During a House Oversight Committee hearing last week, Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) questioned Howard Husock, a Senior Fellow at the Domestic Policy Studies at the The American Enterprise Institute, about corruption of public housing authorities.
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00:00Go sire for five minutes. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We're over $36 trillion in debt and public housing
00:07has only contributed to that cost. Section 8 housing, for example, does not have a time limit.
00:13Participants can receive subsidized housing for decades, while these in most need are stuck on
00:18a wait list. But the housing cost crisis is not the result of just one regulatory requirement,
00:23but rather a series of challenges that forced costly and unattainable standards on local
00:29communities. Not only did Biden's HUD inflate the cost of housing welfare, but it also reinstated
00:36Obama's Affirmative Further Fair Housing Initiative, or the FFH rule. You're very familiar, aren't you,
00:43Dr. Drew? In 2015, Obama introduced the FFH rule to dictate zoning requirements in any community
00:51across the country that applied for a community development block grant. According to the Cato
00:56Institute, Mr. Edwards, AFFH required federal and local agencies to spend $55 million each year to
01:03comply with its regulations, thus increasing local taxes, reducing property values, and causing greater
01:08harm than good in impoverished communities. Luckily, President Trump terminated this rule,
01:14and my legislation, the Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act, will codify that termination.
01:19I invite all my colleagues to join in on me, help me with that.
01:22Dr. Carson, it's great to see you again. Thanks for testifying. As Secretary, you worked to give
01:28Americans a hand up, not a hand out. How does the AFFH rule harm local communities?
01:37Well, it's just a very good example of how the government insinuates itself into places where
01:44they don't need to be. You know, communities have developed on their own throughout the time that
01:51we've existed as a nation. Many of them thrived extremely well. They had people who came from
01:58different countries. They couldn't speak to each other because they didn't have the same language,
02:03but they understood one important thing. That's called the common good. It was a phrase used
02:08frequently by our founders. It means not what's good for this group versus that group, but what's
02:14good for everybody. AFFH has a bunch of bureaucrats who impose their rulings in a situation like that.
02:23The reason that those communities thrived is because if it was harvest time and Mr. Jones broke
02:29his ankle, everybody else harvested his crops. They didn't ask what his religion was or what his
02:34politics were. They said, this is my neighbor. They need help. That's the kind of communities we
02:39need to get back to, not government sponsored and dictated communities. That's absolutely great.
02:47Thank you. Mr. Houssak, in February of 2024, 70 New York City Housing Authority employees were charged
02:54with accepting cash from contractors in exchange for awarding certain contracts to these entities.
02:59Is it correct that public housing authorities that administer these HUD programs are required to place
03:05tenants who receive housing benefits on their housing authority boards?
03:12There are representatives required very state by state, but that certainly is possible.
03:19And that was one of the largest corruption cases in New York municipal history.
03:25In your opinion, what's the first step to address the abuse of these public housing authorities?
03:29Well, I think they should not be in the management business at all, right? What we have,
03:37and I live in the metro New York area, there are a lot of companies that really know how to manage
03:41buildings, and one of them is not the housing authority of New York. Now, there may be well-meaning
03:47people who could oversee contracts. That's a proper role for government. It happens all the time. This
03:52Congress does it. But we should have private management. And we are moving slowly in that direction
03:58through the rental assistance demonstration program, where we're bringing in private management. You have
04:02some people yell out, that's privatization and it's bad. But no, we need to bring in private management
04:08and not let these housing authorities, which have a proven record of corruption and incompetence.
04:14The New York City Housing Authority, the largest one in the country, is under the oversight of a federal monitor
04:18because of the dilapidated conditions.
04:23Mr. Edwards, and first of all, thank you very much for your Institute for Cato looking into the national
04:28emergencies that I was so hyped up about and showing that there's $12 trillion that between
04:34Bill Clinton and Joe Biden, all that time in between, we ran out $12 trillion worth of our debt,
04:41one-third of our debt with no receipts. So thank you very much for that applause.
04:45In my legislation, putting Trust and Transparency Act would require any NGO that receives even a penny
04:56of federal funding to disclose its extravagant donors so Congress can see which NGOs have nefarious
05:01intentions. So in the case of affordable housing, the American people would have access to the books
05:07of NGOs that house illegal aliens at the expense of a taxpayer. Is that true? If that were to pass,
05:13is this a place to be looking? There's entities that receive federal grants
05:19do require, are required, do have required financial disclosure, but the threshold is very high.
05:26It's like a million dollars or something like that annually. Yeah. Thank you. I'll have more
05:30questions later. Thank you.