President-elect Trump can create a new beginning for the U.S. Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) by utilizing it in achieving his goals of making infrastructure improvements, addressing illegal immigration, assisting our veterans and working families.
In addition, Trump will have to deal with two pressing problems involving HUD. First, HUD has taken on the role of forcing diversification via the Section 8 portable housing voucher program. Second, HUD is mandating that a tenant’s criminal history should not be a factor in housing.
HUD can also play a decisive role in ending the cycle of government dependency by mandating time limits for taxpayer-funded housing for non-seniors that have the ability to work.
HUD’s Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) has thousands of infrastructure projects which have already been identified, planned and in many cases ready to proceed but for lack of funding. With additional funding, the CDBG program can play a role in Trump’s plan to remake America’s aging infrastructure.
HUD is also uniquely situated to address the problem of illegal immigration. Currently, HUD allows illegal immigrants to live in public and Section 8 housing under a blended funding formula. HUD’s justification is that taxpayer funds are not directly used for illegal immigrants.
However, this is a legal ruse that has the real effect of denying housing to law-abiding American citizens, veterans and seniors, and should be stopped.
The Trump administration will also have to address one of the most radical social-engineering programs since the 1960s. Obama’s HUD has introduced the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” program, an attempt by bureaucrats in Washington to tinker with the demographic profiles of various communities by threatening to withhold federal funds and by super-sizing portable Section 8 vouchers.
This program is to be enforced by federal “mobility cunselors.” This attempt to federalize local communities was tried before by HUD in Dallas with disastrous results, and is being ushered in on a national scale with almost no debate.
Another misguided Obama-HUD initiative is to ban public and private landlords using the criminal histories of applicants and tenants to make decisions about renting. I will concede as a former police officer, defense attorney and criminal justice professor that America has too many laws and too many people in prison.
Over 80 million Americans have arrest records. During the Clinton administration, there was a broad consensus that drug dealers and violent criminals should be denied taxpayer-funded housing. But we could at least address this issue with more public debate.
Another area of needed reform concerns lifetime affordable housing benefits for those who can work, which was not the original purpose of public housing as conceived during the Great Depression.
I am a product of that original concept, having spent my youth in affordable housing. But now, public and Section 8 housing benefits are almost family heirlooms passed down from generation to generation.
This has led to a cycle of broken families and urban decay. Many communities have taken the initiative and begun voluntary programs to get families off of government housing and into gainful employment by setting clear expectations that public housing is not permanent but merely a stepping stone.
They provide the tenants with skills and education so they can enter the workforce. Participants enter into five-year service plans which provides guidance and assistance towards the goal of self-sufficiency. Current HUD family self-sufficiency programs have no teeth and are simply not up to the task.
If this concept was mandated for those able to work, it would transform our public housing authorities into incubators of self-reliance and opportunity. This would also open up the waiting list for housing for seniors, veterans and the disabled, as those who graduate out of public housing move into private housing.
Trump can reshape affordable housing to serve working families, seniors, veterans and the disabled. HUD needs this new beginning. HUD can play a key role in meeting the incoming administration’s agenda for economic renewal while restoring those communities battered by global economic forces and an entitlement culture that rewards dependency.
HUD can become one of the major policy and program implementers of the Trump administration.
Douglas Bushman is executive director of the Marlborough Massachusetts Community Development Authority, a real estate attorney and served as an alternate delegate for Donald Trump at the Republican National Convention. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
