Former HUD secretary touts affordable housing

CENTERVILLE — Helping working-class and middle-class families become homeowners could be a major driver in the nation's economic recovery.

That may sound a lot like the mantra that helped burst the recent historic housing bubble in the first place, but a former housing official said this latest plan would be quite different and potentially much more successful in the long term.

Speaking in Davis County at the grand opening of a newly developed planned housing community, former U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros said that extending the federal government's homebuyer tax credit and getting back to "common sense" lending practices would be a good way to help push the economic recovery forward.

"What we want to do is produce a V-shaped recovery where we rise up and stay up versus a W-shaped economy that rises and then falls back down," he said.

"When we find things that work — like this homebuyer tax credit has worked — we can't risk not continuing it," he added.

Cisneros was the mayor of San Antonio prior to his stint as HUD chief in the Clinton administration.

Now he is the founder and chairman of CityView, an institutional investment firm based in Los Angeles that focuses on urban real estate, in-city housing and metropolitan infrastructure.

Cisneros said the company currently operates in 12 states and is involved in 45 developments across the country, having built about 7,000 homes.

Locally, CityView is an investor in the Pineae Gardens development in Centerville. The project is planned for 227 housing units, consisting of condominiums, townhouses and detached single-family homes.

CityView looks to invest in projects that involve the development of housing that falls in the middle range of a given area's real estate market, Cisneros said.

"Homes that firemen and policemen and teachers and nurses can afford," he said. "That's what we try to do."

He said that 88 percent of the homes that have been financed through CityView have met the working-class affordability criteria, including Pineae Gardens, where prices range from $159,000 to about $270,000.

Having gone through a divorce in December 2008, new condo owner Doris Donat said she was grateful to have the opportunity to buy an affordable home in a difficult housing market.

"I couldn't rent a place that's as beautiful as I'm living in," she said. "I'm very happy."

First-time homeowner Vilma Malespin, who immigrated from Nicaragua with her husband and three children, said buying a home was a goal she felt her family might not ever attain.

"I never thought I was going to buy (a house)," she said. "But it's amazing … I love my place, my condominium."

Cisneros said getting more individuals and families into homeownership could help more communities like Centerville improve their local economic fortunes in a lasting way and pull the country out of the downturn.

"Housing is a durable form of economic development," he said. "Each one of the rooftops is a disposable income and what will follow is stores and shops and retail."

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