At nearly $2 billion a year, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOME Investment Partnerships Program for the last two decades has produced housing for low-income households in the form of block grants to state and local government agencies. Yet a growing number of critics say its main legacy is a long trail of unfulfilled promises. The Washington Post once again has provided fuel for this view. A month ago the paper published a follow-up article to a lengthy May expose, revealing that about 75 projects have spent a combined $40 million "with little or nothing built." This is on top of the roughly 700 projects receiving $400 million in federal subsidies that the Post earlier identified as delayed or abandoned. HUD once again is insisting that HOME overall is a success. And Congress once again, justifiably, is highly skeptical.
Delay, waste and corruption are nothing new to subsidized housing programs. An expose of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's HOME Investment Partnerships Program 
If Reverend Al Sharpton was radioactive to future President Barack Obama during the 2008 campaign, he's become a shadow member of the Obama cabinet in 2010. The close working relationship between the radical black civil rights leader and leading administration officials was very much in evidence last week at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers where Sharpton's nonprofit group, 
