HUD housing urban dev

countrywide Freedom financial reverse mortgages fail

trump 2 SCOTT TURNER nFLXIAN NATL? SEan feucht

HUD Secretary Ben Carson

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02/11/2026

Last year, Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner teamed up with Christian nationalist worship leader and right-wing political activist Sean Feucht to host a Christian worship service on the National Mall.

Shortly thereafter, Feucht revealed that he was working with members of the Trump administration to organize a series of similar worship services around the country in 2026, tied to the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

During a livestream broadcast on Monday, Feucht announced details of what he called the "Roots Of Revival" tour in which the federal government will partner with him as he hosts prayer events "from coast to coast [in] all the historic and epic places of revival and awakening that were birthed in America."

"As I was praying and fasting leading into the new year, I felt like the Lord said, 'Remind America on the 250 year anniversary of her heritage in revival and awakening.' In other words, call America back to God, this is the source of our strength," Feucht said.

"Here's the exciting thing," he continued. "The coolest part is we get to do it together with the Freedom 250 organization, which is the White House/Trump administration arm executing the mandate of celebrating America's 250 year birthday. We're so excited. We have come into an agreement with them to partner together, to collaborate together. They're going to be coming out to some of our events. We're going to be championing other things they're doing and so it's just very, very amazing. It is a dream come true and such a blessing."

"It's just an amazing season from God to be able to do this in partnership with our own government and to know that they have our back and to be able to be an extension of literally the Faith Office inside of the White House, all the people that are praying inside of there, so many members of the the Cabinet and the Trump administration love Jesus and they're going to be a part of this in various ways," Feucht gushed. "It's just so exciting to announce that we are officially partnering together."

Feucht also announced that his "Roots Of Revival" tour was going to be participating in the Trump administration's National Jubilee of Prayer, Praise, and Thanksgiving to be held on the National Mall on May 17.

"We're going back with the White House, with our own government, to help them host a whole day of worship and prayer," he said. "We're so excited. May 17 is when that happens on the National Mall, but the whole year, Roots of Revival is going to be partnered with the White House and many other organizations."

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an 7 25

A proposal from the Trump administration would impose a strict two‑year limit on Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) flagship rental assistance programs, including Section 8 vouchers and public housing. If enacted, the change could leave 1.4 million of the nation’s lowest-income households without housing support, the Associated Press reported Thursday.

A New York University analysis of HUD data concludes that the two-year cap would force 1.4 million households — predominantly working families with children—out of subsidized housing, leading to widespread evictions and upheaval, per the report.

The report spotlighted Havalah Hopkins, a 23-year-old working mother of an autistic son, who fears such a limit would render them homeless, as neither wages nor local affordable housing currently offer a viable safety net.

“A two‑year time limit is ridiculous,” she told AP. “It’s so disrespectful. I think it’s dehumanizing—the whole system.”

IFrame Content

She further said, “It’s a cycle of feeling defeated and depleted, no matter how much energy and effort and tenacity you have towards surviving."

Since hearing about Trump’s proposal, Hopkins says she's been consumed by the fear of loading her life into a van with her son, unraveling the sense of safety she’s worked so hard to build.

The report noted that both Democrats and Republicans have acknowledged that imposing time limits could reduce HUD's notoriously long waitlists.

Some hard‑liners believe that the looming threat of losing housing will prompt recipients to become self‑sufficient; others argue that limits — if paired with support services and job-training incentives — could encourage tenants to make positive life changes.

Meanwhile, it remains uncertain whether Congress will support Trump’s HUD agenda.

This week, the House appropriations committee is evaluating HUD’s fiscal year 2026 budget — but so far, no time-limit provisions are included, per AP.

HUD spokesperson Kasey Lovett said in a statement to AP that the Senate has not yet released its budget blueprint for the agency and emphasized the administration’s intent to press forward with implementing time limits.

:{“HUD will continue to engage with colleagues on the hill to ensure a seamless transition and enforcement of any new time limit,” she said.

Scott Turner (politician) - Wikipedia

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Eric Scott Turner (born February 26, 1972) is an American businessman, politician, and former professional football player who is serving as the 19th United States secretary of housing and urban development since 2025.

He served as executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council from 2019 to 2021. Previously, Turner served as state representative for Texas's 33rd House District, which includes part of Collin County and all of Rockwall County, from 2013 to 2017. Before entering politics, Turner played cornerback in the National Football League (NFL) for nine seasons.

On November 22, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intent to nominate Turner as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in his second administration. Turner was confirmed by the United States Senate to the office on February 5, 2025, by a vote of 55-45, and took office later that day.

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[https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/housing-crisis/ stossel accidently left the citation?

...Perhaps that’s why Ronald Reagan, friend to unregulated markets of any kinds, sought to humble the agency.HUD never really recovered from the 1980s, when its budget was slashed from $26 billion to $8 billion. Starting with his administration, the agency budget and its corresponding possibilities for action shrank dramatically.

Going into the Reagan years, HUD was politically vulnerable. After a cavalcade of negative press about public housing, and several high profile fights over its expansion into majority white communities, this program—and other affordable housing efforts—were attacked as ineffectual relics of the mid-20th-century liberal consensus. (...

(HUD’s efforts to enforce the 1968 Fair Housing Act were rarely robust enough to spur a comparable backlash.) Politicians in both parties largely abandoned an expansive vision of its goals, leading to market-oriented programs like Bill Clinton’s HOPE VI, which substantially shrank the number of publicly subsidized affordable housing units being offered.

Many commentators have noted the parallels between Donald Trump’s appointment of Ben Carson to Reagan’s disastrous appointment of Samuel Pierce, Jr., who blew his eight years as HUD chief binge-watching soap operas and permitting his aides to dole out millions in illegal subsidies to real estate consultants. In appointing Pierce, the administration seemed similarly less interested in targeting HUD than in allowing it to subside into lassitude. (Reagan himself often failed to recognize Pierce, greeting him in a 1981 White House reception as “Mr. Mayor.”) There is little reason to doubt that Carson will similarly seek to scale back the agency’s ambitions: After all, he described the Obama administration’s highly technical Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule as “experimenting with failed socialism.”

But Carson isn’t the main threat to HUD’s mandates to fight segregation and expand access to affordable housing. Though Pierce allowed ineptitude and corruption to flower at HUD, the disaster was remediable. Far more damaging to an expansive vision of HUD’s mission, today or in the future, will be the sweeping budget cuts that are a central aspect of Paul Ryan’s vision for America. Trump offered few substantive statements on housing policy and, in contrast with Reagan, is entering office with staggeringly high disapproval ratings. Ryan’s policy preferences are widely expected to set the domestic policy agenda in the year ahead.

There is little doubt that if Ryan gets his way, further cuts to HUD can be expected. And the Republican Congress he leads will gladly finish the job Reagan started 30 years ago. Over the course of Reagan’s years in office, HUD’s budget authority fell by 70 percent. Between 1977 and 2012 the agency lost over half of its funding. As a direct result, only five million families receive federal housing assistance today—a quarter of those eligible for assistance. Unlike food, heating, or medical assistance, federal housing aid is not automatically available to anyone whose income falls below the poverty line. America would still have a housing crisis if Reagan hadn’t been elected in 1980, but it probably wouldn’t have the vicious size of the one we face today.

A 2004 estimate from the National Low Income Housing Coalition shows that if the federal government had continued funding housing assistance at pre-Reagan levels, at least 15 million more people would have enjoyed housing supports. Instead, those millions of Americans—many more, since the study was conducted—are going without housing support in a time of stagnant wages and skyrocketing housing costs. Last December, Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies found that 11 million households are paying more than half their income on rent.

All those statistics and massive numbers hide the lived reality of what Reagan-era budget cuts, and HUD’s massively reduced capacity, mean for actual poor Americans. If a family spends half their income, if not more, on rent, that means they are extremely vulnerable to getting kicked out of their home. In his groundbreaking book Evicted, Matthew Desmond showed the ramifications in painstaking detail. People who are insecure in their housing become vulnerable in every other aspect of their lives too. Children perform worse in school, adults have a harder time at work, families become less invested in communities. Suicide rates are correlated with eviction, as are higher levels of crime.

The federal government is the only institution with the potential power and resources to end this nightmare. ...

https://prospect.org/mapping-corruption-interactive

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Housing and Urban Development Department

QUICK AND DIRTY

HUD Secretary Ben Carson had no experience in government and questioned his own fitness for a Cabinet appointment.
After his confirmation, he gave top jobs and rapid pay raises to a roster of friends and associates.
Ignoring a $5,000 limit on office expenditures, Carson ordered a $31,000 dining set. When word got out, he canceled the order and seemed to blame his wife for the idea. In a whistleblower complaint, a career HUD official, Helen Foster, said she was told to “find money” for the purchase and then demoted for raising objections.
Carson has called for drastic cuts to his own department, outside of the decorating budget. An anti-government ideologue, he says he puts his faith in private-sector remedies such as the administration’s Opportunity Zone program, which relies on tax incentives to spur development in low-income communities.
Under Carson’s oversight, that program has been tweaked again and again to produce greater benefits for billionaires and Trump friends and supporters.
Carson’s son and daughter-in-law have HUD-related business activities. Carson has created opportunities for them to participate in official events and use their family ties to try to make deals for themselves.
Ben Carson Jr. runs a Maryland-based construction firm and a private equity fund. His wife Merlynn is a management consultant. In 2017, Carson Jr. organized a “listening tour” in Baltimore for his father.One of the people invited to participate was Seema Verma, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Although she did not attend, Merlynn Carson subsequently obtained a half-million-dollar consulting contract from Verma’s agency.

SELF-AND-CRONY-ENRICHMENT

Deputy Chief of Staff Alfonso Costa Jr. is the son of a man described by the secretary as “my very best friend.” Carson and Al Costa Sr., a dentist turned commercial real-estate investor, were partners in a lucrative deal involving an office building in Pittsburgh—a property that has netted Carson as much as $2 million a year. Carson has been a frequent guest at Costa’s villa in Tuscany, which rents for upwards of $20,000 a month. In 2017, Costa Sr. was convicted of health care fraud after billing insurance companies for $44,000 in fictitious dental work. He escaped a prison sentence thanks partly to a supportive letter from Carson.
The Opportunity Zone program, entrusted to Carson’s leadership, has become a boondoggle for billionaires and Trump associates. In Baltimore, Under Armour founder Kevin Plank (another recipient of an invitation to the secretary’s listening tour) won an Opportunity Zone designation for a project located in an area initially rejected as too wealthy. In Florida, the beneficiaries include a Republican donor developing a luxury housing project and superyacht marina near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.In Detroit, Quicken Loans founder Dan Gilbert has several Opportunity Zone projects in the works after extensive lobbying....

mcconn HEALS HEELS 3rd covid fail bill will spike homeless, hunger

dn 720 dog whistle to suburbs

https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/a-new-trump-administration-rule-could-force-tens-of-thousands-of-kids-into-homelessness-report/

Trump Administration has proposed a rule designed to purge undocumented immigrants from public housing. But according to analysis from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the rule could have the effect of displacing more than 55,000 children who are all legal citizens or residents of the United States.

HUD Secretary Ben Carson has described the proposed rule, which is beingaggressively pushed by White House Senior Policy Adviser Stephen Miller,as a way to “make certain our scarce public resources help those who are legally entitled to it.” However, HUD’s analysis indicates that about half of the people in households that are facing possible eviction or homelessness are children who are legally qualified for help.In the U.S., current rules forbid undocumented immigrants from directly receiving federal housing assistance. But families that have mixed immigration status are eligible.An undocumented single man or single woman is not eligible for housing assistance under current rules, but a family is eligible if at least one person in that household is eligible. For example, a man who is undocumented would not be eligible by himself, but his family could apply if his wife is a U.S. citizen or if he has a child who was born in the U.S. (that U.S.-born child enjoys birthright citizenship). And the benefits the family is entitled to receive are prorated accordingly.But the new rule would require everyone in that household to have “eligible immigration status,” the Washington Post reports. According to HUD, roughly 25,000 households in the U.S. representing about 108,000 people presently living in subsidized housing have at least one ineligible member—and about 70% of these households with mixed immigration status (around 76,000 people) legally qualify for benefits. About 55,000 are children.According to its analysis, “HUD expects that fear of the family being separated would lead to prompt evacuation by most mixed households. Temporary homelessness could arise for a household if they are unable to find alternative housing."

Diane Yentel, president and chief executive of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, is highly critical of the proposed rule, and the Washington Post quotes her as saying, “Tens of thousands of deeply poor kids, mostly U.S. citizens, could be evicted and made homeless because of this rule. And by HUD’s own admission, there would be no benefit to families on the waiting list.”

Trump’s HUD wants to expand flawed program that is ‘privatizing public housing’

It leaves vulnerable residents at the mercy of developers.

DANIELLE MCLEAN

FEB 27, 2019

https://thinkprogress.org/a-flawed-public-housing-program-leaves-vulnerable-residents-at-the-mercy-of-developers-66a0ee5b2321/

3 stories 11/18

"Pretty Much a Failure”: HUD Inspections Pass Dangerous Apartments Filled With Rats, Roaches and Toxic Mold

by Molly Parker , The Southern Illinoisan

The system for inspecting federally subsidized properties is failing low-income families, seniors and people with disabilities and undermining the agency’s oversight, The Southern Illinoisan and ProPublica have found.

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Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson attempted to roll back an Obama-era rule aimed at curbing housing segregation. This was covered for an absurd 23 seconds in total: 8 seconds on CNN, 15 seconds on MSNBC, and none at all on Fox News.

ec update 7/27 vienna great housing, most ppl have, much less % on income

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/hud-delayed-action-crumbling-public-housing-because-feared-political-repercussions

HUD Delayed Action on Crumbling Public Housing Because of Feared 'Political Repercussions'

As residents in Cairo, Illinois, dealt with mice, toxic mold and lead paint, HUD officials waited to step in.

By Molly Parker / ProPublica July 27, 2018, 5:47 AM GMT

CAIRO, Ill. — As public housing deteriorated in Illinois’ southernmost city, bureaucrats at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development delayed stepping in because they wanted to avoid “political repercussions” and negative attention, according to a scathing audit released today.

HUD’s inspector general, the agency’s investigative arm, said HUD officials bickered over whether a series of internal reports dating back to 2010, citing widespread mismanagement and worsening conditions in apartment complexes in Cairo, were sufficient to seize operations of the Alexander County Housing Authority, which owned the buildings. HUD officials also worried whether the agency could afford to run the local authority if it did take it over.

As a result, some 200 children and their families languished in two 1940s-era complexes overrun with mice, toxic mold and lead paint. Parents sprayed Raid around their children’s beds at night to keep the roaches off them while they slept. The heating system was so inadequate they were forced to use their gas ovens in the winter to stay warm. The Southern Illinoisan has been chronicling poor living conditions in Cairo, mismanagement by the local housing authority, and HUD oversight failures since the fall of 2015, and had already reported most of the problems identified in the audit.

HUD “could and should have done more to oversee” the housing authority, the 28-page report said, based on interviews with two dozen HUD officials.

In February 2016, during the final year of President Barack Obama’s administration, HUD took possession of the local housing authority and appointed its own staff to run it.

Another year passed before HUD announced a plan to address the unsafe conditions at the complexes, known as Elmwood and McBride, which housed 400 people, about a sixth of the town’s population. Cairo is a predominantly African-American city of about 2,400 people that sits at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

In April 2017, HUD officials shared the plan with residents: The complexes would be closed because the housing authority didn’t have the money to repair them.

HUD has offered families moving expenses and vouchers that subsidize rent in the private market. With few rental options available, most people have had to relocate to other nearby communities. Only seven families remain at Elmwood and McBride.

At the time of the closure announcement, a HUD spokesperson told The Southern Illinoisan that HUD was “stunned … at what we saw, not just in terms of the deplorable living conditions that we encountered but at the poor, even absent record keeping, the staggering backlog of critical repairs, all of this going to the very health and safety of the residents living there.”

The inspector general’s report, citing this quote, noted that the “deplorable” conditions at the housing authority “did not occur overnight” and that HUD was aware of many of the problems based on multiple assessments completed over six years.

In one extensive report from 2014, experts from across the agency identified serious and widespread failures at the local housing authority. Among them, HUD found that officials had inappropriately siphoned off $400,000 in funds earmarked for the management and routine maintenance of Elmwood and McBride to pay administrative salaries and benefits. The report also noted that conditions were significantly worse at the two complexes, comprised almost exclusively of African-American families, than at other more integrated properties. And HUD fair housing auditors found that the housing authority was paying black employees lower wages than white workers, even when black workers had the same or more experience, and were assigned more difficult tasks.

Even still, senior officials in HUD’s Office of Public and Indian Housing resisted the recommendations of staff in Chicago and other departments to take swift action.

Senior Public and Indian Housing officials told the inspector general that they were unaware of the 2014 report or its findings, but others contradicted that assertion and said they met with senior officials to discuss them.

“Although it may be too late to save ACHA,” the inspector general’s audit said, referring to the local housing authority, the report recommended that HUD take swift action to improve oversight of “troubled” housing authorities across the country. As of June, there were 50 with this designation, which is determined by a variety of HUD assessments. There are about 3,800 housing authorities nationally.

Rep. Mike Bost, R-Murphysboro, whose district includes Cairo, said the report portrays gross negligence on HUD’s part. “This is a case where HUD basically knew the problems were there, and chose not to react because of the embarrassment they might have had to face because it had gotten so bad. They let it continue to go down that path and now there’s no way to recover from it.”

The inspector general’s report also noted that over the years, there were several errors in how the housing authority’s properties and finances were graded by HUD. This delayed the agency’s push for corrective action, which is guided by a defined set of policies based on annual performance reviews, officials told the inspector general.

HUD’s contract with housing authorities includes a provision to take them over in emergency situations, including when the life, health and safety of residents is at imminent risk. HUD “should have exercised this authority sooner” and “we are concerned that the … officials we spoke with may not have been aware of” this option, the report said.

One official who isn’t named told the Office of Inspector General that it takes years to build a record sufficient enough to take a housing authority into receivership. That same official said the process “isn’t too mapped out.” Another said he was unsure of what precisely triggered receivership.

Though HUD has taken over about 20 housing authorities since 1985, including four in Illinois, a receivership manual was only recently created. The inspector general recommended that HUD take several steps to improve its oversight of troubled and at-risk housing authorities, including improving policies and training, and creating strategies to work across HUD’s departments when housing authorities are uncooperative.

In response to the report, Dominique Blom, HUD’s general deputy assistant secretary for Public and Indian Housing, wrote to the inspector general that the agency agrees with most of the recommendations.

The Office of Public and Indian Housing “also wishes to note the accomplishments made at the Alexander County Housing Authority” since receivership began to “correct deficiencies, substantially reduce the administration costs that threatened to bankrupt the agency and reposition the assets,” her letter said.

For their part, many residents say the forced move has disrupted their lives. The small local school district has lost about a fourth of its student population because of the housing crisis. As receiver, HUD has struggled to keep up with tasks as basic as keeping the grass mowed.

HUD spokesman Jereon Brown declined further comment.

Sens. Dick Durbin and Tammy Duckworth, both Illinois Democrats, said in a joint statement that there is “no question” that Cairo public housing residents “suffered through decades of neglect, inadequate oversight and outright discrimination.”

“The findings in the Inspector General report underscore what we’ve already known — HUD and the Alexander County Housing Authority failed the people of Cairo. HUD must enact policies to prevent this from ever happening again.”

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/trump-administration-now-has-fair-housing-its-crosshairs

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/ben-carsons-war-poor-people-bad-news-republicans

no lnx

Trump's choice for Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Dr. Ben Carson, delivered on the president's command to move people "out of poverty" by proposing to raise the rent on some of America's most vulnerable communities.

On Wednesday Carson released legislative text that would raise rent for tenants in government-subsidized housing to equal 35 percent of gross income (based on the assumption that they work 15 hours a week at the federal minimum wage). This amounts to an increase of 5 percentage points from the current policy, which established a cap on the rate of rent at 30 percent of adjusted income. This means that the cap on rent for America's poorest families would rise to $150 per month instead of $50 per month.

Carson titled his proposed bill the “Making Affordable Housing Work Act,” in one of his most distinctly Trumpian moves since assuming office. And officials at the Department of Housing and Urban Development claimed this would only affect about half of the 4.7 million families currently receiving housing benefits. But not all policy experts agree with that estimate.

"More than 4 million households will see their rents rise," Will Fischer, Senior Policy Analyst at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, told Salon. He also emphasized that the effect of Carson's new policy on poor families would be devastating.

"These proposals will raise rents for working poor families, the elderly and people with disabilities and force them to divert money from other basic needs like clothing or food or medicine," Fischer told Salon. "In some cases it's gonna push them to the brink and put them at risk of eviction or homelessness. The HUD says that these are reforms but they don't pursue any particular policy goal other than squeezing rent out of these families."

Fischer also cast doubt on the idea that Carson's underlying goal is to reform the system and help poor families.

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https://www.propublica.org/article/cairo-thebes-in-small-town-america-the-public-housing-crisis-nobody-is-talking-about

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/5-states-most-rapid-increases-homelessness

Homelessness increased in the U.S. in 2017 for the first time since 2010, and advocates for homeless people are alarmed. Ten city and county governments have declared states of emergency since 2015 in response; meanwhile, Department of Housing and Urban Development head Ben Carson shows ongoing disinterest in supporting local governments’ efforts. While cities like Los Angeles are facing a well-publicized crisis as they struggle to find long-term solutions, California is surprisingly not even one of the states with the five fastest increases in homelessness, according to a new survey compiled by Credit Loan.

Measuring homelessness in any city is a challenge. For one, most major cities count more homeless people in residing shelters than unsheltered people living on the street or in encampments (Los Angeles is a major exception). This survey includes both sheltered and unsheltered, but notes the frightening rise in unsheltered homeless (nationwide, about a third of the homeless lack shelter).

“Unsheltered homelessness is on the rise, and major cities are feeling it most,” said Nan Roman, president and CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. “As cities bear the burden of increasing unsheltered counts, it is essential that they address the affordable housing crisis, increase investments in proven housing interventions, and ensure that they have appropriate emergency shelter capacity.”

Beyond the division of sheltered versus unsheltered, experts disagree on the best methods of measuring rates of homelessness. The Credit Loan survey uses a point-in-time (PIT) count from HUD data that communities collect from physical outreach to determine how many individuals are literally homeless on a designated day. This data is pulled from PIT count numbers from 2007-2016. Other groups like the Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness prefer to rely on the numbers generated through statewide data systems to measure homelessness in their states.

According to the Credit Loan survey, these are the states that saw the most significant increases and decreases in homelessness over the past 10 years:

Credit: Credit Loan

The states vary significantly in geography and cost-of-living expenses (South Dakota, for example, is one of the least expensive states to live in, yet the same factors drive that state’s homelessness as in New York), but there is a surprisingly strong common thread explaining why so many people go without homes. In any city or state, the homeless crisis is directly tied to lack of available low-income housing.

A number of diverse factors make the situation in South Dakota unique. The state has seen the largest increase in homelessness in the past 10 years. Native American homeless rates are rising as it becomes more difficult to find affordable housing on reservations, where isolation and lack of abundant infrastructure make construction difficult. Elsewhere in the state, homeless advocates have noticed the homeless population getting younger.

Traci Jensen, homeless liaison for the Sioux Falls School District, told KSFY in December, "We do see the number of youth over the last couple years has increased." Though a different estimate at the end of 2017 claims the homeless rate had dropped 12% in the past year in South Dakota, three shelters say that number doesn’t tell the full story. "The demand that we see for homeless services certainly hasn't decreased," Brett Johnson with the Sioux Empire Homeless Coalition, said. Many of the area's homeless are living in cars or with friends, Johnson added. Local representatives are pushing for more inexpensive housing options. Rep. Kristi Noem recently wrote, “Despite South Dakota’s relatively low cost of living, finding affordable housing can still be a challenge for low- and middle-income families. That makes it no surprise that there are 120 families on the waiting list for Habitat Homes.”

In densely populated metro areas like D.C. and New York, homeless advocates are unanimous in blaming the problem on sky-high rents. “The one single thing that really has changed is the lack of affordable housing,” Michael Ferrell, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, told the New York Times. “The housing that’s being created today in the District is not for working-class people,” he said. Gradually widening inequality is to blame: in D.C., as in many other American cities, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. In New York City, the Coalition for the Homeless similarly reports that lack of affordable housing is the main cause for the city with the highest number of homeless people. Homelessness in New York City has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression in the 1930s, according to the Coalition for the Homeless.

There is some good news in the struggle to house the homeless.Though Michigan is hurting from the nationwide lack of affordable housing, the state managed to decrease its homelessness rate by 67% over the past 10 years, according to the survey. “We saw the incidence of homelessness spike during the recession and it’s been trending downward each year since in Michigan,” Eric C. Hufnagel, executive director of Michigan Coalition Against Homelessness, told AlterNet. “That’s due in part to a short-term funding infusion, an improved economy and policies which have strengthened the homeless service delivery system in Michigan. Additional funding remains a key need, but there are many other barriers to ending homelessness, including the affordable housing crisis.”

These are some of the cities with the most homeless:

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ben carson backup

Trump has tapped his family’s wedding planner to run the largest HUDoffice in the United States. Lynne Patton has planned events for the Trump family since 2009, including the wedding of Lara and Eric Trump. She has also helped run the Eric Trump Foundation, which is now under investigation by New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman over whether the charity took money intended to go to children with cancer and instead funneled it into the for-profit Trump Organization. Lynne Patton has no experience running public housing. On her LinkedIn page, she lied about having a degree from Yale University and Quinnipiac Law School. She’s been tapped to oversee the public housing for New York and New Jersey, which involves managing billions of dollars of federal money.

http://www.alternet.org/economy/trumps-plan-gut-hud-threatens-very-survival-working-poor

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orsley is one of countless public housing residents across the country directly impacted by news that the Trump administration is mulling whether to slash HUD’s budget by at least $6 billion, or 14 percent, in the 2018 fiscal year. The proposed cuts were revealed Wednesday by Washington Post reporter Jose A. DelReal, who cited “preliminary budget documents” that he had obtained.If implemented, the reductions will hit a federal agency that is already unable to meet the level of human need, thanks to systematic defunding over the course of decades.

Douglas Rice, a senior policy analyst for the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, a Washington, D.C., think tank, reports that the proposed cuts would, in fact, amount to $7.7 billion dollars, or a 16 percent reduction, in 2018. He arrives at this number by evaluating expected funding levels for 2017, writing: “it’s reasonable to presume that the final budget will be close to the average of the bills the House Appropriations Committee and the full Senate approved last summer.” By contrast, DelReal wrote his story based on 2016 funding levels.

Either way, the cuts are poised to be dramatic. Rice told the Washington Post that 20,000 renters will lose their assistance for every 1 percent slash to the budget of HUD. “The reality is that we’ve been living under these austere budget caps, and budgets like HUD’s have already been pretty much cut to the bone,” Rice said, pointing to the sequestration cuts of 2011. “And when you try to cut below that, you really end up with harmful impacts.”

The proposed cuts would go deep. “Budgets for public housing authorities—city and state agencies that provide subsidized housing and vouchers to local residents—would be among the hardest hit,” writes DelReal. “Under the preliminary budget, those operational funds would be reduced by $600 million, or 13 percent. Funds for big-ticket repairs at public housing facilities would be cut by an additional $1.3 billion, about 32 percent.”

Public housing in the United States already faces a backlog of $26 billion in repairs, according to a 2010 report commissioned by HUD.

The Community Development Block Grant Program, which was budgeted to receive $3 billion this fiscal year, would be entirely slashed if the proposed changes were implemented. While the budget document reportedly suggests that funds for the program “could come from outside the HUD budget as part of a separate White House bill,” it is not immediately clear where exactly such dollars would come from and whether they would be guaranteed. The HOME Investment Partnerships Program, which helps fund local affordable housing, would also be eliminated.

The gutting of HUD would take money directly out of the hands of renters in need. The Post story notes, “Under the proposal, direct rental assistance payments—including Section 8 Housing and housing vouchers for homeless veterans—would be cut by at least $300 million, to $19.3 billion. Additionally, housing for the elderly—known as the Section 202 program—would be cut by $42 million, nearly 10 percent. Section 811 housing for people with disabilities would be cut by $29 million, nearly 20 percent. Money available for Native American housing block grants would fall by $150 million, more than 20 percent.”

According to Rice’s analysis of the Post report, if the cuts go through, “Housing Choice Vouchers that some 200,000 low-income households currently use to pay their rent would be eliminated in 2018.” He explained, “Reducing the availability of this crucial support would increase and prolong homelessness for vulnerable people with disabilities, families with children and others.”

“It should be very clear to our movements, to our communities, and to the entire country that [the] Trump administration is intent on further destabilizing and dismantling programs that our communities rely on tso survive,” Malcolm Torrejón Chu, communications organizer with the Right to the City Alliance and organizer for the National Homes for All Campaign, told AlterNet. “These threatened cuts to housing are threatened cuts to our community survival. And we have no illusions that the current HUD programming is enough.”

The proposed reductions are in line with Trump’s recent claim that he will pay for a $54 billion increase to the war budget in large part by cutting domestic programs.

But long before Trump made this assertion, HUD Secretary Ben Carson—who has no prior experience in housing policy—has been open about his desire to dismantle key public housing initiatives. In 2014, he opposed an agreement between the city of Dubuque and the Department of Housing and Urban Development to address the city’s housing policies that discriminate against black residents, suggesting it was proof America was "becoming communist." In 2015, he vocalized his opposition to a HUD fair housing rule that is aimed, in part, at reducing segregation, calling it a “failed socialist experiment.”

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http://www.alternet.org/economy/trumps-treasury-pick-excelled-kicking-elderly-people-out-their-homes

In 2015, OneWest Bank moved to foreclose on John Yang, an 80-year-old Korean immigrant living in Orange Park, Florida, a small suburb of Jacksonville. The bank believed he wasn't living in his home, violating the terms of its loan. It dispatched an agent to give him legal notification of theforeclosure.

Where did the bank find him? At the same single-story home the bank had said in court papers he did not occupy.

Still OneWest pressed on, forcing Yang, a former Christian missionary, to seek help from legal aid attorneys. This year, during a deposition, an employee of OneWest's servicing division was asked the obvious question: Why would the bank pursue a foreclosure that seemed so clearly unjustified by the facts?

The employee's response was blunt: "You're trying to make logic out of an illogical situation."

Yang was lucky. The bank eventually dropped its efforts against him. But others were not so fortunate. In recent years, OneWest has foreclosed on at least 50,000 people, often in circumstances that consumer advocates say run counter to federal rules and, as in Yang's case, common sense.

President-elect Donald Trump's nomination of Steven Mnuchin as Treasury Secretary has prompted new scrutiny of OneWest's foreclosure practices. Mnuchin was the lead investor and chairman of the company during the years it ramped up its foreclosure efforts. Representatives from the company and the Trump transition team did not respond to requests for comment.

Records show the attempt to push Mr. Yang out of his home was not an unusual one for OneWest's Financial Freedom unit,which focused on controversial home loans known as reverse mortgages. Regulators and consumer advocates have long worried that these loans, popular during the height of the housing bubble, exploit elderly homeowners.

The loans allow people to benefit from the equity they have built up over many years without selling their houses. The money is paid in a variety of ways, from lump sums to a stream of monthly checks. Borrowers are allowed to stay in their homes for as long as they live.

The loans are guaranteed by the U.S. Department ofHousing and Urban Development, meaning the agency pays lenders like Freedom Financial the difference between the ultimate sale price of the home and the size of the reverse mortgage.

But the fees are often high and the interest charges mount up quickly because the homeowner isn't paying down any of the principal on the loan. Homeowners remain on the hook for property taxes and insurance and can lose their homes if they miss those payments.

A 2012 report to Congress by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said that "vigorous enforcement is necessary to ensure that older homeowners are not defrauded of a lifetime of home equity."

ProPublica found numerous examples where Financial Freedom had foreclosed for legally questionable reasons. The company served several other homeowners at their homes to let them know they were being sued for not occupying their homes. In Florida, a shortfall of only $0.27 led to a foreclosure attempt. In Atlanta, the company sought to foreclose on a widow after her husband's death, but backed down when a legal aid attorney sued, citing federal law that allowed the surviving spouse to remain in the home.

"It appears their business approach is scorched earth, in a way that doesn't serve communities, homeowners or the taxpayer," said Alys Cohen, a staff attorney for the National Consumer Law Center in Washington D.C.

Since the financial crisis, OneWest, through Financial Freedom, has conducted a disproportionate number of the nation's reverse mortgage foreclosures. It was responsible for 16,200 foreclosures ongovernment-backed reverse mortgages, or 39 percent of all foreclosures nationwide, from 2009 through late 2014, even though it only serviced about 17 percent of the loans, according to government data analyzed by the California Reinvestment Coalition, an advocacy group for low-income consumers. While some foreclosures were justified, legal aid attorneys sayFinancial Freedom has refused to work with borrowers in foreclosure to establish payment plans, in contrast with other servicers of reverse mortgages.

Experts say the companies are not entirely to blame for the wave of foreclosures. HUD oversees standards on most reverse mortgages. In the years after the housing crash, HUD's rules evolved, creating a miasma of confusion for mortgage servicers. Companies say the new federal rules required them to foreclose when borrowers fell far behind on property and insurance costs, rather than work out payment plans.

OneWest's rough treatment of homeowners extended to its behavior toward borrowers with standard mortgages in the aftermath of the housing crash. In 2009, the Obama administration launched a program to encourage mortgage servicers to work out affordable mortgage modifications with borrowers. OneWest, weighed down by several hundred thousand souring mortgages, signed up.....