Cushing Dolbeare

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Cushing Dolbeare. Cushing was one of the nation's leading experts on federal housing policy and the housing circumstances of low income people. She designed the methodology for and was the original author of Out of Reach, NLIHC’s widely cited annual report on the gap between housing costs and wages of low income people. She was also well-known for her work on analyzing federal housing subsidies, documenting the disparity between the cost of tax-based subsidies that benefit homeowners and direct spending on housing assistance for low income households.

Cushing began the National Low Income Housing Coalition in 1974 when she organized the Ad Hoc Low Income Housing Coalition in response to the Nixon Administration’s moratorium on federal housing programs. She served as NLIHC’s Executive Director from 1977 to 1984 and again from 1993 to 1994. She remained active with NLIHC as a researcher, policy analyst, and board member until her death.

Cushing was an adviser and friend to several HUD Secretaries. She was a mentor to countless housing advocates and researchers. In 1995, Jason DeParle wrote in the New York Times that she was the “dean” of the Washington corps of housing advocates. Her honest assessments and unassuming manner made her a trusted source of information and a model for the best kind of lobbying.

Cushing was both the conscience and the brains of the affordable housing movement. There is no one else like her. Her passing is a great loss to the nation, but especially to low income people whose well-being was her life’s work. Over the years, millions of people have obtained homes they can afford due in no small part to the dedicated perseverance of someone they never met, Cushing Dolbeare.

Cushing died of cancer on March 17, 2005 at her home. She was 78. [1]

[edit] Family letter

Cushing's life was summed up in 1985 by her mother, Mary-Cushing Howard Niles, an activist and professional herself, who coined the term "middle management"in her eponymous book published in 1941. This letter was written to commemorate Cushing's retirement. Yet Cushing worked with other organizations and never really retired, giving a speech in Washington just nine days before her death.

An excerpt of the letter:

When you were a little child, you were energetic, articulate, enterprising, courageous, and often stormy. By the time you were five you began to take charge of your own life. You had a feeling for justice. "That's not fair!" was your frequent outcry. You saw the poverty of the Great Depression in Canada as well as in the USA.

When you were about nine, you were in a conservative private school in Toronto. You came home storming. "That teacher said, 'If Gandhi wants freedom for India, why doesn't he fight like a Christian with guns instead of all this fasting?'"

"Did you say anything?" I asked.

"No, I did not. She wouldn't have understood me."

The family moved to Baltimore when you were nearly fifteen and you entered Park School as your fifteenth school! Here you had plenty of interests from history to carpentry and cabinet making. One summer you went to an American Friends Service Committee work camp near Morgantown, West Virginia. You selected construction work, not child care. "People think I am destructive when I clear the ground and start digging down. But you have to dig and get a sound foundation for the building. I want to build." The following summer you went on a camping trip in Mexico and you liked the people but were appalled at the poverty.

At Park School you helped found a newspaper. You went to Washington to interview Senator Joseph ball, one of the four Senators who sponsored the resolution calling for a United Nations organization to replace the weak League of Nations. He made the remark that a leader should never get so far ahead of his people that they don't know where he is. You worked for him as a volunteer that summer and in the fall you went to Swarthmore and chose political science and economics as majors. After a year or so you moved to Washington, taking night courses at American University and working with the National League of Women Voters on the Bretton Woods international agreement.

You and I celebrated V-E Day at a thanksgiving mass at a Catholic church near our house on Capitol Hill. A few days later you signed up with the State Department as typist on the midnight shift at the UN Organizing Conference in San Francisco. You were not quite nineteen. Excitedly we saw you off on the official Sunset Limited train complete with State Department personnel and a swarm of delegates including the French and Australian ambassadors with whom you became acquainted.

With your employee pass and your work hours on the midnight shift, you got to most of the interesting sessions of the Conference. The wife of a delegate, Jacob Blaustein, called us to say she had frequently seen Cushing at the sessions and asked her when she slept. The response: "Oh, I sleep any time there is nothing exciting going on!"

Your letters home were copies of your insightful narrative to Joe Ball. When you returned to Washington you became a paid member of his staff. You worked night and day, including helping Betty Ball and the children. Our house was only a few blocks from the Senate Office Building. What a remarkable trio we were: Fa had gone back to the Baltimore Life after his stint with the Office of Price Administration, and I was working at the Truman White House.

Early in 1947 you returned to Swarthmore College's honors course. That summer you dug potatoes with your bare fingers at an international work camp in the Netherlands where in addition to Dutch young people there were some British, Americans, and six courageous young Germans. The latter became your friends who invited you to visit them in their homes. You heard how hard it was for them to get an understanding of Nazism when their parents and others were silent. You heard their stories but the sight of the devastation was terrible. You gave remarkable talks on your return, describing the utter necessity for Europe to abandon war. After you got your B.A. Honors degree, Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, you determined to go to West Germany as a historian in the US Army. With close German friends and a car, you managed to see much of post-war Europe, speaking fluent German and passable French.

On your return you got a job of research assistant to Senator Hubert H. Humphrey. His legislative assistant was Max Kampelman. It was a remarkable experience but entailed getting cooped up in a room in the Congressional Library for days at a time. After a year or so, you were glad to accept the job of Associate Director of the Citizens Planning and Housing Association in Baltimore. You used our little house there while Fa and I spent a year or more in India. We bought a larger house where you had a suite of your own. In the spring of 1956 you accepted a similar position in the Philadelphia Housing Association. By that time Prince Charming Louis Dolbeare, then living in Philadelphia, had a consulting job in Baltimore and won your heart.

You told us you had never dreamed of wanting a big wedding but if you had one we could break the social color bar. We had three weeks before you and Louis were leaving for Europe and all four of us were working hard at our jobs. Arranging the wedding was difficult for in 1956 Baltimore was still tightly segregated. No hotel permitted "mixed" groups until several years later. The wedding itself was held in the packed Unitarian church. The choir in which you had been participating sang the Bach Wedding Cantata. We felt that the angels were dancing with joy in the ceremony which joined this superb pair. People said, "We love everything about this wedding!"

We have been celebrating you, Cushing and Louis, ever since as you have been going from strength to strength. Your children follow you in character, mind and compassion; your grandchildren no less.

As we trace your concerns and interests they are diverse and self-consistent from early involvement with work camps and empathetic travel (in Mexico, Europe, and later India, China); your study in politics and economics...and lobbying in the National Low Income Housing Coalition and ADA; your dedicated service to the American Friends Service Committee, especially community development, race relations, migrant workers...your expertise on housing, especially for the poor; your concern for poverty and exploitation of persons and the whole range of civil, political, economic and social human rights; your competence in bringing different ideas and feelings into consensus. Our stormy little girl has become a powerful but nonviolent woman who tries to like and understand all kinds of people; who has integrity and strength with deep compassion.