According to former congressional staff members we interviewed, non-profit housing and
community development groups seized the situation as an opportunity to pressure Congress and
the administration to do something for housing and community development. One staffer said:
I think the real impetus [for the AHP and CIP provisions] came directly from the [non-
profit] groups, and the principle groups that were active in Washington at the time were
ACORN, the Consumer Federation; we had to a lesser extent Consumers Union. Public
Citizen may have been in there. And you had the Center for Community Change. That
was probably, that may have even been the most important…. What ACORN looks out
for…is…these local groups…and there’s thousands of them out there, and they’ve put up
multi-family housing projects all over the country and they’re constantly looking for
ways to fund their housing development activities…. By the time FIRREA came through,
these groups had been starving for years because the HUD funds had just been drying up.
So along comes the S&L bailout and there’s billions of dollars washing around and
parenthetically, a lot of surplus properties too. They just had stars in their eyes.
Yet, in tracing the origins of the housing and community development provisions in
FIRREA we find a more complex answer than simply interest group pressure. Community
groups had lobbied Congress during the 1980s with little to show for their efforts. In this case,
the role played by policy entrepreneur Henry Gonzales (D-TX) proved critical. Gonzales was a
28-year veteran in the House and champion of economic and social justice issues, including
housing (Nuestro 1983). He held the pivotal position of Chair of the House Banking, Finance,
and Urban Affairs Committee, a committee that, as its name suggests, was predisposed to see
financial institutions in relationship to their impact on urban communities. Gonzalez coupled the
empty funding pipeline for subsidized housing and community development with resolution of
the S&L crisis by framing the debate as a challenge to ensure that those who did not benefit from
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