Randy Neugebauer: “I believe there is a concept that I strongly support, and one that I think a lot of Members of this body support, that…”

“I believe there is a concept that I strongly support, and one that I think a lot of Members of this body support, that when government is too prescriptive, then good ideas and innovation get suppressed. This is the reason I brought forward this amendment, because in H.R. 3524, it requires that all housing units demolished under the HOPE VI grant program be replaced on a one-for-one basis. What we know is that this is a new provision in the HOPE VI program. One of the things that concerns me most about this is in many cases it is not necessarily feasible for us to go back on a one-for-one basis, nor may it be a need in that particular community. Chairman Waters and I had a chance to travel down to New Orleans and see some of the activities going on down there, and what we saw is some units that were brought back on a one-for-one basis that were vacant, were unoccupied, which indicated there may be some resistance to coming back to that particular neighborhood. What we also know with the HOPE VI program is that this program was designed to replace some very terrible housing conditions, an old, failed system of putting all of these low-income systems in a very concentrated area, and we found out very quickly that that was not a successful program.”