A Phil Hall Op-Ed: For a man who seems to have an opinion about everything, former President Donald Trump has been uncharacteristically quiet about the state of the U.S. housing market. His campaign has not offered any proposals on addressing the evaporation of affordability in housing, nor have any ideas been put forth regarding the challenges facing builders in creating new housing.
Indeed, the Trump re-election website has a page called “Issues” which fails to include housing among the topics impacting Americans. If we are to have any clue on what a second Trump term would look like for the housing market, we would need to consider the first Trump go-round at the Executive Branch.
Of course, the biggest mistake Trump made was naming Jerome Powell as the chairman of the Federal Reserve – he immediately began to criticize Powell’s decision making and even publicly toyed with firing him. But to his credit, Trump named Mark A. Calabria as director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and had Mick Mulvaney take control of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when Richard Cordray tried to usurp the president’s authority by naming his own successor, an unprecedented act for a regulator.
For many people, naming the prominent neurosurgeon Dr. Ben Carson to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) seemed like an eccentric idea, but those critics obviously didn’t read Carson’s cogent 2015 op-ed in the Washington Times titled “Experimenting With Failed Socialism Again,” which argued that the Obama administration’s “government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences” that were doomed to failure.
“There are reasonable ways to use housing policy to enhance the opportunities available to lower-income citizens, but based on the history of failed socialist experiments in this country, entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous,” he wrote.
For many Trump haters, the most contentious aspect of Carson’s leadership at HUD came when the department rewrote the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule regarding how state and municipal governments addressed affordable housing opportunities. Carson’s critics claimed he was enacting racist policies, ignoring that the AFFH rule changes were sought by many mayors who complained federal regulations limited their ability to address fair housing concerns.
“Mayors know their communities best, so we are empowering them to make housing decisions that meet their unique needs, not a mandate from the federal government,” said Carson at the time. “Having said that, if a community fails to improve housing choice, HUD stands ready to enforce the Fair Housing Act and pursue action against any party that violates the law.”
Indeed, Carson’s HUD was active in enforcing fair housing laws, successfully securing settlements with multiple lenders, insurance companies, landlords, housing authorities and even the State of Maryland. Carson’s HUD also brought much-needed changes to its reverse mortgage policy, revised the federal Manufactured Home Construction and Safety Standards to expedite construction and update safety requirements for carbon monoxide detectors, and ceased the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insurance on new mortgages on properties that include Property Assessed Clean Energy assessments in order to bolster the health of the Single-Family Mutual Mortgage Insurance Fund (MMIF). David H. Stevens, the president and CEO of the Mortgage Bankers Association and FHA Commissioner during the first part of the Obama Administration, praised the latter move by tweeting, “Yes! Good news! This is a rip off program that can screw consumers promoted by the last Administration. Great move @SecretaryCarson and HUD. The Obama team got this one way wrong.”
And, of course, Carson’s HUD responded quickly and efficiently to the Covid-19 crisis with policies that ensured homeowners and rental housing residents would not suffer financial calamity during the pandemic.
Elsewhere in the Trump administration, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin submitted a housing finance reform plan to address the never-ending federal conservatorship of the government-sponsored enterprises (GSEs) – that might have ended the conservatorship if the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives ignored the plan. And there were also the Opportunity Zones created under the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act signed into law by Trump.
Furthermore, Attorney General Bill Barr brought a fair and equitable settlement in 2020 related to Department of Justice’s investigation into the National Association of Realtors’ (NAR) cooperative compensation rule and clear cooperation policy. In comparison, Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland is trying to unilaterally abrogate the 2020 NAR settlement.
Would Trump’s return to the White House fix the problems in today’s housing market? That’s hard to say – but if the past is any indication of what the future can bring, a second Trump term would see less regulation and less social engineering than we’ve experienced in the Biden era. And while it would be great if Trump shared his housing market ideas, at least we know he will not be spewing Biden’s comments about how elevated home prices were being caused by real estate agent commissions or how unnamed corporations were trying to keep Black households out of housing.
Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].
Photo: TheDigitalArtist / Pixabay
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Great article!! Thanks for the reminders of what’s happened in our industry.
It would have been better to have started with the last paragraph
What an incredibly politically biased article by an author that conspicuously cherry picked his data. The Ben Carson led HUD, for what they can actually control, was a nightmare that only ended by being voted out of office. Ben Carson who stated that “poverty is just a state of mind…” put his adage in force by cutting rental assistance programs for the working poor and yet giving tax breaks or let’s say -financial assistance to wealthy developers to build high rent properties. He called for an end to enforcing the AFFH in local jurisdictions to prevent housing discrimination, called for onerous work requirements to be determined by landlords for housing assistant tenants and also stated that rental assistant housing should not be in any way luxurious with tax payer dollars while he spent $165k to decorate his office with tax payer money and then fired the assistant that continued to point out that there is a $5k limit. Also, Carson’s daughter in law secured a government contract in the hundreds of thousands through HUD for her “consulting” firm. Overall, his regressive policies along with determined deregulation is only going to put us back in the same situation as 2008 when Bush did the same. Apparently this author doesn’t understand that history is the best predictor of the future and is either the worst researcher ever or turned a blind eye to the blatant corruption and cronyism when Ben Carson was in office. Btw, I only touched on the tip of the iceberg of the data.
What a bunch of Malarkey written by Trumpster.
Couldn’t agree more with Nancy. Malarkey, this is written from Earth 2 vision. I live on Earth One. Get your pen out of the playpen. Get real.
I don’t care for either candidate but I do want to point out that Biden has now made several references to national rent control.
His administration has also made several references to eliminating the 1031 Tax Deferred Exchange and eliminating the home interest mortgage tax deduction.
Regardless of your uninformed biases, we need Trump more than ever before.
He is the only one who can undo the damage the current puppet regime has done.
I’m really surprised at the naysayers reading WRE. By & large, Real estate people are business people and vote for business oriented people. It’s usually been a given that real estate agents, and other business minded people have always been in favor of less goverment, which usually means less Democratic conrol and more Republican input. For so many years we begged for a business person, not a politician to be in the White House. And yes, there are still plenty of us that believe the election was stolen, rigged, or somehow manipulated in Biden’s favor. According to the media, the killer that has been caught dead to rights, is alleged to have done it until proven guilty. Don’t you think that those closestest to the process, day in and day out, know how to rig it without being caught? Of course they do! Because there’s not proof, using the tools and methods we know of, doesn’t for a minute mean it didn’t happen. It just means they knew how to do it an get away with it. Wouldn’t they be stupid if they thought they might get caught? And yes, there are those that can’t stand Trump, and there have been plenty of times I wished he’d keep his mouth shut (He has lightened up some). So, let’s get to the scenario so seldom put before us. For the firs time in our lives we have two Presidents running again, for the same office, and for the first time in our lives we can compare one term with another. Something that’s never, at least in our lifetimes, been done before. So, hate his ego, hate his looks, hat anything you want about him, but ask THE question: ARE you better off now than when Trump was in office? You and I both know it’s a no-brainer. Please, like him or not, base your choice on his performance not anything else. The Real Estate community and every other business or livelihood will be better off, as they usually are, when a Republican is in office. Somethimes, I’d like to vote with my heart, but that doesn’t pay the bills.