SPECIAL FOCUS >>RETHINKING FEDERAL HOUSING POLICY
What the Next President
Needs to Know About Housing
Be part of AFFORDABLEHOUSING FINANCE’s new campaign for change
BY ANDRE F. SHASHATY
AFFORDABLE HOUSING FINANCE • MARCH 2008
With the presidential election
just eight months
away, AFFORDABLE HOUSING
FINANCE is launching
an ambitious effort to
bring the industry together around a simple
but forceful housing agenda for the next
president and secretary of the Department
of Housing and Urban Development
(HUD).
We are calling this campaign
Americans for a New Federal Housing
Commitment, and our goal is to start to
reverse the long absence of coherent policy-making
on housing now, before the next
president takes office.
We’ve asked the experts what they
think, and now it’s your turn. Please read
the following tentative list of policy ideas
below, think about them and how they
might help you deliver housing in your market
area, and rank the most important ones
on a scale of one to 10, with one being most
important.
We want to promote principles that are
important enough to make a difference but
not so specific as to prevent consensus from
a variety of industry stakeholders.
We have put forth a wide range of possible
measures for urgent action by the next
president and the president’s appointee to
run HUD. We focused on encouraging more
efficient use of current government
resources and private market forces, since
expensive new direct subsidies are not likely
to be enacted, with some limited exceptions.
We have chosen not to list broad policy
goals like “end chronic homelessness,” since
they are too general to elicit a meaningful
response.
Your input is crucial to this process. We
will use your feedback to boil this down to a
list of 10 principles for federal housing policy.
With your help, we will then seek
endorsements for our principles from
prominent Americans—not just those in
housing and government but also business
leaders, members of Congress, and other
opinion leaders. We will present our policy
proposal with a list of endorsers to key
advisers of the presidential candidates and
distribute it to state and national leaders.
We will invite key policy advisers to the
final presidential candidates to attend a
public forum on housing policy and HUD as
part of AHF Live: The 2008 Tax Credit
Developers’ Summit, which takes place Nov.
5-7 in Chicago.
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