With money tight for almost everything, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee has come up with a creative way to fund an affordable housing trust fund: Dividend payments by banks receiving bailout money from Uncle Sam.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank , D-Mass., has introduced legislation that would send $1 billion in dividends paid to the Troubled Asset Relief Program to the National Housing Trust Fund.

The housing fund was created by Congress in 2007 to ensure a steady base of public funding would be available for the construction, rehabilitation and preservation of affordable housing units. But it got no money last year as lawmakers stretched out spending in the face of declining revenues.

President Obama’s budget for next year proposes $1 billion for the fund’s coffers.

Frank’s bill would also direct $1.5 billion to the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, a housing program enacted last summer. That program was put in place as a way for state and local governments to acquire and redevelop foreclosed properties.

It would direct $2 billion to a Department of Housing and Urban Development fund designed to aid homeowners struggling to make mortgage payments and another $2 billion for the department to develop a new program that would aid multifamily homes in the midst of default or foreclosure.

Under the $700 billion financial bailout program, banks gave the government preferred shares that can yield an annual dividend of 5 percent for the first five years, followed by 9 percent per year until the capital is repaid.

Treasury has reported receiving more than $4 billion in dividend payments so far.

The bill continues Frank’s efforts to direct TARP funding to ease the foreclosure crisis believed to be at the core of the current economic downturn.

But the legislation, which has three Democratic co-sponsors, is likely to draw the ire of many Republicans who have argued for months that TARP has become a “slush fund” for all kinds of purposes. They want dividend payments and returned funds to go to pay down the national debt.