God-and-bootstraps policy remain largely a mystery....

Carson’s God-and-bootstraps message fails to hearten housing advocates

Less than two months into the job, Carson still holds forth on God and neurosurgery, but his views on housing policy remain largely a mystery.

By LORRAINE WOELLERT

God is Ben Carson’s favorite subject. Brain surgery is a close second. Housing is somewhere further down the list.

“I was told that as a government leader, I really shouldn't talk about God. But I have to tell you, it's part of who I am,” Carson said last month, in one of his first speeches as Housing and Urban Development secretary.

Less than two months into the job, Carson still holds forth on God and neurosurgery, but his views on housing policy remain largely a mystery. While he's making good on a promised listening tour to learn about the $48 billion agency he now leads, he's done little public speaking about the urgent issue at hand — a lack of affordable housing.

That's one reason why early excitement over his nomination has given way to bewilderment and now frustration. Every policy job at the agency remains vacant, and advocates who thought Carson’s celebrity would raise awareness of affordable housing have been disappointed. President Donald Trump doused any remaining hope when he said he would slash HUD funding by 13.2 percent.

Carson told POLITICO that policy proposals are in the works, but in public appearances the one-time presidential candidate is sticking to his stump-speech staples. He prescribes “godly principles” as a cure for the country’s political division and praises housing advocates for “putting God’s love into action.”

“Speaking of God, which I love to do; quite frankly, he’s a great guy,” Carson said on March 28, drawing friendly laughter during a speech to the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals. “We should be grateful that God gave us variety. But you know what he didn‘t give us variety in? The brain.”

With that, the secretary — an acclaimed pediatric neurosurgeon — was off and running to his other favorite subject. Housing experts brought on stage to analyze his remarks were flummoxed.

“I was trying to take notes on what he was saying about housing,” said Armando Falcon, chief executive at Falcon Capital Advisors, waving a piece of blank paper. “I could have filled a page with neurosurgery notes."

Faith groups are deeply embedded in the affordable housing firmament, which has greeted Carson’s speeches as part motivational, part sermon and part lecture. The secretary offers no apologies.

“One of the most important parts of our Constitution is freedom of religion. There’s a mistaken thinking that we’re not supposed to talk about God,” Carson told POLITICO. “Godly principles and loving your fellow man and caring about your neighbor, there’s nothing wrong with that.”

But lately, his up-by-the-bootstraps message has been falling flat with anti-poverty audiences.

“It’s a great story, but it’s a dangerous message because not everybody can pull themselves up by their bootstraps,” said Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. “Nobody does that, including Secretary Carson. He had a lot of support — his mother, his family, his faith. He had a whole context of support.”

So when the secretary got stuck in an elevator while touring a Miami housing project on April 12, Twitter was ruthless and late-night TV had its fun. Carson’s allies spun a good-natured silver lining — at least all those millennials watching Jimmy Kimmel now know that the secretary is on a listening tour.

That tour, which will wrap up in early June, has inspired a clutch of anti-Trump protesters devoted to the HUD secretary. CarsonWatch, launched with $75,000 in seed money, will highlight the secretary’s lack of experience and the agency’s threatened budget cuts. The group calls the listening tour “fake.”

“It’s been mostly an opportunity to do well-staged photo ops,” said Guillermo Mayer, chief executive of Public Advocates, a civil rights group affiliated with CarsonWatch. “He’s so far making empty promises that these cuts will be made up in the infrastructure bill. Show me the language and the votes.”

Carson said that while housing will be part of Trump’s infrastructure bill, that legislation won’t fill funding gaps at HUD. To meet the president’s spending targets, the agency will find ways to cut waste and be more efficient, he said.

As he learns his way around the HUD bureaucracy, Carson expects to start announcing policy plans in the next 90 days. High on his list of priorities is bringing new life to a program known as Section 3, which creates local jobs when agency money is spent on a project.

“It’s been largely ignored because people say we don’t have local people who know how to weld or have plumbing skills,” Carson said in the interview. “That is true. However we do have a brain, which means we have the ability to think ahead. We know well more than a year ahead of time when we’re going to start a major project. Why not go in and train people in that area at that time so they’re ready?”

“We’re moving away from the concept of just housing people to the concept of developing people,” Carson said.

The housing community, a large, unwieldy group that includes labor, civil rights and faith-based activists as well as Wall Street firms and state and local governments, has been meeting in Washington to coordinate a budget message and present a united front to Congress. The groups take Carson’s assurances that nobody will be “thrown out on the streets” with strong skepticism.

“He has a deep well of compassion; that’s very clear when you meet him. The question remains if that translates into understanding the magnitude of what he’s overseeing and the depth of the need,” said Shola Olatoye, chief executive officer of the New York City Housing Authority. “Yes, people should work and yes, health is important, but we haven’t heard about the bricks and mortar.”

Already, some people are being denied housing aid in anticipation of budget cuts. Soon after Trump released his plan, some agencies stopped redistributing rental subsidy vouchers under Section 8, a HUD program with a waiting list of low-income households. Hundreds of thousands of families are on those lists, which have a median wait time of 18 months, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

“The fear is that, if the federal government cuts their funds, they might have to take a voucher away from someone,” said Shamus Roller, executive director of the National Housing Law Project. “There are a lot of people on that waiting list who aren’t going to get vouchers.”

Carson is taking a holistic view and plans to work with other agencies. He’s a strong advocate for education, job training, criminal sentencing reform, and building human capital.

“Everybody is either going to become part of the engine or part of the load,” Carson said at an April 3 meeting of the National Low Income Housing Coalition. “We as a nation can go a lot further and a lot faster if a lot more people are part of the engine.”

The message echoes one that forced House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to retreat years ago.

“Even Paul Ryan had to move off his `makers-and-takers' frame,” said Chris Estes, president of the National Housing Conference. “You have a lot of people working full time and they don’t make enough money. That’s nondebatable. It doesn’t matter how much faith in God you have, that’s not the fix.”