Affordable Housing Finance readers were asked to vote on the 10 most important things for the next president’s HUD secretary to do in his or her first 100 days in office. The results are below:
Recommendation |
Rating (represents the ratings average on a scale from one to 10 ) |
| Increase efforts to persuade local zoning and land use authorities to streamline their approval processes to reduce delays and reduce entitlement costs for affordable housing. |
4.2 |
| Empower field staff to make decisions. Take decisive action to plant the seeds of a new culture that says results are more important than process and delegate more authority to regional and local staff. |
4.39 |
| Remove impediments to using HUD programs with the LIHTC and direct staff to resolve conflicts between HUD regulations and tax credit regulations in favor of the tax credit program. |
4.52 |
| Collaborate with state and local housing agencies. Take immediate steps to change the adversarial attitude of HUD employees toward state and local housing agencies and actively encourage new ideas for collaboration among levels of government. |
4.77 |
| Implement immediate training for all HUD staff on the importance of public-private partnerships, the market-oriented approach of the tax credit program, and the successful record of performance by state and local housing agencies and nonprofit housing development entities that have emerged since enactment of the LIHTC program in 1986. HUD staff are remarkably uninformed about these advances in housing delivery methods and seem to view today’s private nonprofits with undue suspicion. |
4.87 |
| Make it a top priority to address the problems of public housing by expediting implementation of the Quality Work and Housing Responsibilities Act, particularly those provisions that help increase public housing agency access to private capital. |
4.89 |
| Reduce HUD’s reliance on contractors, and clean up the process for awarding contracts to increase oversight and ensure that federal dollars yield tangible benefits. This should include a complete review of all contracts awarded without competitive bidding and all contracts for information technology (IT) projects. |
5.48 |
| Make recruitment and staff retention and training a top priority and set immediate and aggressive goals to reverse the loss of skilled employees or to speed their replacement. |
5.64 |
| Recognize the legitimacy of nonprofit housing sponsors’ desire to recycle funds derived from sale of HUD-assisted assets. One of the obstacles to preservation of older assisted housing is HUD’s policy of severely limiting the ability of nonprofit project owners to realize any financial gain on the sale of a HUD-assisted property. |
5.77 |
| Take a personal role in a crash program to improve HUD’s IT systems. HUD has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on contracts to create and upgrade its information and computer systems, with very mixed results, and the agency’s databases on projects it owns or finances appear to be shockingly bad, or in some cases, nonexistent. Top level management must invest heavily in addressing these chronic problems. |
5.86 |
