The ARC notes that some severely distressed areas still lack basic infrastructure, such as water and sewer systems.

The program is designed to tear down and redevelop severely distressed public housing projects, occupied by poor families, into redesigned mixed-income housing.

Words like mocking, lunatic and idiotic have their appropriate contexts, but no place in responsible investigation of severely distressed literary icons.

That joke, some exile leaders believe, conveys a fatalism that reflects the severely distressed conditions in Cuba, where the desperation for hard currency has caused street crime and prostitution to flourish at what some say are pre-Castro levels.

Under the House bill, the Government could replace "severely distressed" housing projects with vouchers or certificates, a form of Federal aid that can be used to pay rents anywhere in a community.

Last year, the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, which was appointed by Congress, increased the estimate to $27 billion - more than H.U.D.'s entire annual budget.

Another study, by the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing, estimated that 86,000 units, or 6 percent of all public units, were badly deteriorated.

"The major thrust of the program so far has been in uplifting the declining manufacturing, industrial and commercial sectors of the severely distressed urban neighborhoods," the committee said in its report to Governor O'Neill and the legislature.

Congress established the National Commission on Severely Distressed Public Housing in 1989 to study the issue of dilapidated public housing.

Margery A. Turner, a researcher at the Urban Institute, said the findings showed that "improvements are possible, even in severely distressed neighborhoods."