At the same time, while Hill Democrats and the administration appear to have the momentum to make substantial changes to federal housing policy, the extent to which the government should shoulder this burden remains a subject of lively debate.

Orlando Cabrera, who was a deputy HUD secretary for public and Indian housing in the Bush administration, says encouraging private investment in housing was one of the positive legacies of the Bush years and should continue. “I don’t believe the federal government has the sole responsibility of taking care of folks, whether they are elderly or disabled or families with kids,” said Cabrera, now an attorney who specializes in affordable-housing issues. “At the end of the day, this is a broader issue of what we want our tax policy to be. I believe the federal government has a role here, but I don’t think it has an exclusive role.”

Building the Status Quo

The federal government’s role in public housing began in the New Deal, when Congress and President Franklin D. Roosevelt looked for ways to improve what the 1937 Housing Act referred to as “unsafe and unsanitary” conditions in many urban slums. In his 1944 State of the Union address, Roosevelt declared “the right of every family to a decent home.” Even so, federal affordable housing has never been guaranteed to all those who are eligible based on their income — generally around the poverty level.

Housing advocates estimate that public housing and Section 8 serve about 4.5 million families — only about one in four that qualify. The shortfall is so large that adding dollars won’t solve the problem, experts say.

“The huge issue is that our existing programs serve a tiny fraction of the people in need,” said Margery Austin Turner, director of the Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center at the Urban Institute, who, like Rice, wants a fundamental overhaul of policy. “Incremental adjustments and improvements aren’t going to close the gap between what low-income working families can afford to pay for housing and what housing costs in the market,” she said.

Those lucky enough to get into public housing or receive a voucher pay no more than 30 percent of their incomes in rent, the government definition of housing affordability. Poor households that don’t get assistance — about 12 million nationwide — face difficult choices. Some double up with family members and friends. Others pay the majority of their incomes in rent while forgoing other necessities. Those who are most desperate pay slumlords to live in substandard conditions, squat in abandoned structures, or move in and out of homeless shelters, motels and cars.

Last year, a survey of hundreds of school districts showed a 25 percent increase in the number of homeless children. But it isn’t just the current weak economy that’s driving more and more of the poorest renters in cities and towns nationwide to seek aid. The confluence of long-term economic trends and public policy shifts has intensified the problem.

For years, growth in the number of renters at all income levels has far outpaced the construction of new rental units. And beyond cutting back the level of spending on public housing operations and maintenance, the Bush administration set policies at HUD that effectively reduced the number of rental vouchers in use. Meanwhile, demolitions under HOPE VI, signed into law by President George Bush in 1992, have driven a net loss of about 165,000 public housing units since 1995.

On top of it all, the real estate bubble earlier this decade made housing more expensive for everyone. The number of poor families spending more than half their income on shelter shot up by a third between 2000 and 2007, and that was even before the recession cut deeply into employment and earnings.

In this environment, after years of being maligned on all sides, public housing is starting to look pretty good.

“We have to be strategic about the public housing stock that exists,” Turner said. “I think it would be a mistake to just go on a rampage of tearing it all down because there are a lot of housing markets that, if they aren’t tight right now, they will be pretty soon. If we lose our stock of publicly subsidized, outside-the-market rental housing, it’s going to be increasingly difficult for low-income families.”

The Case for Public Housing

Those who study public housing say the worst of it has been cleared away as part of HOPE VI and other endeavors. The remaining stock is largely in better condition and located in neighborhoods that are less impoverished than those where apartments have been demolished. Of the country’s 1.2 million available public housing units, about 60 percent are in census tracts that have low or moderate poverty rates.

Not only that, these experts say, in many instances public housing is a better option for renters and for the government than privately operated subsidized rentals.

“Public housing is in better shape, in a lot of ways, than it has been,” said Alex F. Schwartz, a professor of housing policy at the New School for Management and Urban Policy. “Public housing is more flexible; it can serve a wider range of incomes, and if it’s well managed, it can survive in perpetuity.”

Henry Cisneros, who was President Bill Clinton’s first HUD secretary, says the housing projects developed under HOPE VI have helped transform the way people think about assisted housing.

“Public housing in the new iteration is becoming a plus in many communities,” said Cisneros, who recently wrote a book, “From Despair to Hope,” on the results of HOPE VI. “What used to be kind of a sinkhole within a city where no investment could occur because of the crime and deterioration today are magnets for investment in the adjacent blocks.”

That said, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates that public housing units need at least $22 billion in upkeep that has been deferred in part because HUD’s operating and repair budgets haven’t been large enough to fully cover maintenance costs.

“Given some of the underfunding that these programs have suffered in recent years, it requires a significant investment just to restore some of these programs to stability, and that’s an important step,” said the Center’s Rice.

But even with those costs, the Center calculates that if you take into account the amount already spent on these units, it would cost about 8 percent less to keep them in use than to tear them down and finance an equivalent number of Section 8 vouchers.

“Federal assisted housing stock preservation is less expensive than development, and this stock has been the recipient of significant federal investment over the years,” said Danna Fischer, legislative director and counsel for the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an advocacy group that focuses solely on the needs of the poorest renters. “We’re not going to get another public housing unit the way the existing ones were created. Preservation, whether it’s public housing or any other assisted housing stock, is more cost-effective than building new units.”

Supporters of this view say public housing developments are better choices for certain types of families who typically have trouble finding places to live when they’re given Section 8 vouchers and told to go into the private marketplace and find a place on their own.

The elderly, the disabled and bigger families in search of more than three bedrooms all may be better off in buildings that cater specifically to their needs, housing advocates say. In certain locales, such as rural areas that have few rental units of any type, low-income families often can’t find landlords who will accept their vouchers.

The Urban Institute’s Turner cautions, however, that relying solely on a blanket policy of preserving existing public housing might not be the best approach, either; strategic redevelopment, including a plan to replace each unit torn down, would be better. “There is still some of it located in very distressed neighborhoods or in excessively big concentrations,” she said. “I would move forward with preservation high on the agenda, but not the only thing.”

Until now, most HOPE VI projects have been designed to replace old public housing with a smaller number of units for the very poor. But in line with Turner’s recommendation, housing advocates and Democrats in Congress have been pushing for changes in the program to require one-for-one replacement of all affordable units that are demolished.

Housing experts say this need for preservation extends also to the program known as project-based Section 8. These privately owned properties often look like housing projects to outsiders because the federal government essentially rents out an entire building and sublets it to subsidized tenants — most often specialized populations such as the elderly or people with disabilities.

The number of affordable units in the project-based Section 8 program has dropped to about 1.3 million from about 1.7 million in the early 1990s. Property owners have sometimes withdrawn from the program when they determined that they could make more money by renting in the private market. In addition, many landlords have expressed frustration with delays in HUD’s rental payments.

At the same time, advocates for the poor are pushing for a doubling of the number of Section 8 vouchers, which has hovered around 2 million in recent years. “We would like to see 200,000 new vouchers every year for the next 10 years, so you get a total of 2 million more,” Fischer said. “You need hard units, but you need additional vouchers to meet demand.”

Culture of Dependency?

Assisted housing has long had its critics, particularly among conservatives who question the federal government’s role. And despite the apparent growing pressure to expand federal housing subsidies, some of these critics are warning anew that an increase in aid would do more harm than good.

Ronald D. Utt, a housing expert at the conservative Heritage Foundation, says public housing and Section 8 alike create a culture of dependency that doesn’t encourage families to work or to improve their lot in life. Moreover, he argues, these programs have a history of mismanagement and waste. “At the moment, as currently configured, they really perform a custodial function,” Utt said. “For those lucky enough to get into them, once you get in, nothing is expected of you.”

He suggests that it would be better to give time-limited aid, such as unemployment benefits, to workers who need temporary help because of economic troubles, “as opposed to taking somebody who was once more or less self-sufficient and making them totally dependent on government for everything.”

Although the HUD policies of the Bush administration have been widely criticized by the Obama White House and the housing advocacy community for neglecting needy renters, those who administered those policies remember their efforts differently. Housing programs are now more efficient and results-oriented, Cabrera said.

The Bush administration also tried unsuccessfully for several years to kill HOPE VI, but the objections were largely that the program was inefficient and poorly managed. In the end, projects were streamlined and money that had been awarded was finally spent during the Bush years, Cabrera said. In addition, he said, public housing authorities in general became more efficient.

“I think there was terrific policy achievement in terms of moving toward an asset-management model,” Cabrera said. “It took housing authorities from living in a netherworld in which basic business principles didn’t apply and drove them toward the real world.”

And while the Bush administration didn’t focus on building housing for the poor in particular, it did expand the Low Income Housing Tax Credit program, which is administered by the Treasury Department to encourage private developers to build “affordable” housing. Those units aren’t necessarily cheap enough for the poorest families, however, unless they have Section 8 voucher or other assistance. Still, the role of private developers should continue, Cabrera said.

“One of the things I would hope is that we remember how much good has been done using the public-private model, because that has worked,” he said. “The government has rarely been very good at building things and running them, and even if they do build them, they are not very good at keeping them up.”

Housing advocates and the Obama administration aren’t entirely dismissive of the Bush administration efforts to make HUD programs more efficient and involve private developers. The current administration has expressed interest in continuing both public and private development efforts.

Vouchers’ Mixed Bag

Beyond public housing, Democrats and the administration also are moving toward overhauling the Section 8 voucher program, which hasn’t lived up to its promise as a method of improving the lot of impoverished families.

“In terms of the ability to de-concentrate poverty, it’s a mixed bag,” said Schwartz of the New School. “It tends not to overcome issues of racial segregation and discrimination. In general, it really tracks very closely with the general distribution of rental housing, which more and more is found in lower-income and predominately minority neighborhoods.”

Cisneros says one of the lessons from HOPE VI is that replacing public housing with vouchers wasn’t always good for the families who were displaced.

“Many of them ended up in new ghettos of Section 8 because they took the path of least resistance and because landlords were unscrupulous and piled people on top of each other to get the money,” he said. “In some cases we didn’t improve people’s lives as we could have done.”

One idea promoted to solve the problem of concentrated poverty is to build more rental housing targeted toward low-income families in areas outside the inner city. Another is to make it easier for housing authorities to provide the maximum number of vouchers to families for use across jurisdictions, and to make it easier for private landlords to participate.

The Section 8 Voucher Reform Act, sponsored by California Democrat Maxine Waters , would enact some of those changes. That measure and others designed to spur the production of low-income housing are now making their way through the House Financial Services Committee.

In the bigger picture, though, experts say what’s needed are grander solutions: new ways to strategically invest government dollars to continue to encourage private investment in neighborhoods, better coordinate resources and planning among all government programs and all levels of government, and expand the living options of the destitute.

“It’s the idea that this is not just about housing,” said Michael Kelly, executive director of the District of Columbia Housing Authority and president of the Council for Large Public Housing Authorities. “It’s about creating healthy neighborhoods so there’s housing for various income levels. There have to be good schools. There has to be retail that’s walkable. There has to be recognition that public transportation is key for developing healthier communities.”

The Obama administration is working toward an enhanced version of HOPE VI that would not only revitalize public housing but also add more community and social services for needy residents. HUD is also in talks with the Department of Energy and the Department of Transportation to ensure that housing development and redevelopment plans are sustainable.

“We’re now moving off of defense,” said HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan in a recent interview, by way of characterizing the Obama administration’s attempts to add money to the budget for affordable housing. “We can now begin to think more creatively and constructively about how to bring these programs into the 21st century.”