hoods with the most troubled rental housing units.
    In addition to the affordable units that would have been created through the expansion of the Mixed Income Housing Program, for example, the department has received notification that its proposal for 700 new federally subsidized rental assistance certificates has been funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.  These subsidies will go directly to rent units from private landlords at market rates.  With these additional 700 certificates, more than 4,100 lower income families will receive subsidies through the city to rent units from private landlords.  This is an especially important, stable revenue source during a soft rental market.
    For the very poorest of families and elderly residents, the city owns and manages approximately 1,000 conventional public housing units -- about 600 for families and 400 for the elderly and disabled.  These units serve the most vulnerable segments of the population.  While the family units have a controversial reputation, they provide an extremely important housing safety net.  Ironically, perhaps, the Mixed Income Housing Program is designed to avoid the concentration of poor families that are typical of public housing developments and the source of neighborhood resistance to such developments.
    The department has also taken aggressive steps to stabilize the neighborhoods with the most marginal housing where landlords are experiencing the highest vacancy rates and where tenant flight would be accelerated by further deterioration.
    In particular, the city has worked with nonprofit organizations to acquire derelict apartment units abandoned by private landlords unwilling or unable to make the investment needed to maintain the units as decent housing.
    Over the past several years, the city has secured the acquisition of scores of empty, abandoned or foreclosed multi-family housing units in Southeast Albuquerque, most in the Trumball and La Mesa neighborhoods, that otherwise would have been boarded up and left to the mercy of vandals and transients.  Some of these units have been rehabilitated and rented as affordable housing, often for populations with special needs.
   The worst units have been demolished and replaced with owner-occupied housing in an effort to stabilize the neighborhoods through an increase in home ownership and an improved income mix in the population.  The effect has been to put the brakes on accelerating blight that threatened to turn these neighborhoods into a New Mexico version of the South Bronx, with blocks of abandoned, derelict housing.  This has been extremely important in preserving the housing values in these areas.
    The council's action in rejecting the expansion of the Mixed Income Housing Program has limited one element of this strategy.  As a consequence, 200 poor families or elderly renters will be denied the chance to obtain decent housing at an affordable rent.  There is no evidence, however, that it will have any discernible effect one way or another on the vacancy rates in the older, multifamily units in the Southeast Heights.
   
   The city's affordable housing programs are not a significant cause of the problems owners of these units face.  Rather, the city programs have become a scapegoat for the large market forces that have lured majority of more affluent families and individuals to larger, more modern apartment complexes with more amenities in more desirable locations.  The solution to the problems faced by these landlords will not come by reducing the housing options for lower income families and elderly individuals.  The needs of these families and senior citizens are here now and should be acted upon now.