A worker saws wood at Canal Crossing, a new luxury apartment community consisting of 393 rental units near the university city of New Haven on Aug. 2, 2017 in Hamden, Connecticut. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President-elect Donald Trump late Friday announced his intent to nominate former NFL player and Texas state lawmaker Scott Turner to lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“Scott will work alongside me to Make America Great Again for EVERY American,” Trump said in a statement.
Turner, if confirmed by the Senate, will administer a roughly $68 billion agency that provides rental assistance, builds and preserves affordable housing, addresses homelessness and enforces the Fair Housing Act that prohibits discrimination in housing.
Turner has some experience with housing. During the first Trump administration, he worked with then-HUD Secretary Ben Carson on Opportunity Zones, which were part of the 2017 law that provided tax breaks for investors who put money into designated low-income areas.
“Those efforts, working together with former HUD Secretary, Ben Carson, were maximized by Scott’s guidance in overseeing 16 Federal Agencies which implemented more than 200 policy actions furthering Economic Development,” Trump said. “Under Scott’s leadership, Opportunity Zones received over $50 Billion Dollars in Private Investment!”
Turner will be tasked with addressing the housing shortage of about 3.8 million homes for sale and rent, according to 2021 estimates from Freddie Mac that are still relied upon. Homelessness has also hit a record high of 653,100 people since January of last year, according to a study by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University.
While on the campaign trail, Trump proposed opening up federal lands for housing, which would mean selling the land for construction purposes with the commitment for a certain percentage of the units to be kept for affordable housing. The federal government owns about 650 million acres of land, or roughly 30% of all land.
Trump has also opposed building multi-family housing, and has instead favored single-family zoning and while such land-use regulation is controlled on the local level, the federal government could influence it.
During Trump’s first term, he proposed slashing many of HUD’s programs, although those requests were not granted by Congress. However, for his second term he’ll have control of both chambers.
In all of Trump’s budget requests, he laid out proposals that would increase rent by 40% for about 4 million low-income households using rental vouchers or for those who lived in public housing, according to an analysis by the left-leaning think tank the Brookings Institution.
Trump also called for cutting housing programs such as the Community Development Block Grant, which directs funding to local and state governments to rehabilitate and build affordable housing.
The former president’s budget requests also would have slashed the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, known as LIHEAP, which assists low-income families.