Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson testifies to the House Financial Services Committee, Wednesday, June 27, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
A pair of smug NPR commentators recently took the Trump Administration’s cabinet chiefs to task for their lack of relevant experience.
I have no bones about their dismissal of billionaire bubblehead Betsy DeVos, our erstwhile education czar, or recently ousted EPA chief Scott Pruitt, whose brazen gorging at the public till put even hardened Bay State hacks to shame.
But the putdown of Ben Carson as completely unqualified to run the Department of Housing and Urban Affairs with a dismissive and highly amused “he doesn’t know anything housing” struck me as a little much.
After all, housing and all that goes with it, from rents to construction of new homes, isn’t exactly rocket science, or in Carson’s case, brain surgery, a field our much ridiculed housing czar made his reputation long before he recklessly opted to throw his lot in with Donald Trump.
Now I have no answer for Carson’s bizarre decision to spend $31,000 in taxpayer money on a new dining table set for his new office.
But when it comes to housing, after 18 months on the job, Carson is zeroing in on an issue that shows while he may not be a housing wonk, he is learning fast on the job. Specifically, he is taking aim at zoning roadblocks thrown up by suburbs and towns across the country that are stymying efforts to build badly needed housing.
Speaking to the board of a prestigious Harvard housing center, Carson earlier this year laid out plans “to identify and incentivize the tearing-down of local regulations that serve as impediments to developing affordable housing stock.”
In particular, the HUD chief singled “out-of-date building codes, time-consuming approval processes, restrictive or exclusionary zoning ordinances, unnecessary fees or taxes and excessive land development standards.”
That’s a pretty clear summation of the biggest challenge facing our nation’s housing market – obstructionist local regulations that, by making housing an artificially scarce commodity, have led to a new normal marked by continually rising home prices and rents.
NIMBYism Worsens Nationwide
The recent issue of Evidence Matters, a quarterly pub put out by the research department at Carson’s HUD, puts the blame in all the right places.
HUD researchers take aim at many of the regulatory evils that have helped make Massachusetts one of the most expensive places in the country to live: large, multi-acre lot zoning, which ensures only large and expensive houses get built; restrictions on density and height of new
apartment buildings, which only serves to push rents higher; and restrictive controls on new subdivisions and excessive permitting requirements, among others.
The biggest losers when suburbs, towns and cities clamp down on new home and apartment construction are low- and moderate-income families, who can least afford the rising prices and rents that are the inevitable result of such policies.
And NIMBY attitudes are helping drive many of these restrictions, with such self-centered opposition seemingly on the rise around the country, the HUD researchers note in their Evidence Matters report.
“Both anecdotal and empirical research indicate that in the suburbs, NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard, or resistance to unwanted development in one’s own neighborhood) may have worsened,” the researchers note. “Many suburbs have enacted restrictions on affordable housing development, employed exclusionary zoning, imposed restrictive subdivision controls, and established complex review processes and requirements for permit approvals.”
To give credit where it’s due, towards the end of its tenure the Obama Administration also took aim at restrictive zoning. And while Carson’s HUD is clearly on the right track with its analysis of what is behind our country’s perpetually overpriced-housing, in the same breath it is taking a big step back on another badly needed initiative.
Carson has taken the sledgehammer to the Obama Administration’s efforts to challenge housing policies by local communities that reinforce long-standing patterns of segregation.
Under Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, the HUD would have been able to cut grant money to communities that, for example, insist on steering affordable housing away from middle- or upper-income neighborhoods and into already impoverished areas.
It’s easy to see why the Trump Administration wouldn’t like this, but it also flies in the face of efforts to stop communities from boxing out new housing.
That said, HUD’s focus under Carson on clearing away local roadblocks to new housing is an important step forward, even without the added teeth the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing would have given it.
More housing will mean lower prices and more opportunities for families of modest means and of all backgrounds to not only rent, but get a strong stake in the American Dream by buying as well.
Here’s hoping Carson is serious about zoning reform. If so, he has the chance to be remembered as something other than a brilliant brain surgeon who inexplicably decided to become a flunky for the worst president in U.S. history.
Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.
