The Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act gave tribes more flexibility in how they could use federal housing funds to meet their communities’ needs. It eliminated a matrix of different housing programs and replaced them with a single, block grant program for projects. (Getty Images)
Native American housing advocates are calling on Congress to help them meet growing and urgent affordable housing needs on tribal lands by reauthorizing a law that expired more than a decade ago.
Tribal housing leaders discussed what they say is an affordable housing crisis among their communities at a webinar Tuesday held by the Western Governors’ Association — a nonprofit organization of the governors of 22 states — and urged reauthorization of the Native American Housing Assistance and Self-Determination Act, a law Congress first passed in 1996 that gave tribes more flexibility in how they could use federal housing funds to meet their communities’ needs. It eliminated a matrix of different housing programs and replaced them with a single, block grant program for projects.
“This isn’t really a handout in any way, shape or form,” said Rudy Soto, executive director of the National American Indian Housing Council and member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes of the Fort Hall Reservation. “Our ancestors of tribal nations, early as the country was forming, had the foresight to forge these treaties and legal agreements while conceding lands for the purposes of housing, education and health care.”
Native Americans have some of the lowest rates of homeownership in the country, and updating the law is the single most important way to boost home construction and homeownership among Native Americans, the housing leaders said.
“If people really want to help, they can help us reauthorize (the act) to improve the legislation and ensure this funding well into the future,” said Paul Lumley, a citizen of the Yakama Nation and chief advancement officer at the Native American Youth and Family Center in Portland.
The last time the act was reauthorized was in 2008, and it expired in 2013. While Congress still funds Native American housing assistance programs through other appropriations bills — even increasing funding for tribal housing needs in 2024 under the Biden administration — tribal leaders said the act itself needs to be reauthorized and updated to reduce red tape for housing projects.
Soto said his organization is working with Oregon’s U.S. Rep. Janelle Bynum, a Democrat representing the state’s 5th Congressional District, and Republican U.S. Rep. Troy Downing, of Montana, to introduce legislation reauthorizing the law.
Neither congressional office immediately responded to requests for comment from the Capital Chronicle.
Barriers to Native American homeownership goes beyond policy
The Native American homeownership rate in the U.S. sits at 54% — less than the rate of 72% for white households and 63% for Asian households, according to the National Association of Realtors. The Native American homeownership rate is, however, higher than the rate of Black homeownership at 45%, and slightly more than the 51% Hispanic homeownership rate.
Advocates at the meeting pointed to a variety of barriers to owning homes, such as lower income levels and mortgage lending constraints on tribal land. Research also shows that Native American communities disproportionately experience overcrowded homes, and a lack of infrastructure and housing in remote areas where many Native Americans live on or near reservations.
Jody Cahoon Perez, executive director of the Salish and Kootenai Housing Authority based on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, said beyond policy, cultural and historical injustices play a role in the barriers Native Americans face when trying to own a home.
“Our whole way of life has changed, and we now live in homes that are stationary and we get mortgages on them when we never used to,” she said at the webinar. “We moved with the seasons, with the food we migrated. It was different. So it’s like we’re having to catch up with centuries of progress on the non-tribal side and also surviving genocide.”
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