Several speakers touched upon the issue of housing during last week’s Democratic National Convention, which was held at the FleetCenter in Boston.

It affects everyone in the country, but it wasn’t a focus of the politicians who converged on Boston for the Democratic National Convention last week. Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts mentioned it briefly, as did U.S. Senate candidate Barack Obama of Illinois and Mayor Jack Ford of Toledo, Ohio.

Even though everyone needs somewhere to sleep at night, issues surrounding housing – especially affordable housing – weren’t talked about in depth during the convention. That didn’t mean, however, that the issue wasn’t on the minds of delegates and other people in town for the convention. Voters should be concerned about housing’s place on the agendas of both parties, said Helen Kanovsky, the chief operating officer of the AFL-CIO Housing Investment Trust, at a panel discussion held Wednesday of last week, noting the scarcity of the subject in the week’s speeches.

Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez and Stamford Mayor Dannel Malloy, both delegates for presidential nominee John Kerry, hoped that, even though the issue wasn’t brought up during the nationally televised speeches, a Kerry administration would make it a priority.

Kerry and the Democrats understand the pressures that burden central cities and other metropolitan areas, Perez said.

Malloy agreed. A third-time delegate, he wants to see the perception of affordable housing change and for people to stop thinking of it as a “ghetto creation,” he said.

“I think Kerry and Edwards’ administration is going to promote affordable housing,” Malloy said, standing in a hallway at the FleetCenter during the DNC’s Tuesday night proceedings. “When John Kerry gets elected, I suspect he’ll appoint to [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] someone who actually cares about housing.”

‘A Powerful Role’

Perez, a first-time delegate to the convention and an organizer of the Hispanic Caucus, admires some work Kerry has done for housing. Among the programs Kerry pushed to instate was YouthBuild, which provides at-risk young people with basic education and skill training in return for building affordable housing.

Cities coping with shortages in affordable housing should take programs like that and look beyond them, Perez said. He stressed the importance of being creative when trying to maintain and build affordable housing.

“Because the federal government, over the last 20 years, has gotten out of the business of providing true subsidized housing … we have to use the market and be creative,” Perez said from the lobby of the Connecticut delegation’s Boston hotel last week.

Perez has his own ways of getting creative and hopes the federal government can help cities and towns push toward long-term solutions to housing problems.

“Housing is such a big key in stabilizing communities – especially lower-income communities,” he said.

Promoting homeownership is one of the best ways to stabilize those communities, Perez said. Creative city leaders can find ways to use subsidy money from the federal government to help citizens buy homes, he noted, and helping people buy homes also can be less expensive than subsidizing rents in the long run.

Education and homeownership are the two most important barometers of Americans’ success, he added.

“If you get a bachelor’s degree and you get a house, you become an American,” Perez said.

The federal government should look at how to be creative with redevelopment money to encourage partnerships to increase supply and assist in transition to homeownerships and to help break the cycle of lower-income people moving from substandard home to substandard home, he said.

Perez is working toward those goals in Hartford and money from the federal government is an integral part of what the city does. The private housing market downtown has been picking up lately as a result of projects like Hartford 21, which will bring luxury, market-rate apartments to the city.

Although those projects are necessary to make the revitalization of downtown Hartford a success, they could pose something of a danger to existing affordable housing in the city, Perez said. But his goals don’t include gentrification. Perez hopes the new housing complexes will stimulate the housing market and diversify the downtown, as well as bring new life into businesses that are located there.

“[It’s] the feet on the street sort of notion,” he said.

The city itself has put money into projects like Adriaen’s Landing, a mixed-use, waterfront development.

“But the intent is not to set up pressure and competition for low-income families,” Perez said.

In addition to market-rate housing and quality affordable housing, the city also needs more assisted-living complexes for the elderly. There is a shortage now, Perez said.

“These choices have to be out there,” he said.

Federal money plays an important part in offering those choices and Kerry’s administration would place importance on maintaining current levels of funding and revisit current policies with an eye toward what worked and what did not, “rather than letting it fall off the cliff,” he said. Perez hopes Kerry’s administration would look at programs like the Housing Act of 1996 and build on those.

“Federal government has a powerful role,” Perez said.

Kerry’s published platform, “Our Plan for America,” does not mention housing. The section on the economy starts by talking of other challenges.

“Today, our nation faces immense economic challenges: spiraling health care costs, historic job loss, rising tuition and energy costs and a looming Social Security and Medicare solvency challenge,” reads the plan.

But Perez hopes a Kerry administration would keep housing issues at the forefront and will recognize that many cities and towns across the country will want to increase homeownership in the near future.

“I think, in order to get it right, local communities like Hartford need to have that help,” he said.

The federal government should pay attention to that need and to community leaders’ ideas, Perez said. One of his is that instead of homebuyers applying for rebates that they receive after buying a home, the savings should be built in and available upfront.

He also likes the idea of having a housing trust, where some affordable units are kept affordable long-term. That would allow people time to get a college degree or otherwise get their life on track and to break the cycle of moving from affordable home to affordable home, Perez said.

“All these things require time,” he said. “The government has shown, time and time again, it can do this.”

‘Severe’ Problems

The Clinton administration did do it, said Andrew Cuomo, who served as secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton, at a panel discussion on housing at the Sheraton Boston Hotel in Boston last week.

“We had a president of the United States who cared [about housing],” Cuomo told a roomful of delegates and journalists, before blasting the Bush administration’s record on housing. The country’s prosperity before Sept. 11, 2001, should have been used to improve the state of affordable housing, but Bush’s staff did not focus enough on those issues, Cuomo said.

“On the numbers, I think this was a squandered opportunity,” he said. “We have the highest need for affordable housing ever.”

Nicolas Retsinas, the director of Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, also spoke on the panel and agreed with Cuomo. The country went through 10 years of prosperity, but one-eighth of the population spends more than 50 percent of their income on housing, Retsinas said.

“The housing problems are becoming more severe,” he said.

Overcrowding has also increased recently, Retsinas said. It was declining until the 1980s and most thought the days of “teeming cities” were behind us, but that isn’t the case anymore.

“Guess what? [Overcrowding] is going up,” Retsinas said.

The federal government needs a more progressive agenda on housing, rather than subscribing to the belief that the market will fix itself, he said.

“The market will not self-correct,” he said.

Part of the problem is that the economy is creating low-paying jobs, a problem Kerry addresses in his “Plan for America” by suggesting the minimum wage be raised to $7 an hour and that tax breaks be given to companies that create new jobs that stay in the United States.

“There is a disconnect between our hiring and our labor markets,” Retsinas said.

Cuomo gave the Bush administration credit for addressing issues facing the chronically homeless, but noted that those efforts don’t help most families with unemployed or underemployed breadwinners. He also condemned the administration’s efforts to scale back funding for Section 8 and HOPE VI – the program that awards cities money to redevelop public housing.

Retsinas agreed.

“This is not the time to dismantle the most progressive housing program [HOPE VI] we’ve had in this country in 60 years,” he said.

Instead of cutting funding for programs that work, such as Section 8 and HOPE VI, the next administration should instead simplify the process of funding affordable housing, Cuomo said.

Ron Gonzales, the mayor of San Jose, Calif., also spoke about the complexity of funding housing at the panel discussion.

“No financing package that I’ve ever seen … doesn’t look like a bowl of spaghetti,” he told the crowd.

Funding sources for affordable housing projects vary so much it can be difficult to understand, Gonzales said. Money usually comes from the city that is building the project, the state, the federal government and local banks and investors, he said.

Funding can be made simpler, Cuomo said, and the next administration should funnel more money into already successful programs.

“I don’t think we need to reinvent the wheel,” he said.

Even though Americans watching their televisions last week didn’t get an earful of promises for affordable housing, some speakers did mention it.

“I believe we can provide … homes to the homeless and reclaim young people in cities across America from violence and despair,” said Obama, the Illinois state senator and U.S. Senate candidate, during his Tuesday night keynote speech, which received whoops and cheers from the DNC crowd inside the FleetCenter.

Kennedy mentioned a hope that Democrats could provide “a society … that shelters the homeless and cares for the sick so that none must walk alone” during his speech.

But Ford, the mayor of Toledo, Ohio, was the only one to make specific promises about the Democrats’ agenda on housing.

He told DNC attendees that if Kerry wins the White House in November, “urban America will finally get a truly fair housing policy, a common-sense approach to fixing our economy and an administration that works with us, not against us.”