About 500 people marched in the Hill District yesterday to protest another year of federal cuts in affordable housing that likely will mean layoffs in Pittsburgh. The Philadelphia Housing Authority announced 350 layoffs Tuesday.

	Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Shawntika Rice, front left, and Lynne Wilson, front right, joined housing authority workers and other advocates for affordable housing for low-income people yesterday in protesting federal budget cuts. The group marched from Hill House to Freedom Corner in the Hill District. Click photo for larger image.

In rallies and daylong shutdowns that involved almost 100 agencies across the nation, public housing advocates skewered the Bush administration for budget shortfalls.

"We need to convey the severity of the single largest reduction in funding this agency has ever faced and what it means to the 20,000 residents we serve," said A. Fulton Meachem, executive director of the Housing Authority of the City of Pittsburgh.

Chanting "What do we want? Fair housing! When do we want it? Now!" residents of public housing, advocates of affordable housing and plumbers, carpenters, painters and security officers for housing authorities traipsed en masse from the Hill House to Freedom Corner along Centre Avenue.

Before the march, to a packed Kaufmann Auditorium, Frank Aggazio, executive director of the Allegheny County Housing Authority, said, "I've never seen a crisis like this."

Henry Wild, a resident of public housing in Ross, told the assembly, "Pick up a piece of paper and write those politicians and let them know how disgusted you are."

This year's federal allocation is 76 percent of the amount the federal government's own formula says a housing authority needs to operate. Last year's allocation was about 85 percent. The year before it was almost 89 percent.

"Subsidies continue to get cut, and prices go up," said Michelle Jackson-Washington, deputy director of the Pittsburgh Housing Authority. "We're avoiding them [layoffs] for as long as possible.

"If we don't have the money to pay police officers at night, what happens to security?" she asked. "What happens to the maintenance of leaking faucets? Snow removal?"

Demographers and housing experts have been warning of a coming crisis caused by diminishing housing options for the poor. Incentives to help low-income people buy homes, like tax credits, do not reach far enough to help the very poor, of whom many in public housing are elderly.

She added that more than 40 percent of the residents in public housing in the city work, "but they're not making enough to go to the private market."

The federal cutbacks will cause an ever expanding economic ripple, said Ms. Jackson-Washington. "We employ 480 people who pay taxes, and we have a very large vendor list" of people the authority pays for services.

The Allegheny County Housing Authority already has reduced its staff drastically over the past three years, from 280 to 165.

"What I'm hoping is that the climate in Washington has changed a little bit and that lawmakers can find it in their hearts" to reverse the misfortune, said Mr. Aggazio, whose housing authority oversees 3,200 public housing units at 36 sites, 10 of which are designated for the elderly. In nine others, most residents are elderly.

"It is not a stretch to believe that if the current trend continues, many housing authorities will simply go out of business," said Carl Greene, executive director of the Philadelphia Housing Authority, who initiated yesterday's national protest.

If housing authorities start going out of business, said Ms. Jackson-Washington, "homelessness will be the alternative."

"We're having an erosion in dollars for the lowest-income people," said Elizabeth G. Hersh, executive director of the Housing Alliance of Pennsylvania. She said her agency will use a recent survey of Pennsylvanians to lobby for political will that's been lacking.

The survey of 802 registered voters, conducted last summer on behalf of housing advocates in the state, ranked affordable housing second only to affordable health care as the top concerns.

The report indicated that a majority of those surveyed failed to recognize that a shortage of affordable houses is a problem, but of those who did, 88 percent put it in second place.

While public housing distributions have been cut for three straight years, a new federal formula has been devised to redistribute operating money from the Northeastern states to the Sun Belt. Donna White, HUD's national spokeswoman, said that is because a Harvard study showed that Southern states have been underfunded while Northeastern states have been overfunded.

"I urge President Bush to reverse course and come up with a new strategy for affordable housing," said Mr. Greene. "Stop the cut-and-run policy and restore the value held by most Americans of helping the vulnerable among us."