Melvin Watt: “let me just take a minute and commend the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Davis] for the powerful words that he has spoken…”

“let me just take a minute and commend the gentleman from Illinois [Mr. Davis] for the powerful words that he has spoken and for the manner in which he has spoken them. A lot of us have been involved in this debate for 2 or 3 days now, and some of us may be losing perspective, but the gentleman was right on point. I am fascinated by the argument that our chairman of the subcommittee has used with this chart here, because as I recall, all of us supported what we call scattered-site housing. To hear my Republican colleagues now come back and say that by encouraging scattered-site housing and the movement out to the suburbs, all of a sudden we have created the problem now where we have public housing that has an over-concentration of the very poor, is amazing to me. We did not create this problem; the problem got created because we have too many poor people in this country and not enough public housing, not enough housing for people whether they are very poor or whether they are the working poor.”