HUD Secretary Donovan outlines a new direction
Last Friday, February 13, Shaun Donovan, the new HUD Secretary, announced in a speech in New York City that President Obama plans to keep his pledge to fund the National Housing Trust Fund at a “significant level.” Details of the Administration’s plan for this funding will be laid out in President Obama’s fiscal year (FY) 2010 budget, which will be released in the coming weeks. Secretary Donovan also mentioned that HUD must work to address the “rising tide” of family homelessness.
According to The New York Times, Mr. Donovan said “the Obama administration was committed to expanding the housing trust fund, using programs that have helped reduce homelessness among single adults to do the same for homeless families, to improve the department’s relationship with Congress; and to create more accountability. HUD, he said, has long had an “inability to accurately report what we are spending, how we are spending it.’”
He outlined “five different areas where I believe HUD and this administration can begin to turn the direction of housing policy of this country”:
And those five are remaking our mortgage system; dealing with the persistent rental-housing crisis that far too many low-income Americans face; beginning to use HUD and our housing policy as a force for broader sustainability within our economy and within our country; re-energizing efforts around fair housing; and fifth, allowing HUD to become a leader on research and evaluation.
Mr. Donovan said:
It is not just a crisis of confidence in HUD, it is not just a crisis of confidence in federal government more broadly, but it is, to be frank among friends, among housers in this room, a crisis of confidence in whether federal government can make a difference in housing…
We must, as a community, overcome the skepticism, not only about the success of those programs, and the ability of the federal government to make a difference in people’s lives more directly, but – the lack of confidence that when the federal government tries to do something in housing, that it can really make a difference.
According to The New York Times, Mr. Donovan concluded by saying, “We have an enormous opportunity. It will not come again, and if we waste it, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.”
We are ready, Secretary Donovan, to “pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America” by ending homelessness during your term at HUD.
