HUD, History, and What’s Ahead

City of Yes, And… #13

Over the past year, much of my writing has been an attempt to understand how decisions made decades ago shaped our modern housing landscape and created the conditions of scarcity that make reform so vexing today. Last week, I found myself making the case for a causal approach to reform inside the Department of Housing & Urban Development itself. Staff in HUD’s Office of Multifamily Housing reached out after my essay “The Banished Bottom of the Housing Market” caught their attention. The office oversees federal programs that provide project-based rental assistance for low-income seniors, people with disabilities, and other deeply cost-burdened households, disbursing nearly $20 billion annually in rental subsidies to households at the bottom of the income distribution.