Kooky HUD pick will have to rethink snake oil cure
Go ahead, mock President-elect Donald Trump for selecting as his secretary of housing and urban development Ben Carson, his onetime presidential primary rival and before that, a standout neurosurgeon who turned his up-by-the-bootstraps rise from Detroit poverty into an inspirational best-seller.
All done? Now toss a fresh ingredient into the fruit salad of his life, to use Carson’s headscratching standard, as professed in a Republican debate, for evaluating Supreme Court nominees.
Yes, the guy’s a profoundly odd duck. No, he does not have experience running a $49 billion bureaucracy or anything bigger than a 70-member team of hospital professionals. No, he has no housing experience more profound than signing a deed on a $4.3 million Palm Beach villa, bought in a foreclosure sale.
Neither did former NFL quarterback Jack Kemp, despite a stint in Congress representing Buffalo, when President George H.W. Bush appointed him in 1988 to run HUD as compassionate conservatism’s laboratory scientist for revitalizing America’s struggling cities, keeping their conditions in focus under an indifferent chief executive.
As would any Trump nominee, Carson enters in much the same conservative Republican ideological tradition, committed to scaling back government meddling and scaling up private investment and economic opportunity.
President Obama required cities to promote racial integration. Carson trashed the program as doomed “social engineering.”
Running for the Republican nomination, Carson described government’s Great Society anti-poverty programs as a “metastasizing” cancer, spreading social ills with them — “welfare, broken homes, out-of-wedlock births, crime, incarceration” — and withering great past American traditions of communities providing mutual aid. (A classic Carsonism: “If somebody got killed by a bear, everybody took care of their family.”)
As a drug in pure form, he peddles poison — because poverty by definition is an economic market failure that markets cannot themselves correct, contrary to his infamous line that “poverty is really more of a choice than anything else.”
The need for government activism against conditions that perpetuate poverty and its sufferings is exactly why HUD exists, a government agency spending government dollars to help millions of Americans pay rent they otherwise couldn’t, improve aging neighborhoods’ conditions and rebuild after disasters like Hurricane Sandy.
Oh, and by the way, HUD’s Federal Housing Administration is also a pivotal backer of home mortgages, driving one of the biggest sectors of the American economy. Going back to building our own log cabins is not an option.
Nowhere are the HUD stakes higher than in New York City, where a half-million souls call our crumbling public housing projects home and many more rely on rent vouchers to stave off homelessness.
Congress has for years underfunded NYCHA and the nation’s 3,300 other housing authorities by many billions of dollars, leaving many complexes in increasingly dire condition.
Whatever flights of fancy he had into “Little House on the Prairie”-land, Carson and the Republican-controlled Congress now can’t just yank away the life support from 2.2 million urban tenants without inviting utter disaster under their watch.
But NYCHA and its long-suffering tenants could benefit from small doses of market medicine. Already, under a trial Obama program, NYCHA can go to the bank and borrow money to make repairs, something any homeowner can take for granted — but only for a small fraction of its decrepit buildings. Why not more?
May the good and wacky doctor administer his care with an eye to the patient’s health — and with experienced housing professionals at his side at all times.