LAS VEGAS -- Maria Ninfa Martinez is on her couch shuffling envelopes, the bills inside them pushing up the pressure of the blood in her arteries.She's 73, and her husband is dead. She earned a paycheck for 58 years and has $1,194 in monthly Social Security benefits to show for it. Her rent is $625 a month. Then there's her cancer and the bills it brings.Martinez is among the 30,000 area residents older than 65 who live on less than $20,000 a year, one of the several categories of people for whom simply paying the rent or mortgage every month has become increasingly difficult.Enter the 10-year-old Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act and its provision to sell federal land at discounted prices to encourage construction of affordable housing.Martinez and at least 110 other senior citizens are on a waiting list to move into 105 apartments that will rent for as little as $338 a month when Harmon Pines, the first project to be completed under the act, opens in July.So should we be happy for Martinez and her neighbors-to-be or frustrated by a government inching ahead at a pace that seems to ensure supply will never meet demand when it comes to the poor? The federal law that made Harmon Pines possible has, after all, existed for a decade.Mike Mullin, executive director of Nevada Housing and Neighborhood Development, the nonprofit organization building Harmon Pines, says he concentrates on today, on getting the job done. He uses phrases like "We're playing the hand we're dealt," opting not to dwell on the passage of time."If I worried about the need too much, I'd die of a heart attack," he adds.Mullin notes that five years of work went into Harmon Pines before any dirt was turned for the project. He attended meetings to create regulations for the federal law in 2003. Those meetings continued for a year before agencies could agree on the regulations. Two years later, the county handed over five acres of land to Nevada HAND for Harmon Pines.Finally, in March, workers began laying pipes and then framing walls.The idea behind the law is that local governments can ask the Bureau of Land Management to sell them land for affordable housing. There are millions of acres out there, so in theory, there could be lots of affordable housing someday. Under the law, the bureau works with the Housing and Urban Development Department to evaluate requests from local governments. The federal agencies set a discount on the price of the land based on appraisals and the income of the people who will live in the housing. The local governments then turn the land over to private groups to build the housing, with or without bids.In the case of Harmon Pines, Clark County issued a request for proposals and Nevada HAND's was the winning proposal. The county has been the most aggressive of the local governments in setting aside, in its planning documents, land for developing affordable housing under the act. The county earmarked 1,200 acres in 1999. Henderson, Las Vegas and the state also have land they would like to develop under the law, but the county has pushed along the only other project currently on the books, housing for 180 families on 10 acres.(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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