It's just telling that you've got an authoritarian playbook that sort of, at every pass, seems to be more focused on driving up corporate profits at the expense of the American people.
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Department of Housing and Urban Development
housing portfolio has waned for decades with the department effectively working to maintain the public housing portfolio from the late 1990s when the Faircloth Amendment capped HUD’s public housing portfolio.”
Longer-term reforms of HUD rental assistance programs should encourage choice and competition for renters, encourage participation by landlords where appropriate,** and encourage all non-elderly, able-bodied adults to move toward self-sufficiency. This can be pursued through regulations and legislative reforms that seek to strengthen work requirements, limit the period during which households are eligible for housing benefits, and add flexibility to rent payment terms to facilitate the movement of households toward self-sufficiency.
Obviously, using government vouchers or other such programs to expand housing choice options is not without its downsides. The turn toward mobility vouchers constitutes an abandonment of America’s public housing stock, and efforts to increase competition in the public housing market must not come at the expense of local autonomy and the ability of cities, towns, neighborhoods, and communities to choose for themselves the sort of housing they want to allow. Freedom of association and self-government at the most local level possible must remain primary considerations in any conservative effort to increase competition in the public housing market.
Congress should also consider those areas in which federal policy negatively interacts with private markets, including when federal policy crowds out private-sector development and exacerbates affordability challenges that persist across the nation. It is essential that legislation provides states and localities maximal flexibility to pursue locally designed policies and minimize the likelihood of federal preemption of local land use and zoning decisions.
In the same manner, Congress should prioritize any and all legislative support for the single-family home. Homeownership forms the backbone of the American Dream. The purchase of a home is the largest investment most Americans will make in their lifetimes, and homeownership remains the most accessible way to build generational wealth for millions of Americans. For these reasons, American homeowners and citizens know best what is in the interest of their neighborhoods and communities. Localities rather than the federal government must have the final say in zoning laws and regulations, and a conservative Administration should oppose any efforts to weaken single-family zoning. Along the same lines, Congress can propose tax credits for the renovation or repair of housing stock in rural areas so that more Americans are able to access the American Dream of homeownership.
Additionally, enhanced statutory authorities for local autonomy should extend to the prioritizing of federal rental assistance subsidies that emphasize choice and mobility in housing voucher subsidies over static, site-based subsidies and provide authority for maximal flexibility to direct PHA land sales that involve the existing stock of public housing units. Congress must consider the future of the public
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housing model. At best, any new public investments will provide maintenance funds to bring substandard housing units and properties up to livability standards but will still fail to address larger aims of upward mobility and dynamism for local housing markets where land can be sold by PHAs and put to greater economic use, thereby benefiting entire local economies through greater private investment, productivity and employment opportunities, and increased tax revenue.
Any long-term view of HUD’s future must include maintaining the strong financial operations and reliable reporting that are needed to run a $50 billionper-year agency. Before the Trump Administration, HUD effectively did not have a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for eight years, and HUD’s financial infrastructure inevitably deteriorated. The department’s auditors were unable to conclude that HUD’s internal operations were producing accurate financial reporting. The auditors had identified multiple material weaknesses and significant deficiencies in the department’s internal financial controls. Overall, the deterioration of HUD’s financial infrastructure led to a lack of accountability with respect to the use of taxpayer funds as well as to pervasive difficulties with operations and program implementation.
However, by hiring anew CFO from the private sector with a proven track record of visionary leadership, HUD was able to implement an agencywide governance structure that improved its financial processes and internal controls and harnessed the power of innovative new technologies to bring a modernized business mindset to the agency’s financial infrastructure. By the end of the Trump Administration, for the first time in nearly a decade, HUD was able to address all of its previously identified material weaknesses, and the auditors were able to issue their first clean audit report on HUD’s financial statements and internal controls.
Finally, and more fundamentally, Congress could consider a wholesale overhaul of HUD that contemplates devolving many HUD functions to states and localities with any remaining federal functions consolidated to other federal agencies (for example, by transferring loan guarantee programs to SBA; moving Indian housing programs to the Department of the Interior; moving rental assistance, mortgage insurance programs, and GNMA to a redesignated Housing and Home Finance Agency). Generally, this reform path could consolidate some programs, eliminate others that have failed to produce meaningful long-run results, and narrow the scope of many programs so that they are closer to what they were when they were created.