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The Trump administration just announced plans to sell the headquarters of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), a brutalist architectural monstrosity. Secretary Scott Turner admits that HUD headquarters is “known as the ugliest building in D.C.”
The Trump administration is also seeking to terminate half of HUD’s staff and defund programs that have vexed America since the launch of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
Andrew Cuomo, former New York governor and Bill Clinton’s last HUD secretary, admitted in 1998 that HUD had been “the poster child for failed government.” In 1976, Detroit City Council president (and future U.S. senator) Carl Levin denounced the agency as “Hurricane HUD” for ravaging the Motor City with reckless subsidized mortgages with stratospheric default rates.
Vice President Al Gore denounced HUD-financed public housing projects in 1996: “These crime-infested monuments to a failed policy are killing the neighborhoods around them.” In 2006, the leftist Village Voice labeled HUD as America’s worst landlord.
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Gross negligence has always been HUD’s standard operating procedure. In 2011, the Washington Post compiled hundreds of satellite images to prove that HUD’s largest homebuilding program was a “dysfunctional system that delivers billions of dollars to local housing agencies with few rules, safeguards or even a reliable way to track projects.”
HUD claimed to have no idea that billions of dollars of its grants had been misused or plundered and ignored a barrage of complaints from individuals whose neighborhoods were ravaged. HUD left a “trail of failed developments in every corner of the country. Fields where apartment complexes were promised are empty and neglected,” the Post noted.
During the 1990s, I spent many days at HUD headquarters investigating boondoggles. HUD was overstocked with the most depressed employees you would ever meet outside of a group therapy session in a city jail. After I wrote a Wall Street Journal piece headlined “Clinton’s Wrecking Ball for Suburbs,” HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros denounced me for “unfortunate stereotyping of assisted-housing residents.”
But not nearly as unfortunate as subsequent HUD-financed violent crime waves across the nation. In the first half of 2016, at least 30 people were killed at Section 8 residences in Chicago – along with 7,000 other reported crimes.
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In Houston, male Section 8 recipients are twice as likely to commit violent crimes as people with similar backgrounds and incomes who did not receive housing vouchers, according to a Texas A&M University study. A HUD-financed study found that Section 8 relocations “tripled the rate of arrests for property crimes” among boys who moved to new locales.
Russell Vought, Trump’s Office of Management & Budget chief, derided Section 8 because it “brings with it crime, decreased property values, and results in dependency and subsidized irresponsibility.” The Trump administration is expected to propose severe cuts in rental subsidies for next year’s budget.
When Congress created HUD in 1965, it was supposed to bring social justice to American cities. But Sandra Thompson, Biden’s Federal Housing Finance Agency chief, testified to Congress in 2022 that the racial homeownership gap “is higher today than when the Fair Housing Act [of 1968] was passed.”
The Biden administration sought to “fix” that problem with a new mandate to punish mortgage borrowers with good credit ratings by forcing them to subsidize borrowers with shaky records of paying their bills. But “No Deadbeats Left Behind” is a poor maxim for mortgage policies.
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Secretary Turner is ready to abandon HUD headquarters, declaring that that agency’s focus is on “creating a workplace that reflects the values of efficiency, accountability and purpose.” That 12-story building needs a half billion dollars in “deferred maintenance and modernization” expenses and costs more than $50 million a year to operate – despite being perennially half empty even before Trump’s mass firings. The maintenance and modernization costs far exceed the original cost of the building in inflation-adjusted dollars.
HUD’s faltering headquarters could be far more valuable for a symbolic gesture than for a real estate payout.
Donald Trump should take a page from the most dramatic housing intervention of the last 60 years. In 1954, St. Louis opened one of the nation’s largest public housing projects, with 33 high-rise apartment buildings. But the Pruitt-Igoe project soon became hopelessly marred by crime and vandalism. The 1972 film footage of the entire project being demolished should have been required viewing in every high school civics class in the nation.
A heavily publicized demolition of HUD headquarters would provide a more valuable lesson for Americans than any sale price the faltering building fetched. For 60 years, HUD reaped massive congressional appropriations regardless of the havoc it sowed. Razing HUD would remind all federal agencies that failure has consequences.
And seeing HUD headquarters topple down would gratify everyone who wants to drain the D.C. swamp and everyone whose home value or neighborhood was blighted by HUD.
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