Legislative findings and declaration; liberal construction

The Legislature finds and declares that: 1. There exists a serious shortage of decent, safe and sanitary housing in this State available to persons and families of low and moderate income and that many other persons and families are unable to secure or afford, without assistance, decent, safe and sanitary housing. 2. This condition is conducive to disease, crime, environmental decline and poverty, impairs the economic value of large areas, which are characterized by depreciated value, impaired investments, reduced capacity to pay taxes, and lack of new development to meet the needs of area residents, and is a menace to the health, safety, morals and welfare of the residents of this State. 3. This condition results in a loss of population and further deterioration accompanied by added costs to communities for creation of new public facilities and services elsewhere. 4. It is difficult and uneconomic for individual owners independently to remedy this condition. 5. One major cause of this condition has been recurrent shortages of money from private sources, and such shortages have contributed to reductions in construction of new residential housing and have made the sale and purchase of existing residential housing a virtual impossibility in certain parts of the State. Other causes of this condition include increases in rental values and decreases in the availability of federal funding for housing. 6. The ordinary operations of private enterprise have not in the past corrected these conditions. 7. The reduction in housing construction has caused substantial unemployment and underemployment in the construction industry which, together with the shortage of attainable housing, results in hardships, wastes human resources, increases the public assistance burdens of the State, impairs the security of family life, impedes the economic and physical development of the State and adversely affects the welfare, health and prosperity of all the people of this State. 8. A stable supply of adequate money for the financing and provision of other assistance to obtain housing is required to encourage new housing in an orderly and sustained manner, to increase the availability of attainable housing, and thereby to reduce these detrimental results. 9. It is necessary to create a Housing Division in the Department of Business and Industry to encourage the investment of private capital and stimulate the financing of housing through the use of public financing to provide mortgage loans and to make loans to and purchase mortgage loans from mortgage lenders, and to perform any other function authorized by this chapter. 10. It is appropriate for the Housing Division to issue obligations regardless of their characterization for the purposes of federal income taxation by the United States Department of the Treasury. 11. All of the purposes set forth in this chapter are public purposes and uses for which public money may be borrowed, expended, advanced, loaned or granted. Ê This chapter must be liberally construed to accomplish the public purposes and alleviate the detrimental conditions set forth in this section.