00:00Thank you, ma'am.
00:01Senator Coons.
00:03Thank you, Chair Hyde-Smith and Ranking Member Gillibrand, Secretary Turner.
00:07Welcome.
00:08Thank you for the chance to be with you today.
00:10I appreciated receiving, finally, your budget submission, and I look forward to getting to know you better and to work with you.
00:18I'll just mention right at the outset, Madam Chair, that my week had a positive start
00:22because I got to visit a project built by a faith-based organization from the Mennonite community
00:30to address youth aging out of foster care in a rural community known as Greenwood, Delaware.
00:36And I'm pleased, as are you, that the Youth Aging Out of Foster Care program will be sustained.
00:42But I'm gravely concerned that several of the tools that were used to make that project work are not being continued.
00:50I was a county executive.
00:51I spent six years of my life working on housing.
00:55We were responsible for the second-largest housing authority in my state.
00:59The housing authority didn't own any units.
01:02It was all private sector, private landlords, but working in partnership with us and with HUD.
01:08And I'm working on a bipartisan piece of legislation with Senator Kramer of North Dakota
01:13called the Choice in Affordable Housing Act.
01:17And it would make housing choice vouchers more accessible.
01:20It would do a better job of attracting and retaining private sector landlords to the program.
01:26It's got a wide range of groups involved in housing, housing production, housing advocacy, supporting it.
01:32And I'd like you to commit to working with me on that legislation to see if we can make progress on improving the housing choice vouchers program.
01:41Is that something you'd be willing to work with me on?
01:44Thank you, Senator.
01:45It's great to see you, sir.
01:46And I do look forward to seeing the language and hearing from you and your staff and how we can work together.
01:51Obviously, the housing affordability is a top priority of mine and taking care of American people and also people to see people live lives for self-sustainability.
02:02And for the youth aging out of foster care, you know, I'm looking forward to working with this committee and also with the First Lady as we take care of our youth to make sure that they land on solid ground in the days ahead.
02:14Well, you heard from Senator Gillibrand, and I'll repeat the same thing, a passion on my part for working on the conversion of formerly commercial buildings to residential buildings.
02:24I'm close with a developer in Delaware that's done that a number of times successfully.
02:28As Senator Gillibrand knows, it's very difficult to do.
02:32Some properties lend themselves to it easily.
02:34Some properties are almost impossible.
02:36We have a significant challenge nationally.
02:39We are not producing enough affordable housing.
02:41We're not producing enough housing in urban centers.
02:44We're not producing enough housing in rural areas.
02:46And taking underutilized or vacant commercial properties and appropriately transitioning them to housing for those who are either homeless, unhoused, or underhoused is another thing I'd love to work with you on.
02:59But I must say just right off the top that I looked at this budget.
03:05You are a person of faith, as are the rest of us on this panel.
03:09You share a commitment to caring for our vulnerable neighbors, the least of these.
03:15But this budget, Mr. Secretary, is not a serious proposal.
03:18It does not meet the urgent housing needs of our country.
03:21A 50% cut to all the programs at HUD would be devastating to families and goes well beyond right-sizing a bloated agency, which was your phraseology.
03:30I think it takes a chainsaw out of programs that I've worked with for years and that I've seen help the neediest Americans.
03:38As county executive, I relied on the home program.
03:42I've worked closely with the shop sweat equity program.
03:45I've supported and worked closely with the continuum of care program.
03:49Whether it's HOPWA or housing for the elderly or housing for persons with disabilities, the solution to eliminating all of these services and then rolling them up into a new black ground program, I will assert, Mr. Secretary, will simply shift the burden onto states and counties.
04:07States and counties will end up being forced to pick up services for people who will become newly unhoused.
04:14That may not be your intention, but it is certainly my intention to test and push and challenge some of the assumptions underlying this.
04:23The administration is shifting the burden onto states and counties for a lot of other programming, for food assistance, health care, education, and that will badly strain state and county budgets to also move housing affordability for seniors, for the disabled, for families with children, I think goes beyond streamlining HUD services, but leads to fewer people receiving services.
04:46Let me just talk a little bit more about CDBG and home as county executive home was absolutely critical to our working in partnership with local nonprofits, several of them faith-based.
04:58It required a non-federal match, a robust non-federal match.
05:02It allowed us to build affordable housing, especially for disabled folks in our county.
05:08It helped 44,500 individuals a year.
05:11Do you actually believe state and local governments have the ability to pick up the costs for services that will be shifted to them if all of these programs are eliminated?
05:22Thank you, Senator.
05:23And I appreciate your perspective on everything, and thank you to your service, you know, both locally and here nationally.
05:29You know, Senator, HUD has record funding, and currently we're only able to serve one out of four eligible families with $77 billion.
05:39And I alluded to this before, and I will say again, we have to do something different, because what we have been doing over these many years has not been working.
05:51Stewardship has to be a priority.
05:54There's a lot of waste.
05:55There's a lot of fraud.
05:56There's a lot of abuse in our system.
05:58And we can't, when I alluded to saying, you know, you can't keep running the same plays, what I mean there's the best teams that I've seen in my career are the teams that make adjustments.
06:07You know, we can't keep running the same play because it's causing us to lose.
06:11Well, that's what I feel like in America today, and particularly with HUD, that we've been running plays that have caused us to lose.
06:18And so, sir, this is a different way of looking at things.
06:21It's a rethinking of how can we get states to have skin in the game.
06:25I do realize, I understand the responsibility that you speak of.
06:28But this is a way for states to identify their unique needs and then to distribute their funds as they see fit.
06:35They can identify those that have been successful and fund those.
06:39And so, it's a way for the states to uniquely get involved, to be very deliberate and decisive of their stewardship.
06:46And so, sir, that's the paradigm that I'm talking about.
06:49That's the culture shift I'm talking about.
06:51It's a new way of looking at it, a new way of rethinking it.
06:54The HOME program, to be honest, over the last 33 years has built 1.3 million units.
07:01That's only 32 units a year, and it provides gap funding.
07:05But the other funding has been $185 billion.
07:08So, I think we have to relook at this in a different way and do it better.
07:12Mr. Secretary, with all due respect, I welcome and appreciate some fresh thinking or a new look, a new attitude.
07:20But cutting funding by 50 percent, cutting the HUD workforce by a third, is not going to produce any significant increase in housing production.
07:31You can reorganize.
07:33You can right-size.
07:33You can reanalyze existing programs.
07:35I would reject the assertion that the HOME program, as administered in my county, was rife with waste, fraud, and abuse.
07:44I'm not going to defend every HOME program in every county in America because I can't.
07:48But I know the ones I was responsible for.
07:51I met with the Delaware Home Builders earlier today.
07:53Many of the folks in the room I've known for decades.
07:56One of them is among the leading builders of quality, affordable, multifamily housing in America.
08:03And they probably don't want me to quote them right now.
08:07But their comment was, the staffing cuts that you've pushed through this agency, reducing by a third the total headcount,
08:16means that getting projects approved that have to have an approval, a sign-off on a mortgage or a sign-off on a project approval,
08:22their wait times have gone from months to projects not moving forward, falling apart.
08:29And they cited to me the potentially disastrous consequences for low-income housing tax credit projects,
08:36for HOME projects, for Section 232 and 202 projects,
08:40of having all the staff with experience and expertise managing these gone,
08:45and then all the funding shoved into one big pile and sort of pushed at the states to say,
08:50you come up with your priorities.
08:52In the room full of folks I just met with who have decades of experience building housing of all kinds,
08:59high-end, mid, low, multifamily, single-family, inner-city, rural,
09:04these are guys who represent the whole scope of the home-building industry in my state,
09:08they were not optimistic that working together we were going to generate more housing.
09:13And I'll say one last point on one comment, if I might.
09:16Senator from Rhode Island, Senator from Hawaii, Senator from Delaware,
09:20the idea that we're going to solve this problem by accessing federal lands,
09:25that doesn't build you one single unit of housing in my state.
09:29East Coast, there's not a whole lot of relevant, vacant federal land.
09:34And I dare say, although these are not my states or my geography,
09:38in states like Wyoming or Montana or Utah,
09:41my hunch is the infrastructure cost to connect out to and build on available vacant federal land may not pencil out.
09:50Let me conclude.
09:51I'm way over, and I apologize, Madam Chair, but I was the last, so I figured I'd take a little moment.
09:55Thank you for what you've said today about the values you bring to this work
10:00and about working together to find the right balance.
10:04And thank you for your willingness to take on a challenging department at an important time.
10:09But bluntly, Mr. Secretary, I think we need to produce more housing, not less.
10:14And I look forward to working with you to try to find ways to do that in keeping with our charge of stewardship.
10:19Thank you, Madam Chair.
10:20Thank you, sir.
10:23Without objection, this letter from the First Lady Melania-
Comments