Housing policies for poor assailed.

Byline: Rick Jurgens

Mar. 12--BERKELEY -- Panelists at a conference sponsored by UC Berkeley's Housing and Urban Policy program painted a bleak picture Friday of the options available to families with incomes too low to buy houses or pay market rents.

"Where affordable housing is concerned, (the Bush) administration is the worst in a generation," said Xavier de Souza Briggs, a planning professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a housing official under President Bill Clinton.

Government fails to adequately fund programs that provide housing to low- and middle-income people, and spending cuts proposed by the Bush administration would …