Cleaning house: It's time to put a decrepit HUD out of its misery

IN A desperate attempt to reclaim the fiscal high ground and rescue a failing presidency, the Clinton administration has bungled an opportunity to reduce the federal fat.

Just before his mid-December speech to the nation, President Clinton floated a trial balloon calling for elimination of the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Unfortunately, in an all-too-familiar display of weak conviction, Clinton caved into lobbying from HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros and opted for a pathetically modest "restructuring" of the most assailed federal bureaucracy. Only Cisneros and a few big-city (mostly Democratic) mayors made much of a fuss about eliminating HUD. Others pondered whether life without HUD would be all that bad.

Let's at least give the president credit for his bold suggestion.

Let us also be clear that there are millions of elderly Americans, poor families and people with special needs who stand to benefit from the generosity of the American people with respect to housing resources. Yet HUD does not enhance this generosity. The agency feeds off it and diminishes it and lacks the ability and standing to effectively provide for what is overwhelmingly a local, not federal, concern.

Cisneros' belief that consolidating programs will save money and create efficiencies if only he can keep the programs under the HUD banner is merely rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic. The primary problem with HUD is HUD itself. It is questionable whether a secretary who has presided over a calculated effort to increase the size of the HUD largess can now pursue budget trimming and downsizing with equal zeal.

One need only look at HUD's miserable track record in public housing to realize that this institution is incapable of handling really tough problems. HUD has spent billions of dollars over the past 20 years trying to "fix" public housing, but the problems just get worse. This year alone, $40 million will be spent right here in Milwaukee at Hillside Terrace. When it's all over, and we, the taxpayers, have spent an average of $74,000 per apartment, will the residents of Hillside really be better off? Will they have the option of living where they choose, rather than where a bureaucrat decides to put them? Will they be one step closer to escaping poverty? Will they live in a safer neighborhood?

Not likely. It's the same old failed formula: Spend a ton of money on bricks and mortar, a few dollars on limited jobs programs, and hope for the best.

The National Center for Housing Management has real solutions that can make a difference. With funding from the Departments of Justice and Labor, NCHM is taking US military personnel forced to resign due to the downsizing of the armed services and retraining them for careers in some of our nation's toughest public housing projects. These men and women, the vast majority of whom are African-American, make great role models and effective leaders.

This type of program works. Yet HUD ignores it and instead continues to follow the failed scripts of the past. Plainly speaking, HUD has become irrelevant and outdated.

Eliminating HUD is neither a monumental task nor a retreat from our commitment to quality housing and decent, safe neighborhoods. Take the housing resources now parceled out by HUD in the form of 60 odd (in more ways than one) programs, and give these resources to the states in the form of a single block grant. Watch them do more with it.

The few remaining worthwhile functions of HUD can easily be transferred elsewhere. Fair housing enforcement can go to the Commerce Department, with referrals to the Department of Justice. The Federal Housing Administration, which routinely verges on financial disaster, should not be allowed to continue to compete with the private sector while using the American taxpayers' credit card to pay for its mistakes.

As with welfare issues, housing is a local concern. A rules-based command and control bureaucracy operating out of Washington can't help but fail to meet neighborhood needs. It just doesn't work, and HUD is the proof.

Copyright 1995
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