The Bloomberg administration intends to give out 22,000 new federal housing vouchers to help low-income New Yorkers rent apartments on the private market over the next two years, officials said yesterday. To do that, officials are temporarily reopening the waiting list for the program, called Section 8, to nonemergency applicants for the first time in 12 years. Twelve thousand of the vouchers will be given out this year and 10,000 next year — more new vouchers than the city has had in years, officials said. Three thousand will go to New Yorkers on the brink of homelessness, but officials said that most would go for the first time in years to ordinary New Yorkers struggling to make ends meet.

People seeing a 125-acre, 5,600-bed homeless community will look at it and say, "Wow, I wouldn't mind living here," urban developer Michael Arth wrote in a proposal advancing the idea. Arth gets points for enlightened self-interest. He came up with an imaginative solution to a growing problem of homelessness, which is an unwelcome addition to the image he has created for DeLand's Garden District of restored homes where crack houses once flourished. . . . The only problem is a large body of evidence that suggests it won't work, and the absence of workable funding from either public or private sectors. Arth downplays the $100 million-plus cost of the project as minimal in the light of what we spend today in public and private funds on law enforcement, treatment, rehabilitation, feeding, housing and even burying the homeless. He says the construction would be "a one-time cost of $17,500 per village resident," although there is no detailed discussion of what rising construction costs would do during the 10-year build-out period envisioned or how the operational costs would be covered. County officials and leaders of the Homeless Coalition, which has made what most consider good progress in trying to provide shelter, treatment and coordination among health and welfare agencies, have greeted Arth's proposal with polite skepticism. After all, compared with Daytona Beach police Chief Mike Chitwood's widely applauded suggestion to give the homeless a bus ticket and send them home, this looks pretty good, especially when you consider studies have shown about 60 percent of the homeless in Volusia identify it as home. . . .A number of the more than 2,500 homeless on Volusia's streets at any given time aren't seeking the shelter, showers, care and camaraderie envisioned by a community just for them. . .

Rose City Village apartments — a mammoth 18-building complex that was home to hundreds of low-income Latino and Southeast Asian immigrant families — had become a ghost town practically overnight. Research by the Portland Tribune found that most of the inhabitants had left to avoid months of dislocation due to renovation by new ownership, as well as rents that were swelling by $200 to $300 a month. Neighbors and residents told of families and friends being scattered around the city, of tenants crying as they packed their bags to go. . . . “It feels wrong,” she wrote in an e-mail to the Portland Tribune, recalling the day she asked the property manager what was happening. “On the way to the office we passed a Spanish-speaking family having a garage sale on their front lawn. In another apartment we could hear a large group singing hymns in Vietnamese and holding a small church service. … Our next-door neighbors are refugees from Laos and have lived in their small apartment for 10 years.”

Another person who took note of the project was Micky Ryan, a crusading lawyer for the Oregon Law Center, which advocates for low-income people. She began amassing documents in order to figure out what happened and who was responsible. She found evidence that the complex was not, as city officials initially thought, merely private property whose owners could do with it as they wished. Rather, documents and interviews show, in 1991 the apartment complex was funded with state low-income-housing tax credits of at least $2.3 million. The Portland Development Commission, meanwhile, provided a $1 million rehabilitation loan as well as $7 million in bond financing. The original owner bought the property for about $4 million in 1989. In May 2003, he sold it to Steve Rose, a Portland developer, and a limited-liability corporation called Dylan/Bristol, for $11 million. In June 2006, Rose sold it to Brenneke of Guardian Management LLC, which was partners with a California investment company, for $16.5 million.

The brutality of the attacks -- one of which was captured on surveillance video -- has stunned the city, which has recently won praise for its treatment of the homeless. The incidents have also renewed calls to make attacks against the homeless a hate crime under federal law. In the video, two young men are seen beating a homeless man, who tried in vain to fend off the attacks with his hands. "If you looked at these kids, it is almost like it was fun and games for them," says Scott Russell, a Fort Lauderdale police officer. "It looked like they were laughing and finding great joy in what they were doing." . . . Nationwide, attacks against the homeless are on the rise, nearly doubling from 1999 to 2003. In the past six years, at least 156 homeless people have been murdered, according to the National Coalition for the Homeless. Most of the assailants are young men in their teens to early 20s. "In many of the cases, it's a crime of opportunity," says Michael Stoops, the coalition's acting executive director. "A group of teenagers is roaming the street on a hot summer night and they come across a homeless person who might be mentally ill or alcoholic. When they hurt a homeless person, they think they can get away with it -- and they think they won't be hurt in return." Stoops places part of the blame for these attacks on videos, some available on the Internet, that show homeless people being beaten -- or in one case, set on fire Advocates for the homeless have been pushing to make such attacks a "hate crime" under federal law. "If there is any good to come out of evil," says Stoops, "then perhaps this video taped beating will be similar to the Rodney King video and make Americans realize that we need to get the federal government to do something. Because this is definitely going on in all cities around the country."

State Farm, the biggest home insurer in the nation, is in the final stages of settling hundreds of lawsuits over its payments for homes wrecked by Hurricane Katrina along the Mississippi Gulf Coast, lawyers briefed on the talks said yesterday. . . . The talks do not apply to homeowners in New Orleans and the rest of Louisiana. State Farm, under the tentative accord, would provide an average of about $125,000 to homeowners who filed lawsuits, although the payments would range from as little as about $2,000 to about $2 million.

. . . A housing bill will be presented to the cabinet on 17 January, he said, as the government came under renewed pressure to help homeless people. Squatters have moved into a vacant office block in Paris and also set up a tent city along a canal in the capital. The office building, near the Paris stock exchange, has been nicknamed the "ministry for the housing crisis". Three housing lobby groups took it over and then invited families to move in. Homeless Parisians are also camping out in 200 tents by the Canal Saint Martin. Lobby groups say about a million people in France are homeless, of whom 100,000 are sleeping on the streets. Under the government plan, from the end of 2008, the right to housing will apply to homeless people, impoverished workers and single mothers. All those living in slums are to benefit from the same right from the start of 2012, Mr de Villepin said. The plan entails the construction of 120,000 new homes every year up to 2012. . . . The squatters' campaign is being spearheaded by a group called Les Enfants de Don Quichotte (Children of Don Quixote). The group has also set up makeshift camps in the southern port city of Marseille, as well as Orleans, Lyon and Toulouse.

The Socialist presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, yesterday became the latest politician to promise urgent help for the sans domicile fixe or "SDFs" - a once largely invisible army of down-and-outs, the working poor, the wandering young, illegal immigrants, alcoholics and the mentally ill. Judged by events of the past fortnight, the most effective politician in France is not Mme Royal or President Jacques Chirac, but Augustin Legrand, a 31-year-old actor. In mid-December M. Legrand, his brothers and a couple of friends established an illegal encampment of SDFs and sympathisers on the quays of the Canal Saint Martin in the centre of Paris. Within days, the double line of red tents was domintating news bulletins through the quiet Christmas period, forcing the government to crash through the gears of a new homeless policy. Similar encampments have now sprung up in almost every large town in France, from Lille in the north to the chic Promenade des Anglais in Nice. The original Paris encampment has attracted high-profile, "sympathy SDFs" including the actors Béatrice Dalle and Jean Rochefort. In the past few days, political parties from the centre-right to the far left have signed up for the six-point "Canal Saint-Martin" charter, calling for "an end to the [homelessness] scandal which shames a country like ours".

Families account for almost half of the homeless population in Manatee County - and the number of households in trouble is on the rise, homeless advocates warn. That includes the most vulnerable segment of the homeless population: women with very young children, said Adell Erozer, director of the Manatee Community Coalition on Homelessness. The problem, Erozer said, is twofold: Many parents - especially single moms with children - are afraid of stepping forward for help out of fear authorities will take away their children. And many homeless families go unnoticed because of the federal government's ever-narrowing definition of homelessness. In its annual homeless survey next month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development will count only unsheltered people living in cars, parks, abandoned buildings, on the streets or sidewalks or people staying in emergency shelters or transitional housing for homeless people who were once on the street. Manatee County has no shelter facilities for single women without children who are not in an abusive situation, and only very limited family shelter capacity at the Salvation Army. 'That means HUD will miss the families doubling up in motel rooms, or the homeless people in jail or in mental health facilities,' said Erozer. The count determines how much federal funding Manatee homeless agencies will receive. And funding is all the more crucial, advocates warn, because the caseload is exploding. The data support their fear: The Salvation Army of Bradenton has seen a 30 percent increase over the last year in the number of people seeking help. Most of those new clients are families - many headed by single women, new to the streets, said Ellen Potrikus, who screens applicants for emergency assistance. From Jan. 1 though Nov. 30, 8,904 people sought help from the Salvation Army, compared to 6,849 for the same period the year before. . . . A few years ago, most people seeking rental or utility assistance were paying an average of $500-per-month rent, according to Salvation Army records. Today, the average rent of those seeking help in Manatee County is $800. Potrikus lays the blame on a lack of affordable housing and rising rents. Some at-risk families are paying rents as high as $1,300 a month.

BRADENTON - Hit with car repairs and medical bills, Leticia Longoria could not make her rent in November. Faced with the terrifying prospect of life on the streets with two children, Longoria, sought help at the Salvation Army family shelter. Two months later, she's still there, trying to save for a place of their own. Longoria, who makes $7.25 an hour, can stay as long as she is willing to work hard to get out. Longoria's situation is typical, said Ashley Canesse, Salvation Army spokeswoman. As wages have not kept up with housing costs, affordable housing options decline. Those forces, Canesse said, result in longer shelter stays, which lower the number of people the shelter can serve. Five years ago the average family shelter stay was three weeks. By 2006, the average stay stretched seven months.