The furor developing over state affordable housing funds is an eerie remake of a 2001 movie.

When community advocates flooded into the State House Tuesday to rage against suspending funds for the Neighborhood Opportunities Program, the players, the rhetoric and the issue itself had a familiar feel.

A sign said, THIS BUDGET IS AN IMMORAL DOCUMENT.

It was exhilarating, but also depressing. How many times must this same battle be fought?

In 2001, Gov. Lincoln Almond, faced with budget problems, ignited a firestorm by moving to freeze almost $5 million in funds for NOP, which helps finance low-rent housing for people making less than $30,000 a year. For each state dollar, NOP leverages $8 in federal and private funds. It provides stability and dignity and helps the economy.

In 2001, there was one demonstration at the capitol after another. Clergy would come and pray — indeed, several were arrested.

Donald Carcieri, just starting a 2002 run for governor, wrote a Providence Journal essay portraying the freeze as short-sighted. As things worked out, Almond found another way to come up with the money: borrowing.

Now, facing even bigger troubles, Carcieri himself looks to slash NOP funding. He proposes deleting this year’s $7.5-million appropriation. The administration says it may be possible to temper that by tapping $3 million from a capital account. Don’t expect a $7.5-million outlay for NOP in the new fiscal year. Carcieri proposes zero.

The Rev. Duane Clinker, one of the ministers arrested in 2001 — the charges against them wound up being dismissed — said at Tuesday’s rally that the clergy who came then were praying not only for Almond and the homeless but also for their own souls. “We’d been too apathetic.”

Echoing the oft-heard theme that Rhode Island tax policies favor the rich, Mr. Clinker, a Methodist, cited proposed cutbacks not only in housing but also health care, welfare and education, and he asserted, “Wealth is being taken from the bottom of society and the middle of society and it’s being reallocated to the top.”

He told me later that, at heart, it’s a spiritual struggle. “Are we one people or not? Does government serve the people or not?”

Providence College sociologist Eric Hirsch told me, “We haven’t learned anything. The problem is the idea that by cutting programs you actually save money. If you cut programs, put people out on the street, it actually costs you money, because those people wind up in shelters, they wind up in emergency rooms, they wind up in really high-cost institutions like hospitals, drug rehabilitation hospitals. So we’ll wind up paying for it down the road if we cut programs that provide people with a safe place to live.”

Meanwhile, on another budget matter, I spoke with Anne Nolan, president of Crossroads Rhode Island, about Carcieri’s proposal to cut in half its $450,000 grant from the state.

Crossroads’ mission is to move people out of homelessness: provide permanent housing, job training, health care and so on. It also has taken on the burden of providing temporary shelter for up to 75 people a night.

She said Crossroads has been “inundated” and declared, “We don’t have an endowment and we don’t have reserves. We don’t have a rainy day [fund], it’s been pouring for so long.”

I said Carcieri is well educated and asked Nolan what she thinks his problem is. She said, “I sometimes think that it’s an easy target, to target people that don’t have much of a voice.”

M. Charles Bakst is The Journal’s political columnist.

mbakst@projo.com