I’ve been getting emails and telephone calls from people in the housing management industry asking me for feedback on the much-publicized statement of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney that, if elected chief executive, he would abolish the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The fact that the candidate’s father, the late George Romney, served as Secretary of HUD during the Nixon administration — when NCHM was created — is an intriguing angle that I will not explore at this time, as it might lead me into the kind of political discussion that I have always strived to avoid in this space. But the impact that abolishing HUD would have on issues of compliance and housing management is clearly fair game, so here are my thoughts.
First, and by way of introduction, it is not a simple thing to “abolish” a cabinet-level agency that has evolved a culture and body of regulations over the course of almost five decades. The U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) — the first federal agency to issue Section 504 regulations, by the way — was abolished, but two federal agencies sprang up in its place: the US Department of Education and the US Department of Health and Human Services.
But let’s assume an abolition of HUD takes place. There would be two options, in my view. The first would be folding the agency’s regulations into another federal agency, the US Department of Health and Human Services making the most sense (let’s remember that EIV is a Health and Human Services creation). The second option, which does not cancel out the first, is providing federal housing dollars to the individual states for allocation and monitoring – possibly through state housing finance agencies.
From a compliance perspective, one of the better things about HUD is that it is a top-down system: headquarters issues handbooks, notices, and regulations, the field offices follow those, and there is substantial uniformity in interpretations and approaches. Which isn’t to say that the system is perfect, nor that differences in emphasis and interpretations are unknown.
A state-focused system, on the other hand, implies a de facto decentralization in which state agencies could be called upon to establish their own priorities, standards, and interpretations. Larger housing management organizations operating in several states may find that they’ll have to make adjustments in compliance that differ for each jurisdiction in which they operate. While its true that they may already experience some form of that if they have an involvement with Low Income Housing Tax Credits, it will not even begin to approach the degree of adjustments that could result from an abolition of HUD.
Many states are hurting economically, just as millions of people are. Giving states responsibility for administering millions and millions of dollars in housing assistance payments is going to demand more of state government systems which, in many cases, are already overburdened. My point is simply this: Abolishing an agency like HUD doesn’t solve problems. It simply creates new ones. And for my colleagues in the field of compliance, the job will continue to be challenging. Administrations change, priorities change, but the need to provide decent, safe and sanitary housing to families and seniors who haven’t been blessed with a great many options will remain.