23 Mar 2016
U.S. federal community development funding has been decreasing steadily for decades. Next City Magazine's Oscar Perry Abello, in part using data from the U.S. project of the Comparative Agendas Project, writes,
The Comparative Agendas Project website, launched earlier this month, features a tool that allows users to examine trends in public policy activity over time. The exact number ebbs and flows, but since the 1990s, U.S. Congressional Committees have held around 1,500 hearings a year. According to the project’s categorizing of hearings, since 1994, around 20 hearings a year have dealt in some way with the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which administers CDBGs.
Even more precisely, CDBGs came up as hearing discussion topics in just 13 different years since 1975, usually once or twice each year and no more than six times in a single year, for a grand total of 25 congressional hearings on CDBGs since 1975. That’s 25 times Congress has had a hearing about CDBGs in the past 40 years, out of thousands upon thousands of hearings.The trend line isn’t good either.“You can see after Republicans take control in the early 1990s, there’s some interest in cities, but drops off pretty quickly,” Jones notes.Congressional hearings that may have touched in some way on Department of Housing and Urban Development funding and programming, including CDBGs (Credit: Comparative Agendas Project)
Read more at Next City.