A Phil Hall Op-Ed: How Would Trump Impact Housing Policy?
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.
by Phil Hall | Jul 8, 2024 | A Phil Hall Op-Ed, News/Current Events, Real Estate News, U.S. Housing Market, WRE News Exclusive
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