clear, I think, that the benefit of low housing cost in this country is enjoyed not by the poor or even moderate income families but by the class of households who earn over $8,000 a year.

Looking at the proposed rent-income ratio from this context, the question is not whether a 25-percent limit would help people by preventing them from paying more than 25 percent. After all, the 25-percent limit is already on the books, thanks to the Brooke amendment to the HUD Act of 1969. The real question is whether legislating a 20-25 percent standard would, in effect, legitimize an unfair