Sure, Alphonso Jackson gets to leave. He walks away from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development with a fat wallet and fatter cronies, a portrait on the wall, and the seemingly requisite cloud of future indictments overhead.
It would be nice if he could take the department’s policies with him. But at least for the time being, it appears we’re stuck with the same institution of exploiting housing as a commodity for developers and speculators.
That’s what HUD has become during the past 25 years. What was intended as a department for supporting housing as a foundation to strong communities and economic development has become a facilitator to subsidize an industry, not our communities. It’s the difference between funding low-income housing at about $30 billion, and funding mortgage deductions and tax credits for middle- and upper-income households to the tune of $122 billion. Since 1981, tax benefits for homebuyers have been greater than HUD’s entire budget as low-income housing programs have been whittled away. Since 1996, HUD funding for new public housing has been zero, even as more than 100,000 public housing units were lost to demolition or sale. As a result of HUD’s termination of community builder, we have the documented rise of modern-day homelessness.
Alphonso Jackson was just the latest authority figure administering bad policy and perpetuating homelessness, and we can expect his replacement to be cut from the same cloth. When the guard changes, however, we have an opportunity to restore HUD to its former intended glory, if we compel it to do so.
The next head of housing in this country could actually reframe the nation’s housing agenda around the idea that housing is a human right, and that poverty and homelessness we see on our streets didn’t always exist, and doesn’t have to anymore. There is an opportunity here to restore a balance in communities that the housing market has taken to extremes, leading all the way to the current subprime-mortgage crisis that, again, is beating down hardest on minorities and low-income homeowners.
There was a time when the federal government’s role in building communities by supporting housing for the poor was respected and supported. It can be that way again with leadership that is prepared to look frankly at the consequences of the government’s abandonment of affordable housing. That will also mean destroying the stereotype that providing public housing for people with physical or mental disabilities is a burdensome handout but subsidies for people buying $500,000 homes is the taxpayers’ obligation.
HUD, needs to be stipped of it’s ulterior motives, along with the deception that progress is being made by shifting the demographics of homelessness or targeting the extremes, while the systemic problems are left to continue unchallenged. It will take leadership, and advocacy, to make the changes needed, and the support of a willing administration, a far different administration then we’ve seen for past 25 years.
