By Karen Stokes
Marcia Fudge United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (Photo/X.com)
The Biden-Harris Administration has made many accomplishments on housing specifically for communities of color.
In a press call, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Marcia Fudge outlined many of the Administration’s successes.
“I’m trying to talk about what has happened during the Biden Harris Administration as it relates to housing,” Secretary Fudge said. “It’s such a critical conversation especially as we look at the crisis in housing today.”
- Since 2021 we have supported more than 1 1⁄2million first time home buyers, some of it is due to the policy changes we have made at HUD. We started to look at positive rental history, too many Black and brown people report to lenders and they say you have no credit but what we have now done is that if you have paid your rent on time for the last 12 months, we can consider that you are creditworthy. We expanded tools to create an environment in which housing counseling is available to more people across the country and we are changing the way that we calculate student loans in our underwriting process, so those are the things that we know that helped increase for Black and brown people in particular the ability and access to purchasing a home.
- Also in the last three years we have helped more than 250,000 new Black homeowners buy a home. We have helped more than 160,000 Black homeowners avoid foreclosure and stay in their homes and in this Administration there have been over 480,000 Latino homeowners that bought or refinanced homes through FHA.
- We have cut housing costs across the board by giving every single person a reduction on their mortgage insurance premium and that average savings is about $800. Of course the more expensive the home,the more they save.
- We have built and repaired over 500,000 units of affordable housing. Clearly it is not enough because we are 3 million units of housing short of what we need today.
- We serve about 2 ½ million people using housing vouchers every year and that includes approximately 1.2 million people living in rural areas which supports approximately 250,000 older adults and some 450,000 children. We are working to make people’s homes safer. We have a healthy home project that we are very proud of. In particular I have a real issue with lead. We have found that most children in poor Black and brown communities have elevated levels of lead. So we have put about $340 million in to try to address the issue because we know it affects people who are poor, who live in inner cities, who live in older homes.
- We have a crisis of the unhoused. In January, we awarded more than $3 billion to assist local service organizations in support of those who are experiencing homelessness or who we know may soon be in that position.
“I think this Administration has put us in the position that I think people understand what we do, why we do it and understand that this Administration and this government can work for the people we serve,” she said.