ALASKA NATIVES COMMISSION
JOINT FEDERAL-STATE COMMISSION
ON
POLICIES AND PROGRAMS AFFECTING
ALASKA NATIVES
4000 Old Seward Highway, Suite 100
Anchorage,
Alaska 99503
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Witness List | PDF
Version
(On record.)
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: So the next people
on the list are Marsha McCrimmon, Bessie O’Rourke, and Edward
Casey; and Marsha is this --
MS. O'R0URKE: I'm Bessie.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Bessie, okay.
MS. O'ROURKE: Bessie O'Rourke.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Bessie, then would you like to address the Commission?
MS. O'ROURKE: Sure, I'd be glad to.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Okay.
MS. O'ROURKE: My name is Bessie O'Rourke
. I’m the Housing Director for the North Slope Borough. I’ve
worked in Barrow for about seven years for those in the field
of housing. My office is in Barrow. We serve the same region
that Jim Christensen was talking about earlier, the North Slope
region of the state, down to
Anaktuvuk Pass, including seven outlying villages. None of them, of course, are road accessible. All of them, including Barrow, are subject to very extreme climatic conditions. Both of those factors, as well as such facts as a lack of daylight in some portions of the year, all have critical effects on housing resources.
My office manages the operations of a Regional Housing Authority. We also run municipal housing rental housing throughout all those villages, including Barrow. My testimony is directed to issues primarily involving HUD housing, which we manage through the housing authority. Within our generation, there have been families in our region who lived in sod houses. Housing quality has improved dramatically, but there remain many families living several generations to one home, or living with abuse or substance abuse, or living in terribly substandard units. There is not enough decent housing in our region, and the existing programs need to be flexible enough to meet a broader spectrum of the need.
Housing shortages, in my opinion, contribute to and perpetuate a wide range of social ills. Both federal and state programs should take into account the fact that our region, and likely other rural regions of the state, lacks an adequate supply of decent housing, which is one of he most basic needs of people everywhere.
Our communities include both HUD Indian
and HUD public housing in the form of Mutual Help Home Ownership
Program; and in Barrow, a Low Rent Program. More development
through both of those programs is planned; however, federal
regulations for each of those programs too often have no relevance
to life in the arctic. For theoretically set to reflect our
costs of living, do not do so adequately. The remoteness of
our villages, as well as the extreme climate, contribute to
the high costs of living. One recent estimate of cost-of-living
differentials, using Seattle as a -- on the index at 100 placed
Barrow at 385; that is, an item that would cost $100 in Seattle
might cost $385 in Barrow. There are different cost-of-living
index -- there’s different cost-of-living index differential
data available. That was the one that I found that is the most
extreme. They range down to using Anchorage as a 100 value,
Barrow -- placing Barrow at 160.
The seven villages outside of Barrow within our region experience even higher costs on an average as distant and logistics add to the cost of transportation. The income limits for the HUD programs simply do not range high enough to make the very needy families eligible for what is really for them a critical resource. Payment calculations, as well as eligibility determinations, currently include the value of all household members' Permanent Fund Dividends, as well as Longevity Bonus income in the household. These unique Alaskan benefits should be excluded from payment and eligibility determinations. It makes a significant difference to eligibility often times, and affordability, to include these types of income. It frequently makes a substantive difference between being eligible and not being eligible and remaining in a substandard home.
One thing I might mention is that the State Legislature last year -- last session passed a Joint Resolution urging HUD to exclude these benefits -- these unique benefits, from payment and eligibility calculations in the HUD programs. Since the time that legis -- that resolution passed out of the State, it was forwarded to HUD, Senator Stevens has expressed his support; and the reaction from HUD to date appears to be one of inertia.
The effect of HUD's treatment of these benefits is that a family may find its monthly payment increased, so that a benefit is not realized, or the family may find it is not eligible to participate at all.
While regulatory change on the part of HUD may be a cumbersome process and not to be undertaken lightly, I think it is time that HUD recognized that the unique circumstances of Alaska do merit special treatment in their regulations. Unique state benefits designed to ease our lives and special expenses associated with subsistence not being taken into account in HUD regulations are but two examples of areas in which such reconsideration is merited. In fact, without such tailored regulations, the availability of the very programs HUD manages for the benefit of our eligible population is reduced.
Finally, it's not unusual to find that HUD’s regulations, which were written with the Lower 48 in mind, and apparently urban areas of the Lower 48, have absolutely no bearing on life in our communities. Nonetheless; when a regulation is on the books, we are told we must abide by it, despite its admitted inapplicability to our region. Such regulations as those which are intended to avoid the concentrations of low-income people in public housing, which have apparently given rise to slums and drug war zones in urban areas, really have very little relevance to our residents. Forcing compliance with such regulations sometimes paralyzes the housing authorities, arbitrarily denies the benefits of programs to residents, and can result in findings against the housing authorities which can affect their eligibility for further housing development money in the future. To make matters worse, HUD frequent -- HUD’s
response to this frequently is that there is one of helplessness;
that there is nothing that they can do to advocate for our
special needs; there is no way that they can take the initiative
and try to advocate for a regulatory change.
I think the housing needs of Native residents deserve fuller and more fair attentions from the federal government. In cooperation with local government and with the state, more of the critical needs of our residents can be addressed.
I'd like to thank everybody for giving me the time to comment today, and I'll be turning in some written
material in the way of comments as well, understand the Commission may be setting a hearing sometime in the near future in Barrow, and I welcome that news. I encourage you to travel to Barrow and to teleconference your hearings to our villages when you're in Barrow. I think you' d be - - it would be a very meaningful time for you. Thank you.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Well, thank you very much, Bessie. I think particularly one thing that stands out in my mind in your testimony is the -- let's say the applicability of the regulations governing, not only housing, but other things, I think, need to be examined. And, basically, I think that's what I hear you saying, that in the administration of some of these programs, some of the regulations are misdirected and need to be examined for the applicability to the particular areas which they -- they're designed -- or destined for.
MS. O'ROURKE: It's -- as an example, there is a regulation in the HUD Indian Housing Program - - and the Indian Housing Program is -- Indian for HUD is defined as Alaska Native or American Indian, so our program in the Indian housing portion of HUD is the Mutual Help Home Ownership Program, which is a good program. HUD has on the books regulations that require an examination of an income of a spread -- they call it the broad range of income -- of the spread of incomes in the community, so as to avoid a concentration of families within one Mutual Help project of one income category. And if your -- if you're talking about a village of a hundred families, or even Barrow where you're talking about, say, about a hundred Mutual Help homes, where everyone has lived there and been inter-related for hundreds of years, this concept of avoiding these pockets of economic depression and the slums that you might see in, say, Chicago, frequently will have the effect of paralyzing the operation of the housing authority; because HUD will say:
"I'm sorry, you're not complying with this
regulation. We don't know what it means; or we think we know
what it means. We can't tell you how to implement it. We have
no doubt,"
HUD says,
"that it was intended for places that are
far, far different from your region; but you can't proceed
until you've satisfied this arbitrary regulation."
And, as a result, our services to our communities just suffer.
That's one -- that is one of the places in which I think applicability of the regs needs to be examined. I can say that the Regional Housing Authorities have been given a great deal more autonomy over the years than they used to have. But I perceive, too often, both at the state and the federal level, that we have removed the bureaucrats, the rule makers, either to Washington, D.C., or to Juneau, and where it's easy to make regulations that look good, sound good, and maybe apply in some places, there's too little connection with the areas where the population -- the clients are, for the regulations to really make much sense; and then there's too much inertia on the part of the bureaucracy to try to change them or make them work better.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Okay, well, tha --
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: I think just that -- if I may?
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Go ahead.
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: Concerning the suitability of the homes, I've heard it said by an Eskimo:
"I used to live underground, and I was warm.
Now I live above ground, and I' m cold."
Can you comment on that?
MS. O'ROURKE: I think -- what we've experienced in -- at least in the arctic in housing development is in the Seventies and early Eighties, there was a lot of new housing construction; and it was stick-built construction. And frequently, I think, both in the field of residential construction, and in other facilities' construction as well, either the people who knew the appropriate design weren't involved, or the appropriate designs maybe hadn't been developed. So we have now houses that my office manages that have -- were probably not suitably designed for the arctic in the first place, and that are now maybe going on 15 years old; and we have some peculiar and probably unique to the circumpolar area, problems associated with a frozen ground and the permafrost, so that we have settling effects over the years, and that can create terrible structural problems involving staying warm, as an example, I think the design and engineering has progressed greatly; and, currently, what we are looking at and what we have some homebuilders using is a pre-fabricated foam panel design. Again, the houses still have to be on pilings, because of our ground conditions; but technology and equipment for leveling the units over the years, which just is a fact of life, has all been developed. So some of our newer construction is a lot more suitable and tests out on the energy ratings as very high l -- as highly energy efficient.
One of the challenges that faces us is to
create and work with owner builders and people who want input
into design for their own homes to create culturally relevant
designs. And partly those issues come up, because some of our
earlier construction, our stick-built units, have living rooms
that really weren't very big. And one of our most universal
comments when we talk to residents about homes is to create
a much larger living and dining area, because it’s such a central
part of the lifestyle, and particularly an extended family's
dynamics.
Another issue that's come up along those
lines is if you have a five-star plus home in energy efficiency,
then what we’ve found a number of families doing is poking
a hole in the ceiling to get some fresh air; because that was
the traditional method for air circulation. So we -- there's
good progress on this front, because some of those ideas and
those different backgrounds and beliefs about what a home should
be, and how it should be built and organized, are coming together,
and have come together in a good way; and in what we believe
will be a 1ot more energy efficient for a lot longer than the
stick-built homes of the Seventies ever were probably.
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: The reason I ask that is because at the hearing in Nome, one of the speakers, Eileen Norbert, stated that 47 percent of the houses are substandard and 43 percent need repair, and that about -- and I don't know where she got this figure -- 16 percent need replacement. Would you say this is also true from your area or similar?
MS. O'ROURKE: It may be similar. Our area
may be somewhat different in the sense that in the Seventies
and Eighties -- early Eighties, the North Slope Borough was
able to put dollars into some construction. That’s not to say -- I think in our area it would be correct to say that in every village there are families -- at least some number, and I don't have a count for you -- who are living in places that are literally uninhabitable. They are shacks that if you drove by and you didn’t
know the community, you would never imagine that someone lived
in. And we don't have enough either housing available to allow
people to leave those places. Our -- the percentage of those
units, I think, is higher in the villages than it is in Barrow,
but it exists and they exist in Barrow as well.
HUD defines a substandard unit as one that lacks -- one definition is one that lacks running water, or lacks a private bathroom facility, or a tub. Up until the last -- what? -- five or six years, none of our villages included that. Every single unit that we had everywhere was substandard according to HUD with grey water falling out on the ground, and a honey bucket pick up, and that's still the case in all of our villages except Barrow. So. . .
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: In -- I've noticed in many of the villages, when housing comes in, whether it's HUD, or ASHA, or whatever it was, that very frequently the problem of houses not being properly maintained creeps in. And I've also seen that, you know, many times there's -- the amount of money which is required to, let's say, paint the houses, or repair the certain things that are necessary, are out of the range of many people, particularly when it comes to plumbing and things of that sort. And I'm wondering whether that area has ever been addressed as far as making locally available the materials that are necessary for people to, you know, continue a maintenance project on their own homes?
MS. O'ROURKE: There's been a lot of efforts
along those lines, maybe not so effective over the years. One
component of the HUD home ownership program is that a home
buyer is supposed to do their own maintenance, or at least
pay for it, whether they do it or not; and one -- and the --
what -- the flipside of that is, in the HUD program, is that
there is counseling services that are supposed to be made available
to home buyers that include advice -- might include at the
time of a move-in, some hands-on training with the new occupant
of the home as to how to maintain the boiler; and then, as
ongoing maintenance needs occur, to provide assistance, support,
direction, on where to buy, what to buy, and then how to install.
One thing that the Borough is devoting -- the North Slope Borough is devoting some attention and time to now is to develop an outreach and education program for people who do get into some of these new designed houses, because there's some equipment in those houses that's new to everybody air exchange systems, and that, as the North Slope Borough sees it, is a primary component of supporting a home ownership program is to do some outreach and to commit some resources to training -- actual training courses in the villages and in Barrow, too.
But that's always been a difficulty with
he HUD program, and as the houses get older, the maintenance
costs go a lot higher. And if you're sitting in a home; if
you’re buying a home, and it’s five years down the line, and it’s settled so badly that you can’t
stay warm anymore, it would seem silly for HUD to say:
"Well, it's the home buyer’s responsibility."
And, in fact, now there are improvement dollar pro -- improvement program dollars available from HUD for those kinds of things.
It's always been an issue, and one of the difficulties that our home buyers frequently face, and other private home buyers, is finding -- number one, finding the expertise in the villages -- less so in Barrow -- and finding the resources to pay for it for home maintenance. In Barrow, we are fortunate now to have the development of a private-sector in plumbing, and heating: and electric. That's not true in our villages, so we're really still -- and it's a function of the development of the economy, I guess; so the Borough is looking at supporting that development and supporting training in those villages, from the local level, with local resources.
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: Bessie, you had mentioned about a possible hearing in Barrow. I don't know anything about that at the moment; but could you tell us, just for a recommendation to the Commission, how many villages, in addition to the town of Barrow, do you think would be able to attend? Because we've been hearing again and again from Native people:
“Meet in the villages.”
MS. O'ROURKE: Uh-huh (affirmative).
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: And so, you know, avoid the main areas like Fairbanks and Anchorage, so could you give us just an idea of how many villages might participate in the hearing if it were in Barrow?
MS. O'ROURKE: Well, if you were in Barrow, just logistically, it's fairly easy to teleconference to all our villages -- seven other villages. I would expect, although it's speculating, that you'd have some attendance over teleconference. I -- you know, unless -- there wouldn't be people flying into Barrow for it, I don't suspect; but the teleconference makes it available. And I would think every village would be interested in participating, assuming you did some adequate publicity and lead time. Because when we've had other agencies traveling, depending on the issue, but we've had sometimes packed houses in the villages, and packed houses in Barrow, and continued hearings. So I would really recommend that if you're -- if you get to Barrow, that we try to set up teleconference -- teleconferencing it for you.
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: Thank you very much.
MS. O'ROURKE: Sure.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Yeah. Yes, Doctor Rowen?
DR. ROWEN: Father Elliott, you've made a really interesting point when you said -- when you mentioned the Native who said when he was living underground, he was warmer than living above ground. And I was just considering the housing situation like I do medicine. You're taking a people who've lived a certain way for many years in a very harsh environment, and we're bringing housing from a totally different civilization that's made tor totally different conditions, and you're putting it in this environment. And we're seeing some of the runoff of that now: deterioration of the ground underneath, heating, maintenance. In some of the villages, we have horrible sewage problems. And while we try to do piping and plumbing in a climate that's not made for this; and I can't help but wonder what consideration is being given -- if we're really going to consider the needs of these people who are living in this particular type of environment, in looking at something different than bringing in Western-style things into a Native environment?
MS. O'ROURKE: Well, in terms of housing, the qual -- in my own opinion, the quality in housing and the suitability of the design when it first came along -- and it was no question it wasn't designed for the arctic -- was poor. It could have been a lot better. What is going on now is that there is a kind of ground swell in Barrow and a great deal of interest in the villages in participating as an owner/builder or as a home buyer in what you might call a Western-style design. And it's better quality. It's not -- it doesn't look like a solid house. It looks like a house that could have come from the Lower 48; but I don't perceive there's any lack of interest in that. I do see, as I've mentioned earlier, that there is a live interest, and a universal interest, in making sure that a house is designed in a way that the family or the traditional uses can accommodate. And that'll -- that would mean a room to cut up meat in, for instance. It might mean an extraordinary, by other -- by some designers' standards, an extraordinarily large living ar -- room area. But I don't -- I find that what people are interested in is enough space, a safe and decent place, and an energy-efficient space. And there is a great deal of interest in owner participation in home design.
In the Borough -- as to water and sewer in the Borough -- within the jurisdiction of the Borough, we are looking at and have held a series of public hearings and will have more in every village about what villages' desires are on water/sewer systems, burying a system, for instance. And, again, my perception, and I think this is borne by all the records of the public hearings is that nobody doesn't want it. Nobody is saying:
"We lived a different lifestyle for several
hundred years, or thousand years, and this isn't what we used
to have. We don't want it."
There seems to be a pretty universal desire to move to that, and, you know, water and sewer isn't the area that I spend my time working in precisely; but other than water, (laughing) and sewer, and basic decent housing, it's hard to imagine what could be more basic. And I see now that in the North Slope that some of those very basic needs still aren't really present; and I don't see anybody wanting to turn back from them. But it has been an awful slow and too long of a process, I think, to get to good quality designs; because I just don't think they existed, or if they did, nobody took the time for it. And they made a mistake when they just imported designs that didn't take our special needs into consideration, because they' re life and death -- they' re life and safety kinds of concerns.
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: I understand what you' re saying about
designs, because many years ago the city -- the town -- village of Beaver was
rebuilt.
The houses were up on stilts; and at the time that they were being designed,
I asked why, and they said:
"Well, then to prevent the permafrost from
melting."
And they forgot that Beaver gets to 90 above sometimes in the summer.
MS. O'ROURKE: (Laughing) So they --
COMMISSIONER ELLIOTT: Thank you so much, Bessie.
MS. O'ROURKE: Thank you.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Yeah, thank you very much. Oh, excuse me, Martin?
COMMISSIONER MOORE: On the -- I'd like to sometimes hear about how obsolete some of the policies and regulations are regarding the HUD housing program. I think they're just hundreds of years old, and housing relates to health. A lot of elder people when they get cold, they get sick. And the younger children, the babies. They -- when they have a cold, they get sick. Sometimes these fabricated houses when they come in, they're built into two sections of floor, like so. They're not one like this. So when the permafrost comes, the house that's built goes sort of like that and opens up cracks in. the houses. Getting people involved in designing their homes is so very important. And to change some of these policies and regulations that are obsolete. I hope that's the feeling of some of the people from here on. That's all I wanted to say.
MS. O'ROURKE: I think so. I think one of the Borough's priorities is to promote home ownership, both because of, I guess you'd say, pride in community and pride in self, and self-reliance, and community development; but also so that there is no waiting for the federal program, or waiting for the state program, but to kind of spur community esteem and pride. And I think that's a very -- it's taking off, and it seems to be a very healthy development.
COMMISSIONER MOORE: I'd like to see a participation from a home owner. Actually, the people that are getting homes have no say-so, absolutely none. The engineer decides everything.
MS. O'ROURKE: Right, and --
COMMISSIONER MOORE: And the home owner just receives it, and sometimes it's not adequate.
MS. O'ROURKE: And I think, sometimes over the years, a home buyer -- again, you're dealing with a program to develop somewhere else. The fact of the matter might be that there is no other housing anywhere, and the family has been living with two or three other generations under one roof, and it's only getting more crowded. So when the agency comes along and says:
"Here's your house,"
they may say:
"You don't have to sign this if you don't
want to. Don't sign these papers unless you know that they
-- what they mean, and you don't have to take this house if
you don't want to."
But the fact of the matter is, no matter how bad it might have been, or how little they understood about the program, they're going to sign (laughing) just about anything, because it is a desperate situation for a lot of families. And over the years, I think that's really been true; and so there's been very -- like you say, very little participation and also like a take-it-or-leave-it situation, I'm afraid.
COMMISSIONER MOORE: So do you find it that sometimes the home owner isn't very -- not too happy about the house that they're receiving? At your home level?
MS. O'ROURKE: Uh-huh (affirmative].
COMMISSIONER MOORE: The same thing happens in the Lower Yukon in the Kuskokwim area. But they have nothing else to choose from, --
MS. O'ROURKE: That's right.
COMMISSIONER MOORE: -- so they just go ahead and choose it, even if it's not satisfactory --
MS. O'ROURKE: That's right.
COMMISSIONER MOORE: -- or to their liking.
MS. O'ROURKE: Uh-huh (affirmative). That is our experience in some places as well, yeah.
COMMISSIONER MOORE: Thank you.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: Okay, thank you very much, Bessie.
MS. O'ROURKE: Thanks for the opportunity.
COMMISSIONER SEBESTA: I appreciate your testimony.
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