Show HUD’s Budget Cuts the Door

The Opinion Pages | EDITORIAL

Show HUD’s Budget Cuts the Door

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
MAY 30, 2017

Ben Carson, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development, set the stage for President Scrooge’s meanspirited budget when he suggested that the government had made things too “cozy” for poor people and said that poverty was merely a “state of mind.” Mr. Carson, ostensibly the custodian of housing for the nation’s poor, left the impression that the five million people who rely on the government for rental assistance could just pull themselves up by their bootstraps or suffer the consequences.

The people who rely on federal rental assistance are society’s most vulnerable. Two-thirds of them are quite poor, with incomes that do not exceed even 30 percent of median income for their area. Nine-tenths of them are senior citizens, people with disabilities, veterans and working poor people with children who would eventually end up in homeless shelters or on the streets without federal help.

That is precisely what will happen if Congress approves the administration’s proposal for cutting the HUD budget by about 15 percent. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan research organization, estimates that the Trump proposal would result in the elimination of 250,000 rental vouchers.

Half of the households losing rental assistance would probably include the elderly and people with disabilities, but the toll on working families with children would also be high. The center also warns that proposals in the budget would “significantly raise assisted tenants’ rents and cut voucher subsidies in various ways.” Families receiving vouchers to help pay for housing, the center added, would end up living in “lower-rent districts that are likelier to be poor, segregated, and isolated from quality schools and other sources of opportunity.”

The proposal would also cut funding to public housing, leaving already neglected buildings to deteriorate further; curtail programs that prevent homelessness; and eliminate the National Housing Trust Fund, which assists state and local efforts to develop affordable rental housing.

These destructive proposals come at a time when the federal housing effort is already so underfunded that three-quarters of the households that qualify for rental assistance based on income do not receive it. This leaves millions of poor families living in substandard or even dangerous housing, or struggling to meet rents that are a huge percentage of their income.

Living under threat of eviction is particularly devastating for young children, who need stability at home to succeed at school. And as Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies reported last year, allowing families to become homeless is economically counterproductive. Simply put, it costs taxpayers significantly less to help families find permanent housing than to take care of them in a shelter system.

The Trump housing proposal deserves to die a swift death. Congress also needs to rouse itself and search for solutions to an affordable housing crisis that has pushed hundreds of thousands of families to the verge of homelessness.