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A Phil Hall Op-Ed: If you are a fan of Joe Biden who dislikes seeing him criticized in this op-ed column, I can assure you that this will be the last time I will use this space to find fault with him. As Biden departs the White House today, it is appropriate to look back at how his administration handled housing policy.

I should note that references to “Biden” are not necessarily aimed at the man himself, but rather to the Executive Branch bureaucracy that was in charge for the last four years. It was always obvious that the man was never truly running the show, despite endless attempts by his team and apologists to insist he was a dynamo who ran circles around his staff. Last month’s in-depth article in the Wall Street Journal on Biden’s declining health and the efforts to hide that from the public should be required reading for anyone concerned about how government operates.

Housing policy was one of the earliest issues that the Biden White House addressed, albeit for a niche reason – shortly after taking office, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) unilaterally rewrote federal law to declare LGBTQ people were protected from housing discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. The logic behind this was the US Supreme Court’s June 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia that determined federal protections against sex-based employment bias also covered discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

“Enforcing the Fair Housing Act to combat housing discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s the correct reading of the law after Bostock,” said Damon Y. Smith, HUD’s principal deputy general counsel, in announcing the change. “We are simply saying that the same discrimination that the Supreme Court has said is illegal in the workplace is also illegal in the housing market.”

But there were two problems with this. First, it only applied to claims of discrimination in HUD programs – any transaction outside of HUD’s aegis was not covered by this declaration. Second, the Biden administration made no effort to amend the 1968 Fair Housing Act to add LGBTQ people as a protected class. The Biden team never offered support to push for proposed congressional legislation that would have addressed that situation, despite the endless claims by the White House spin doctors that Biden was a pro-LGBTQ president.

As for HUD, Biden gave the leadership role of that department as a consolation prize to Marcia Fudge, an Ohio congresswoman who was openly lobbying to become Secretary of Agriculture to address issues of food insecurity and poverty. However, corporate agriculture was not eager to have a self-proclaimed progressive do-gooder running their department and they successfully lobbied to block Fudge in favor of Tom Vilsack, the former Iowa governor who ran the Department of Agriculture during the Obama administration. Fudge, who came to HUD with no housing policy experience, redirected the department into obsessing over housing’s impact on climate change and racial disparities in housing. HUD’s core mission was put on the proverbial back burner – most egregiously the question of homelessness, which reached record highs during the Biden era.

Over at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Biden installed career bureaucrat Sandra Thompson as director and during her tenure she did nothing to seriously address the too-long federal conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Come to think of it, Thompson did almost nothing of value regarding anything related to housing policy.

As for housing market as a whole, the Biden administration paid no mind as home prices soared, home constructions costs spiked and affordable homeownership opportunities evaporated. The National Association of Home Builders constantly complained how Biden regulatory burdens were making the construction and subsequent sale of new homes much more expensive than it needed to be, and even the traditionally nonpartisan Mortgage Bankers Association got fed up with the Executive Branch when its President and CEO Bob Broeksmit openly declared how the Biden administration created a series of “regulatory knots” that “betrays a lack of knowledge about a critical part of our economy.”

The Biden team (most notably Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen), coupled with the bumbling of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, insisted that Bidenomics-fueled rising inflation was merely “transitory” and that Americans were enjoying the strongest economy in recent history. By the time Biden finally acknowledged that housing expenses were suffocating Americans, he was in search of re-election. The president’s proposals of rent caps and his vague claims of “corporate greed” as the source of rising rental housing costs cruelly betrayed his inability to face realities. Things weren’t much better when the Democratic Party leadership dumped Biden in favor of Kamala Harris – her brief campaign was full of stale liberal ideas including tax credits for certain homebuyers and opaque plans to build millions of new homes without bothering to explain how they would be paid for.

Sadly, the one area in the housing world where the Biden administration took aim at housing involved lawfare. The Department of Justice under the despicable Attorney General Merrick Garland abruptly junked its 2020 settlement with the National Association of Realtors regarding the organization’s Clear Cooperation Policy and inexplicably restarted a probe into the matter that looks to be a classic example of a federal shakedown. After Donald Trump’s resounding election victory, the Justice Department along with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau ratcheted up its lawsuit machinery against financial services and real estate entities – why did they wait until the waning days of a dying administration to rush into court?

Starting today, the Biden era is history rather than news. A new administration will take the reins of government, and we can hope that it will learn from the mistakes of its predecessors and work with the housing market and its stakeholders for the benefit of all Americans.

Phil Hall is editor of Weekly Real Estate News. He can be reached at [email protected].

Photo by Gage Skidmore / Flickr Creative Commons