The 11-point plan proposed by a new joint Housing Advisory Council has the potential to protect all neighborhoods in Hamilton County by dispersing low-income housing more equitably throughout the region. The council was created last year to help resolve fiery disputes between Cincinnati City Council, Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) and angry neighborhood groups.

Not every recommendation is likely to win easy approval from the various boards, but CMHA already is dispersing affordable housing outward and has federal jurisdiction to continue. City council, CMHA and the county commissioners join in deconcentrating poverty clusters and develop incentives to increase homeownership.

David Crowley, who heads council's community development committee, and CMHA board chairman Chip Gerhardt co-chaired the Housing Advisory Council. A third co-chair, County Commissioner Phil Heimlich, later resigned partly over philosophical objections to the federal government imposing housing policies on neighborhoods. Heimlich argues that dispersing low-income households often brings blight and crime to stable neighborhoods. But if the dispersal is done widely enough, the opposite may be true.

CMHA director Donald Troendle insists housing vouchers give poor families more choices, and when that happens market forces result in the deconcentration of poverty pockets, with their attendant blight and crime. Up until 1981, CMHA's jurisdiction was bounded by Cincinnati city limits, and to this day CMHA's public housing portfolio is overwhelmingly located in the core city. But in 2000, the government expanded use of Section 8 housing vouchers. Public housing tenants voted with their feet to leave big, problem-plagued complexes and seek housing in the suburbs.

It's not just the county that hasn't shouldered its fair share of low-income households. Troendle says seven or eight neighborhoods inside Cincinnati with 23 percent of the city's population host a total of only 21 assisted housing units. When poverty is ghettoized in only a few neighborhoods, it creates enormous barriers to rooting out eyesores and crime havens that drag down the entire region.

The Housing Advisory Council suggests programs to keep existing homeowner units from being converted to rentals, spread voucher families out of overburdened neighborhoods, persuade landlords to rent to low-income families and create affordable housing for lower-income homeowners. In the West End's City West and elsewhere, CMHA has been re-inventing neighborhoods as mixed-income housing.

"Safe, affordable housing isn't just the housing authority's problem," CMHA's Gerhardt insists. He's right. If we manage this dispersal well, we protect all our neighborhoods. Officials at all levels should join in developing a true countywide strategy for affordable housing.