Mass. Budget Cuts Hit City Housing

While the full ramifications of recent state budget cuts and economic troubles on local communities are not yet clear, various city functions are already feeling the pinch—including resident service and capital improvement programs run by the Cambridge Housing Authority.

The cuts, announced by Mass. Gov. Deval L. Patrick ’78 earlier this month in response to the deepening economic crisis, trimmed over $1 billion from the state budget.

The cuts do not directly affect capital improvement plans for affordable housing in Cambridge, but two resident service programs—the nationally-recognized Work Force and Community Computer Center programs—have seen their collective state budget earmark of $150,000 halved.

Work Force—originally formulated as a high school dropout prevention program—is a youth development program for low-income students in grades eight through 12 and offers college preparation and scholarships. In 2008, the program served over 130 students and achieved a 100 percent graduation rate and a 92 percent college matriculation rate.

As a result of the cuts, “students would probably receive fewer services,” said Steven Swanger, the CHA’s director of resident services. “If we can’t replace the funding, it would mean cutting back and looking for alternative funding, but we’re not prepared to cut this program [entirely] at this point.”

The Community Computer Center program—which offers computer classes for adults and computer access for Work Force students—would likely be eliminated completely, Swanger said.

“When you close a computer center, the computers will still be there, and the kids can still use the computers,” Swanger said. “But we wouldn’t be able to staff the center with teachers teaching adults how to use them.”

While capital improvement plans for affordable housing have not been directly affected by the budget cuts—state and federal support for affordable housing largely comes in the form of bonds and low-income housing tax credits—the recent economic crisis has made the value of such investments decrease.

“It used to be that if we got an allocation of tax credits, say a million dollars, we could actually get out of the investor about $900,000,” said CHA Director of Planning and Development Terry Dumas. “Now we probably get 780,000, so we’ve lost almost 14 percent of the power of the tax credit program.”

City officials expressed concern that although local aid has been protected in the budget thus far, further rounds of cuts would likely dig into local aid, affecting more basic services such as police and fire departments.

“If you have to make big cuts, which these are, there’s only two places that the money can come from,” said State Representative Alice K. Wolf, whose district includes Harvard and much of the western part of Cambridge. “One is health and human services, the other is local aid and basic school aid.”

Despite the gloomy fiscal outlook, officials said they would continue to look for ways to weather the economic crisis.

“I’m not prepared to tell you at this point that we’re going to lay off staff or stop serving kids,” said Swanger, referring to Work Force. “We will fight tooth and nail to keep it going and keep it going as it exists now.”

—Staff writer Peter F Zhu can be reached at pzhu@fas.harvard.edu.