Andrew Cuomo, last seen unsuccessfully running for governor of New York, resurfaced yesterday on the steps of City Hall in the company of some actual office holders to announce the formation of the “Coalition to Save America’s Affordable Housing.” The coalition’s purpose, as the speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, put it, is to thwart the Bush administration’s attempt “to try to throw families out onto the streets.”According to Mr. Cuomo, secretary of housing and urban development during the Clinton years, President Bush is determined “to reduce the amount of affordable housing in this country.” Rep. Charles Rangel warned Republicans planning on visiting the city for their party’s convention: “Don’t expect to come here to be having a party…at the expense of our housing.” Fully “110,000 people could be kicked out of their homes,” Senator Schumer added ominously, because the Bush administration is “trying to destroy Section 8.”

The Section 8 housing program is the country’s largest federal housing program, currently supporting 2.1 million households. Low-income families pay 30% of their income on housing rent and a Section 8 voucher makes up the difference. The government is spending about $16 billion on the program this year. Next year, spending will be even higher.

The White House isn’t trying to destroy the Section 8 program. In fact, the $16 billion the federal government is spending on the program this year is $4.5 billion more than was spent in the last year of the Clinton administration, when spending stood at $11.38 billion. Mr. Cuomo has some nerve criticizing the Bush administration, which is spending a lot more on Section 8 housing than Mr. Cuomo ever did. Even so, the Department of Housing and Urban Development has been under some pressure to control the spiraling costs. So on April 22, HUD announced a plan to fund the vouchers at the rental rates of August 2003, plus an increase pegged to inflation.

HUD’s new guidelines represent an attempt to stay within the program’s Congressional appropriation and to spread that money to as many tenants as possible. This isn’t a “cut” in the federal housing program; it’s a debate over how much more to spend. The Section 8 program remains entirely intact.

The Democratic politicians protesting yesterday, however, expect growth without end. Mr. Cuomo went so far as to call HUD’s new guidelines a “contravention of the basic role of the department.” HUD, he said, is “supposed to be advocating and supporting affordable housing; it is not supposed to be a destroyer or an eliminator of affordable housing.” Yet, rather than Mr. Cuomo’s vision of welfare without end, we prefer the mission that the current housing secretary, Alphonso Jackson, described in congressional testimony last week: “A compassionate nation must ensure that those Americans served by HUD…live in a healthy and secure environment and have access to tools and opportunities that will help them move toward self-sufficiency.”

The Section 8 program, as Harvard scholar Howard Husock has noted, is “the last vestige of welfare without the reform.” Section 8 vouchers, unlike welfare, resemble an open-ended entitlement in that no time limit applies to them. To qualify for the program and to avoid paying more in rent, families need to keep their incomes low. The program discourages work and encourages dependency. Marrying a wage-earner makes little economic sense, too, under the Section 8 guidelines: As Mr. Husock writes on the City Journal Web site, “Overall, out of the 1 million or so non-elderly, non-disabled Section-8 households, single parents head 783,000.”

Somehow, the Section 8 program escaped the welfare-reform effort that aimed to end such perverse incentives and break the culture of dependency that they foster. The Bush administration has proposed a series of reforms to Section 8 for next year that aim at promoting self-sufficiency rather than dependence. But they would also help eliminate one of the country’s last old-style, big-government welfare programs. That’s really what the Coalition to Save America’s Affordable Housing is trying to prevent. Maybe a better name for the group would be the Coalition to Prevent Self-Sufficiency.