As the year comes to an end, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is reflecting on the milestones achieved during the first three years under Secretary Marcia Fudge’s leadership.

Key accomplishments for the federal department have included historic levels of rental assistance, a boost in first-time home buyers, new investments to address the effects of the climate crisis, and policies to address the legacies of racial discrimination in housing.

“There has never been a greater need for our assistance,” said Fudge. “We have done a lot for people, despite the challenges we are facing, from helping more people than ever before get housing with vouchers to making space for a record number of first-time home buyers to enter the market. We have more to do, and I look forward to expanding on our progress in 2024.”

Highlights from HUD’s impact include:

  • Housing a historic 20-year record of people through roughly 120,000 new incremental housing vouchers in a three-year period. These include new Veterans Affairs Supportive Housing, Family Unification Program/Foster Youth to Independence, Mainstream, Stability, Emergency Housing, and flexible Housing Choice vouchers;
  • Helping launch the White House Blueprint for a Renters Bill of Rights and providing $10 million for tenant education and outreach;
  • Funding legal assistance to over 19,000 low-income tenants at risk of, or subject to, eviction;
  • Providing historic increases in funding for Tribal housing, including investment over $1 billion for housing through the Indian Housing Block Grant (IHBG) Formula program, the IHBG Competitive program, the Indian Community Development Block Grant program, and the Native Hawaiian Housing Block Grant program;
  • Supporting nearly 1.8 million homeowners with purchase mortgages through the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), with 83.6%, or 1.5 million, being first-time home buyers. The FHA’s first-time home buyer rate under this administration is the highest it has been in over two decades;
  • Creating the first HUD program to simultaneously invest in energy efficiency, renewable energy generation, climate resilience, and low embodied carbon. Funded through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Green and Resilient Retrofit Program is providing $800 million in grant and loan subsidy funding and $4 billion in loan commitments to HUD-assisted multifamily housing;
  • Providing $6.7 billion in assistance through Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery to help communities build back after natural disasters in 2021 and 2022;
  • Working on a final rule regarding Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing to address disparities in housing needs for members of protected class groups, replace segregated areas with integrated communities, and transform racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity;
  • Restoring the Discriminatory Effects Tool to protect fair housing and address policies that unnecessarily cause systemic inequality in housing; and
  • Supporting the reentry for people leaving incarceration. The agency will be issuing a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that will require providers of HUD-assisted housing to use an individualized approach to screening, admissions, and other housing decisions.