Follow this tag to curate your own personalized Activity Stream and email alerts.
HUD has emerged as the perfect distillation of the right’s antipathy to governing. If the great radical-conservative dream was, in Grover Norquist’s famous words, to “drown government in a bathtub,” then this was what the final gasps of one department might look like. — NY Magazine
In his new piece for New York Magazine, Alec MacGillis examines Ben Carson's turbulent and confusing time at HUD. He describes in detail, the situation at the headquarters, the Trump Cuts, and the secretary's July trip to Baltimore. He had been chosen for a job he had few qualifications for by a... View full entry
Poverty is largely “a state of mind”, housing secretary Ben Carson has claimed, dismaying observers who had modest hopes for his tenure.
Carson, the neurosurgeon who heads the agency charged with helping low-income Americans gain access to affordable housing, told Sirius XM radio: “You take somebody who has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.”
— The Guardian
"And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way back down to the bottom," Carson continued. The remarks were widely condemned by experts on poverty and homelessness.As the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban... View full entry
With limited funds, many American affordable housing projects aren’t in great shape. Their fate is ever more tenuous with the impending budget cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed by the Trump Administration. In an ironic twist of fate, the often-sorry state of... View full entry
Urban policy experts and progressive activists have expressed intense concern that Carson, in keeping with his strong conservative positions, will seek to cut money for government assistance programs and wear down the social safety net. The Trump administration has recently signaled that many government agencies can expect budget reductions in favor of increasing defense spending. — Washington Post
Realizing the latent dream of every neurosurgeon to one day run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson has been officially confirmed by the U.S. Senate to start operating on the HUD. Although his plans for the agency are vague, Carson has spoken of being against granting... View full entry
A top aide to President Trump’s housing secretary nominee, Ben Carson, was fired and led out of the department’s headquarters by security on Wednesday after writings critical of Mr. Trump surfaced in his vetting, according to two people briefed on the matter.
Shermichael Singleton, who was one of the few black conservatives in the Trump administration, had been working at the Department of Housing and Urban Development since Jan. 23 as a senior adviser.
— the New York Times
“My party in particular has allowed itself to be taken over by someone who claims to be a Republican but doesn’t represent any of our values, principles or traditions,” wrote Shermichael in The Hill in October of last year. ^ Take a listen to a recent Archinect Sessions episode with our... View full entry
This week on the podcast we are joined by Emily Hunt Turner. Emily gives us an update on her restaurant/non-profit startup All Square, as we previously featured in her Working Out of the Box feature. We also talk about her time working as a lawyer for the Department of Housing and Urban... View full entry
IN ONE OF the first official acts of his presidency, Donald Trump has increased taxes on a million middle-class homebuyers.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development on Friday reversed a scheduled 0.25 percent cut in mortgage insurance premiums issued by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). For a mortgage worth $200,000, this adds $500 to a homebuyer’s annual costs.
These insurance fees are effectively a tax on middle-class homeownership.
— The Intercept
A growing list of urban planners, designers, architects, and scholars are putting their weight behind a petition intended to prevent Dr. Ben Carson from becoming the next Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He has no prior experience with housing and holds... View full entry
What are the likely policy goals of a neurosurgeon appointed secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development by a man who can't stop disappointedly tweeting at Alec Baldwin? "There’s not a dearth of qualified Republicans for that job, so if you choose somebody with no background in... View full entry
When president-elect Donald Trump nominated Ben Carson to lead the department of Housing and Urban Development, the response was resoundingly: huh?The neurosurgeon came onto the national political scene in 2015, during his run for the Republican nomination, but after Trump took the presidency and... View full entry
If Carson wants to dramatically change the nature of HUD, all he needs to do is nothing — a course of action he seems temperamentally inclined to accept. Under Carson, HUD could stop enforcement of that "socialist" Fair Housing Act. It could stop prodding local governments to increase access to homes. It could look the other way when local ordinances sequester government-mandated affordable housing away from those with enough pull to say "not in my backyard." — mtv.com
Related on Archinect:President-elect Trump offers HUD post to Ben CarsonTurning down tenants because of criminal records may be discrimination, says HUDU.S. Department of HUD announces the Rebuild By Design winners View full entry
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has offered the post of secretary of housing and urban development to former presidential candidate Ben Carson, who will consider it over the Thanksgiving holiday, a Carson spokesman said on Tuesday.
"The president-elected asked him to consider it and he's considering it," Carson spokesman Armstrong Williams said. Carson, a retired surgeon, dropped out of the 2016 presidential race in March and backed Trump.
— Reuters
More on the US Department of Housing and Urban Development: Turning down tenants because of criminal records may be discrimination, says HUDRebuild by Design Wins Innovation AwardU.S. Department of HUD announces the Rebuild By Design winners View full entry
In new guidance, released Monday, HUD tells landlords and home sellers that turning down tenants or buyers based on their criminal records may violate the Fair Housing Act.
People with criminal records aren't a protected class under the Fair Housing Act... but blanket policies of refusing to rent to anybody with a criminal record are de facto discrimination, the department says — because of the systemic disparities of the American criminal justice system.
— NPR
"Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African-Americans and Hispanics." - New HUD guidance on criminal records and the Fair Housing ActFor related... View full entry
[Through a national competition by the Department of Housing and Urban Development,] The money would be used to help fortify a stretch of shoreline from Montgomery Street on the Lower East Side to the northern tip of Battery Park City. Specific measures have not yet been determined, but could include adding sea walls and temporary flood walls that could be deployed before a storm, and building grass berms that could double as recreational areas. — The New York Times
Not to be confused with the Rebuild By Design competition-winning proposal, "The BIG U", from 2014.More on Archinect:2015 Solar Decathlon winner Stevens Institute of Technology addresses post-Sandy resiliency with the SURE HOUSEWhen the next disaster strikes, how resilient would future-proof... View full entry
Each year, the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) bestows its Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award to a federal agency with the best model practice that can be adopted government-wide. Today, ACUS announced that the 2015 Walter Gellhorn Innovation Award is being presented to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Rebuild by Design Competition. — US Department of Housing and Development
There's something of a mise-en-abyme quality to a competition winning an award, but it's a good occasion to remember the Rebuild by Design was, after all, not quite your regular competition. Organized in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy and funded primarily by the US Department of Housing and... View full entry
