After a year of historic funding gains for Native housing, next year’s budget remains wildly uncertain, leaving tribes and Native housing organizations in limbo again.
Consider: President Joe Biden’s fiscal 2025 budget proposes a 21% cut for Native housing, reducing it from a record $1.34 billion to $1.05 billion. Meanwhile, House Republicans, who have vowed to slash spending across the federal government, pushed for a 9% increase that would provide $1.455 billion for Native housing programs.
Waiting to hear what Congress plans to appropriate for Native housing is nothing new. Even though this year’s funding levels could go up — or down — the uncertainty surrounding the budget highlights a critical issue that’s plagued Native housing organizations for decades.
“You can’t plan if you don’t know what you’re going to have,” says Douglas Marconi, Sr., the new(ish) executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National American Indian Housing Council (NAIHC). The instability, he told Tribal Business News, creates enormous challenges for tribes in planning and executing housing projects.
Marconi, an enrolled member of the Nez Perce Nation, joined the 50-year old housing nonprofit in February after three decades working for Indian housing authorities. His central goal as NAIHC’s top executive is to create funding stability by getting Congress to reauthorize the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act (NAHASDA), first passed in 1996 and last reauthorized in 2013.
NAHASDA covers everything from the Indian Housing Block Grant to the Section 184 loan program, which provides loans specifically for tribal members to obtain housing.
Reauthorizing NAHASDA is a necessary measure to address a growing set of income disparities in Indian Country, Marconi said. He pointed to a 2017 Housing and Urban Development report that said more than 16 percent of Native homes were overcrowded, compared to 2.2 percent nationally. That’s on top of a poverty rate nearly twice the national average, and a median household income 30 percent less than the national average, Marconi said.
Since NAHASDA’s expiration in 2013, Congress has forced tribes to wait every year to discover how much funding will be available. That has made it impossible to plan for or budget housing programs more than a year out, Marconi told Tribal Business News. In addition, funding levels have been mostly stagnant for years until this year’s bump. That means, effectively, that NAHASDA programs have lost purchasing power given rising costs and inflation, Marconi said.
Reauthorizing NAHASDA itself, rather than attaching related funding to yearly appropriations, would increase funding levels and enshrine each year’s appropriations in law, providing needed certainty, Marconi said during a recent conversation with Tribal Business News. His comments are shared below.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
In your view, what makes federal funding for Indian Housing so important?
It’s fulfilling, in essence, the trust treaty obligations that the United States has to Indians. We face unique housing and economic challenges in our various communities across Indian Country. There are huge disparities. It also contributes to a gap in wealth — owning a home is how you begin to build wealth, and that’s denied to a lot of people.
So, what can tribes do? Where can they go? Families are housed together and crowded. This reauthorization that we keep mentioning would provide program improvements to all of our tribal housing programs, including provisions to assist our tribal veterans, streamline our mortgage approval processes, and consolidate environmental reviews.
What makes reauthorizing NAHASDA so central to solving those problems?
Since the act expired (in 2013), we’ve been trying to secure increased funding through our annual appropriations. However, this strategy is unsustainable.
Why?
What stands out and is always an issue year after year is the lack of funding. It’s an understatement when we say that we don’t have funding. It’s not just a lack of funding, but a lack of continual funding, and the way the amount changes each year. It’s hard to plan construction activities, new developments, and staffing for the ongoing population growth that tribes experience.
So that creates bottlenecks and delays?
Oftentimes, when a tribe receives their block grant, they might be able to do a solicitation for architectural and engineering services for one year while this funding is available and then have to bank that, if you will, and wait for another allocation of funding to do the actual construction activities. Then you have to wait for the acquisition of materials. It all takes time, and you can’t plan for any of that if you don’t know the amounts that are going to be approved year over year.
Has that gotten worse post-pandemic?
Since COVID-19, we’ve really struggled to procure contractors. The cost to do business has risen — I don’t know what the national figures say, but I think (when I was at a tribal housing authority) we had 20% increases in costs when COVID first hit. All the layoffs, trying to find labor, trying to find materials…all those factors made the cost of doing business challenging.
So NAHASDA needs to be reauthorized to create permanent funding each year.
Streamlining the process, authorizing it, and making these permanent programs that are funded at levels (that consider) rising costs is very important.
Where does that stand? What are the hurdles ahead of reauthorization in a divided Congress?
I think you said it perfectly there with “divided Congress.” Our stance has always been trying to work on both sides of the aisle because when it comes right down to it, housing is a right to all citizens and tribal nations are struggling with.
Are you seeing any particular Congressional support for reauthorization?
As recently as July 10 this year, Senator Brian Schatz proposed another amendment in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act for this NAHASDA reauthorization. So we’re looking at that as an opportunity.
Beyond NAHASDA, what support is out there for Native housing?
Events like our national convention are revealing more and more opportunities out there for Native homeowners. There’s support coming from state agencies, as well as other federal agencies like the Department of Agriculture. There’s also philanthropic support.
