The Salt Lake City Council will hold a public hearing on its housing policy tonight at 7 p.m. in Room 326 of City Hall, 451 S. State. You can read the policy at http://slcgov.com/council/ agendas/2005reports/ December/121305A3C4.pdf. Salt Lake City's proposed housing policy is full of feel-good statements about the importance of new, more and better homes in the capital.

But low-income advocates say the policy the City Council is set to adopt tonight actually hurts the cause of affordable housing - and may be discriminatory.

The proposal calls for the city to give funding preferences to projects that include more market-rate units than affordable ones in poorer neighborhoods. In richer areas, the projects would need to have more affordable units.

"If it's kept in there and we find some project that hasn't been able to be built that has some capacity for low-income housing, we'll sue the city, and we'll win," Tim Funk, housing director for Crossroads Urban Center, said Monday.

Funk and others say the policy will direct the city's limited money to neighborhoods where it's more expensive to build, meaning fewer units will be constructed.

"The policy is wrong," Funk said, noting Utah's capital doesn't have the high concentration of poverty - found in, say, Chicago or New Orleans - that Salt Lake City is trying to avert. "They don't know what the hell they're doing."

The goal of the controversial section is to spread affordable housing throughout the city. For now, such projects often are built in the central city. The mix of incomes, goes the argument, would help lure retailers and other commercials uses.

"We're just not getting the housing projects on the east side, and we need to do that," said Councilwoman Nancy Saxton, who argues the policy is not discriminatory. It doesn't, she noted, forbid the city from funding projects in low-income areas.

"It doesn't preclude anything" she said. But developers should know that getting funding for most 100 percent affordable-housing projects will be an "uphill battle."

But financing projects that mix affordable and market-rate units can be equally difficult, said low-income-housing developer Claudia O'Grady.

The policy "is not quite as affirmative of a commitment to create more affordable-housing opportunities as maybe the housing community would like to see," she said.

Advocates also worry the policy doesn't include language about how the city will replace the single room occupancy (SRO) units its Redevelopment Agency plans to tear down on State Street. The SROs are basically hotels with weekly rents of $80. Without the units, many tenants would be homeless.

"They haven't taken any responsibility, not one direct word of responsibility in this housing policy [for SROs]," Funk said. "That makes this housing policy unacceptable."

Saxton said the council hasn't reached a consensus on SROs, but will handle the issue later.