A Phil Hall Op-Ed: It’s a shame that Time Magazine tapped Taylor Swift as its Person of the Year last week, because the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has its own candidate for accomplishing amazing things during 2023.
The department’s PR team put out a press release on Friday with the headline “HUD Secretary Marcia L. Fudge Delivers Unprecedented Homeownership Achievements.” Needless to say, that caught my eye and tickled my fancy, as the words “Marcia L. Fudge” and “achievements” are rarely seen together in the same sentence.
“When the Biden-Harris Administration and Secretary Fudge took office, Americans were facing numerous challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic, a lack of affordable housing supply, and rapidly increasing home prices,” the press release said. “In spite of these headwinds, concerted efforts by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have helped millions of American households obtain or maintain homeownership.”
While the worst of the pandemic is mercifully behind us, the lack of affordable housing supply and the rapidly increasing home prices are very much in the front windshield and not the rearview mirror.
The press release also insisted that “HUD has achieved significant milestones, with a clear focus on expanding access to homeownership, supporting home retention through the pandemic, and addressing racial bias.” Among these milestones was the 35% reduction in the pricing of FHA’s mortgage insurance premiums implemented last March, which HUD claims without supporting data will result in 425,000 borrowers “saving more than $336 million in aggregate in the first year of their mortgages.” The press release never explained why HUD waited two years after Fudge took office for this reduction went into effect.
The press release also noted that in the “past year alone, FHA’s first-time-homebuyer rate by share of originations is almost 40 percentage points higher than the conventional mortgage market.” Well, we can thank Jerome Powell for that and not Fudge.
Then, we are told that “FHA revised its policies for the treatment of student loan debt in the underwriting of FHA-insured mortgages to ensure that all borrowers were being evaluated fairly” – lest we forget, the Biden White House has repeatedly tried and failed to get massive chunks of student loan debt erased, which has less to do with strengthening the economy and more to do with winning votes.
Some of the other milestones cited in the press release give Fudge credit for work that has been going on long before she came along. For example, this sentence: “As it has for more than eight decades, FHA remained a vital means of access to homeownership for first-time homebuyers, with more than 80% of FHA-insured purchase mortgages going to first-time homebuyers in each of the last three years.”
And this sentence: “To educate and prepare prospective homebuyers, HUD continued to promote and encourage consultation with the more than 4,000 HUD-certified housing counselors available nationwide.”
And also this sentence: “From the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic through the end of fiscal year 2023, almost two million FHA and ONAP homeowners affected by COVID-19 obtained a forbearance, a temporary pause or reduction in mortgage payments, to stay in their homes as they sought options to return to long-term, sustainable mortgage payments and bring their mortgages current.” This sentence is especially rich because Fudge is taking credit for work that was initiated by her predecessor, Ben Carson, and the Trump administration.
Of course, HUD and the FHA do important work and their efforts are deserving of respect. What is problematic, however, is the attempt by the department’s publicists to give the false impression that Fudge is taking HUD to a new level. Perhaps Fudge and her staff need to spend less time on self-congratulatory accolades and more time paying attention to the problems that continue to burden the housing market. Affordable homeownership opportunities remain seriously limited across much of the company while the expenses in buying and maintaining a residential property have gone up dramatically since Biden and Fudge arrived on the scene. Making housing affordable again without special taxpayer-financed programs would be a milestone worth cheering.
