House Committee Determines HUD Has Not Done Enough to Prevent Poverty

The House Financial Services Committee examined housing policy, the future of housing, and HUD's progress in its 50th year of operation at a hearing Thursday.

The Committee ultimately determined that although HUD has been instrumental in fighting housing discrimination and poverty, it has failed to meet its original goal to “not only to relieve the symptom of poverty but to cure it and, above all, to prevent it," President Lyndon Johnson said.

Chairman of the Committee Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) noted in his opening remarks that "HUD has clearly achieved good. It has made commendable progress to aggressively fight immoral and illegal racial discrimination in housing. It has proven vital to many of our low-income elderly and disabled citizens and has undoubtedly made poverty more tolerable."

But on the other hand, Hensarling said that HUD has also "dramatically failed to meet President Johnson’s noble aspirations, much less deliver any measurable results. In fact, poverty levels are largely unchanged since HUD’s creation."

HUD met its 50-year mark last month and despite its decades of experience and $1.655 trillion in cumulative annual appropriations, the Committee found that the department has not fully addressed poverty issues. The Committee believes that Americans need to move from government dependence to being self-sufficient.

"Housing policy is education policy and education policy is housing policy," said Renee Glover, Chair of the Board for Habitat for Humanity International and former President and CEO of the Atlanta Housing Authority. "Coordinated efforts should be made to de-concentrate poverty in neighborhood schools to power-up school reform efforts and strengthen the long-term sustainability of newly developed mixed-income communities and neighborhood schools.”

The Committee also mentioned that federal housing policy need a new paradigm, one that will support a free enterprise economy, which has lifted more out of poverty than all of Washington’s bureaucratic anti-poverty programs combined.

"HUD is in dire need of an overhaul and a modernized mission," the Committee explained. "We must reform and innovate how we provide assistance for housing in the 21st century with a higher purpose than simply warehousing and marginalizing the poor, or we will fail the very people who are in most need of liberation from dependency."

Howard Husock, VP of Research and Publications, Manhattan Institute stated, "it is a good time for HUD to think about how it can become not just a funder of housing…Its goal today should no longer be cutting ribbons on new apartment complexes but encouraging our subsidized housing of all kinds to be a means to help those of low-income move up along the path of upward mobility.”