ThinkProgress Home
ThinkProgress
ThinkProgress Logo

Stories tagged with “Department of Housing and Urban Development”

Economy

Mitt Romney Tells Rich Donors His Secret Plan To Cut Housing Assistance

By Pat Garofalo on Apr 16, 2012 at 11:10 am

During comments overheard by an NBC news reporter, Mitt Romney told a crowd at a private fundraiser last night that he might eliminate the Department of Housing and Urban Development, scale back the Department of Education, and eliminate some specific tax provisions. There are all details that he has refused to divulge on the campaign trail:

Romney went into a level of detail not usually seen by the public in the speech, which was overheard by reporters on a sidewalk below. One possibility floated by Romney included the elimination of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Cabinet-level agency once led by Romney’s father, George.

“I’m going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I’m probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go,” Romney said. “Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later.

Regarding taxes, Romney said, “I’m going to probably eliminate for high income people the second home mortgage deduction.” He also said that he would “likely eliminate deductions for state income and property taxes.” The campaign is already attempting to walk the comments back, with a Romney adviser telling CNN, “He was tossing ideas out, not unveiling policy.”

For starters, Romney’s tax ideas, while reasonable, would raise nowhere near enough money to offset the huge tax cuts that he has in mind. Those tax cuts would increase the deficit by $900 billion in 2015 alone. Meanwhile, eliminating the deduction for state and local taxes, one of the largest tax expenditures for the government, for everyone saves $72 billion per year, and saves far less if the elimination is limited to upper-income Americans.

Romney’s plan to eliminate HUD, assuming he didn’t shuffle its programs to other departments, would bring an end to critical programs like Section 8 housing vouchers and community development block grants. Eliminating housing assistance is even more problematic given the disproportionate percentage of veterans in the homeless population.

So while he’s happy to hand out tax breaks worth hundreds of thousands of dollars to the very richest Americans, Romney would at least contemplate eliminating housing subsidies for the very lowest income Americans, giving them little hope of putting a roof over their heads.

LGBT

Housing Department Introduces Sweeping LGBT Protections

By Zack Ford on Jan 28, 2012 at 6:46 pm

Speaking today at the National Conference on LGBT Equality: Creating Change in Baltimore, HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan introduced a broad and sweeping set of new nondiscrimination protections the department will be implementing. Under the new guidelines, any program that receives funding or insurance through HUD will be prohibited from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, including Section 8 housing, emergency shelters, and other social services, as well as lending for FHA-insured mortgage financing. In addition, all such programs will now be required to recognize same-sex and otherwise LGBT families — regardless of their marital status or the adoption status of their children — to ensure they can stay together as a family unit when accessing HUD resources.

In his remarks, Donovan explained the significance of these changes:

DONOVAN: And so, first and foremost, this rule includes a new equal access provision that prohibits owners and operators of HUD-funded housing, or housing whose financing we insure, from inquiring about an applicant’s sexual orientation or gender identity or denying housing on that basis. If you are denying HUD housing to people on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity—actual or perceived—you’re discriminating, you’re breaking the law – and you will be held accountable. That’s what equal access means – and that’s what this rule is going to do.

Secondly, this rule makes clear that LGBT families, like the DeShanes, are eligible for HUD’s public housing and Housing Choice Voucher programs that collectively serve 5.5 million people. Third, the rule also makes clear that sexual orientation and gender identity should not and cannot be part of any lending decision when it comes to getting a mortgage insured by the FHA – part of HUD.

I’m proud to announce that this rule will be published as final in the Federal Register next week and go into effect 30 days later.

Watch it:

In addition to HUD’s new regulations, the White House announced Friday that it will hold a series of public forums across the country designed  to “ensure health, well-being, security, justice, and equality for LGBT Americans.” It is likely that these conferences will help serve as a vehicle for educating local service providers and community leaders about how to implement various new protections.

LGBT

Catholic Bishops Call For Housing Policy That Discriminates Against LGBT Americans

By Zack Ford on Mar 29, 2011 at 12:20 pm

In response to a proposed regulation from the Department of Housing and Urban Development prohibiting discrimination in its programs based on sexual orientation and gender identity, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has cried out that the regulation will interfere with their religious beliefs and threatened to end their support and sponsorship of tenants for HUD programs (PDF):

Specifically, the regulations may force faith-based and other organizations, as a condition of participating in HUD programs and in contravention of their religious beliefs, to facilitate shared housing arrangements between persons who are not joined in the legal union of one man and one woman. By this, we do not mean that any person should be denied housing. Making decisions about shared housing, however, is another matter. Particularly here, faith-based and other organizations should retain the freedom they have always had to make housing placements in a manner consistent with their religious beliefs, including when it concerns a cohabiting couple, be it an unmarried heterosexual couple or a homosexual couple. Given the very large role that faith-based organizations play in HUD programs, the regulation, by infringing upon that freedom, may have the ultimate effect of driving away organizations with a long and successful track record in meeting housing needs, leaving beneficiaries without the housing that they sought or that the government intended them to receive.

HUD’s decision reflects a growing awareness of the discrimination actually faced by people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender. A recent study revealed that one in five transgender individuals has experienced homelessness. An estimated 40% of homeless youth are LGBT, and LGBT elders are at higher risk for homelessness due to the compounding financial inequities they experience over their lifetimes.

This is only the latest of several threats from the Catholic Church to suspend charity support in the face of LGBT progress. In 2009, when the District of Columbia was preparing to pass marriage equality, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington threatened to discontinue all social services for the city if the same-sex marriage law was passed. After the law passed, DC Catholic Charities dropped all spousal benefits for newlyweds and new hires. In Maine, the Roman Catholic Diocese of Portland pulled its funding of a homeless shelter because of its support of same-sex marriage.

But, while the Bishops feel that it is more important to discriminate against LGBT people than to actually provide them housing, a recent study revealed that 74% of American Catholics support same-sex marriage or civil unions. In conjunction with its new proposed policy (PDF), HUD is also conducting its own study of housing discrimination against LGBT people.

Yglesias

Which Agencies Are the Best

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 31, 2009 at 4:13 pm

Apparently on alternate years the Office of Personnel Management does a huge survey of the federal workforce in which they, among other things, rate each agency on four dimensions. Lee Siegelman determined that “the correlations between agencies’ scores on any pair of dimensions are all .88 or above” so you can useful combine the four scores into a single composite and then get a nice chart:

agencies2_thumb.png

The best-run federal agencies, according to this measure, are the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Management and Budget, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Three cabinet departments — HUD, Homeland Security, and Transportation — are bottom-of-the-listers. The worst-run agency by far, though, appears to be the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees nonmilitary international broadcasting by the government. It used to be part of USIA, but it became independent in 1999, and, to judge by the assessments of those who work there, seems to be something of a disaster. What is it about the Broadcasting Board of Governors that’s soo bad? Basically everything, according to the OMB survey: It ranks dead-last on three of the four dimensions iand 36th of 37 on the other dimension.

Fortunately, the Broadcasting Board of Governors isn’t that big a deal in the scheme of things. By contrast, the low quality of HUD, DOT, and DHS is a very significant problem. There seem to be some very interesting ideas about sustainable communities coming from the leadership at HUD and DOT that I’m very interested in, and that have important implications for our long-run growth, quality of life, and ecological sustainability. But it seems to me that these initiatives are unlikely to be successful unless the agencies running them can be reasonably effective.

Yglesias

Ron Sims at HUD

By Matthew Yglesias on Mar 10, 2009 at 1:14 pm

I don’t know a great deal about Ron Sims, head of King County in Washington (that’s Seattle and some surrounding areas), but apparently he’s going to be Deputy Secretary at HUD and based on Kate Sheppard’s writeup he seems like an excellent choice:

Sims has built up a national reputation for his efforts to reduce carbon emissions in the Seattle area and prepare the region for some of the now-unavoidable impacts of climate change. His work on global warming helped earn him acknowledgement as a Public Official of the Year in 2006 from Governing magazine, which honored him again in 2008 as one of America’s Innovative Leaders for his work on mass transit.

King County’s plan to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions was enacted in 2007, and it’s already seeing results. According to its most recent climate report, in 2007 the county reduced emissions from its operations by more than 6 percent below 2000 levels, as measured by the Chicago Climate Exchange, a voluntary cap-and-trade market. It was the first county to join the exchange, and King County Metro Transit was the first major bus transit agency to join. [...]

In his new post, Sims will apply lessons learned from his work in the Seattle area, but also take inspiration from cities like Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, New York, Phoenix, and San Francisco, where mayors have launched innovative programs to curb emissions. “My job is to find those areas where folks are doing that and say, folks, let’s meet, let’s begin to work with Secretary Donavan on a strategy that basically says we’re not having to start from scratch,” said Sims.

The Seattle are is far from the ideal in terms of transportation policy, but my understanding is that they’ve made some important strides in recent years and that it’s one of relatively few metro areas where political leaders understand that controlling demand for space on roads—rather than endlessly building more highways—is the key to resolving congestion issues.

Switch to Mobile