Matt Katz: You're listening to The Takeaway. I'm Matt Katz. On Wednesday, Marcia Fudge was confirmed as secretary of housing and urban development in a bipartisan vote. She’ll be the second Black woman in the role and the first in more than four decades.

Marcia Fudge: I remember the feeling I had as a kid of the safety, security, and peace of mind contained in one word, "home." I remember the comfort of knowing that no matter what happened, I could always go home. Far too many Americans live without that feeling.

Matt Katz: As HUD Secretary, Fudge will not only inherit a housing crisis made worse by the covid 19 pandemic, but also an agency in crisis. For more on this, we're joined now by Jerusalem Demsas, a reporter with Vox. Jerusalem, welcome back to the show.

Jerusalem Demsas: Hi, there. Nice to be here.

Matt Katz: Let's start with some background on Marcia Fudge. How does her experience in government equip her for the new role at HUD?

Jerusalem Demsas: Marcia Fudge is a 12-year Congresswoman. She's represented the Cleveland area in Ohio in Congress. She hasn't particularly worked on housing issues in that role, but prior to being Congresswoman, she was the first Black woman to lead a majority-Black town as mayor in the Cleveland area. In that role, obviously, all mayors have to deal with housing issues, and homelessness issues, and that's where the majority of her housing experience comes from.

She was confirmed 66-34 in a bipartisan vote by the Senate, which means there's reasonable confidence in her ability to do the role, but questions about her qualifications did come up during the confirmation process, mostly by Senate Republicans who feel not only that she does not have the policy chops in housing to do the job, but also that she has made some statements in the past that have been critical of Senate Republicans, meaning that they feel like she's not going to be willing to listen to their policy ideas.

I think the vote being so overwhelmingly bipartisan kind of belies the idea that she doesn't have support from both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, but I think it was a question of whether or not she's really focused on housing in the past. Prior to being nominated by Joe Biden to be the HUD Secretary, she was actually gunning to become the Secretary of Agriculture, which is something she has focused on a lot in Congress. She has seemed to take on this role, and during the confirmation processing, too excited to take on this role. I think it's just up to seeing how well she can manage a large department. A big part of the job is just management and ability to advocate for your department, both to the president and to Congress.

Matt Katz: Right. You mentioned that Republicans brought up some disparaging comments she's made about Republicans in the past. I was reading your story, and my eyebrows raised over something she said last year that Republicans, "Don't even care a little bit about people of color." How did she explain that remark when she was asked about it during her confirmation hearing?

Jerusalem Demsas: Yes. She made that comment when discussing police reform efforts in the Senate. During her hearing, she said that she's willing to listen to any Republican who has ideas about how to improve the lives of people of color, but mostly, she just dodged the question. It wasn't like other nominees, such as Neera Tanden for OMB where there was a concentrated attack on Republicans that she waged for quite a while and that Republicans were ready to sink that nomination.

With Fudge, you could tell that some Republicans were upset about the remarks, but she has done enough bipartisan work. She has good friends. She's worked well across the aisle while in Congress, to the point that the 64-33 vote really just indicates that no one really believed that that was something that would hinder her from being able to work in a bipartisan manner.

Matt Katz: At HUD, Secretary Fudge will have to deal with not just the housing crisis, which we'll talk about in a moment, but also an agency in crisis. The agency has shed many employees of late. Why has there been such a staffing exodus at HUD?

Jerusalem Demsas: Yes. HUD has historically been underfunded. It is one of the departments that, in general, is working to improve the lives of marginalized communities. Usually, poor Americans who need help getting housing is the majority of the programs existing at HUD. Republicans, in general, don't believe in using public housing as an approach towards helping people who need it at the lower end of the income ladder. They're more looking for market-based solutions, and so they've been hostile to HUD funding over the years.

Then on the side of Democrats, Democrats have been really scared to really prioritize HUD because that would mean enforcing a lot of fair housing laws that are really controversial on the ground. It would mean making sure that cities and localities are not discriminating in how they're placing the housing voucher recipients in poor areas, which is a really common way of separating them from the rest of the community. That's just a really difficult conversation for folks to get into, and it's easier for presidents to ignore it.

Even under President Obama, HUD sustained budget cuts. Every single Democratic president has really ignored the responsibilities to the department. I think we're getting to the point right now, where the housing crisis has ballooned out of control. It's no longer something that you can just say is affecting less wealthy Americans. It is something that is now affecting even people higher up on the income scale, who are having difficulty finding housing in the places they want to live. The affordability crisis in America's major cities, and even in America's less and non-coastal cities is getting to a point where the government's really going to have to step in. I think that this is a moment where all of America is going to be able to benefit if they choose to take it on through HUD, which is still not something that any president has ever done.

Matt Katz: You said this housing crisis has been exacerbated of late. I imagine that's because of the pandemic. Are things just much worse in terms of people finding housing because of what we've experienced over the last year?

Jerusalem Demsas: Yes. There are two facets to this. There are renters and homeowners. These folks have experienced the crisis in two different ways. For renters, the majority of people who have lost their jobs, who have sustained financial losses during the pandemic have been renters. There are billions of back rent that have accrued, and there have been a lot of folks who've lost their homes and had to double up with other family members or even become homeless. That's a huge crisis, not only for the renters, but also for a lot of the small landlords that own these properties are not able to continue to operate them if they're not getting people's rent. What that ends up happening is that they end up selling their units to private equity firms or other large corporations that then turn those into non-affordable housing units, which already exacerbates America's existing affordable housing stock. That's one crisis.

Then the other side where we're talking about homeowners, we've seen record-low mortgage rates over the last year, which has made it really attractive for people to buy houses. People on the higher end of the income ladder have actually been able to save more money this year, because they're staying home, or they're not able to do as much as they used to be able to do, but their incomes haven't really taken a hit. For those folks, they've been trying to buy houses, but America's long-running supply issue where we're just not building enough homes, where people want to live means that everyone is bidding up like the same number of houses. It's led to a point where we're seeing the highest price increase in memory among America's housing stock.

People are also frustrated because they're not able to find homes that they want to live in. They're not able to buy homes where they want to live, and they're forced to take a cut in the types of amenities or things they want to buy. It's really two different crises, and also, of course, the homelessness crisis, where we've seen a lot of studies done that show that people who are homeless are not only more likely to get COVID and die of it but also more likely to increase community transmission. I think that's the big thing here is that COVID has shown us that you can't just be worried about yourself, you have to care about your community, and that public health means also housing. That's something where if this administration takes it seriously, they have a huge opportunity to make lives better.

Matt Katz: The Biden administration has said that racial equity will be a guiding force for all policies, but specifically housing policy. What will Secretary Fudge prioritize in order to address that?

Jerusalem Demsas: There are a lot of things here and I think that's a really good question because the way that Marcia Fudge has come at HUD is not from someone who has a lot of housing policy experience. She's coming at it from someone who has certain values about how she thinks that housing policy should be done. She has really prioritized equitable housing policy during her confirmation hearing, and there are a lot of ways that this can be done.

Firstly, Joe Biden has already put into motion, the two different rules that were undone during the Trump administration that would make enforcing the Fair Housing Act a lot easier, and also increase the amount of enforcement that HUD would be doing. These two rules are ones that would enforce Fair Housing Act protections against race, color, national origin, religion, disability, sexual orientation, family status.

I think these kinds of rules can do a lot. They're also extremely controversial. A lot of Republicans do not feel like these kinds of interventions from the federal government or that the courts should be able to force landlords to engage in this way that sometimes there's going to be a lot of federal overreach, but that's one big thing that they've already started putting in motion and Fudge is going to be instrumental and seeing how those rules are both designed and implemented. The second way is just HUD runs tons of different programs. It runs programs for housing vouchers, it runs programs to send funding to mayors, called Community Development Block Grants or other types of grants that just send tons of money to cities and localities in order for them to develop their communities.

The administration of these programs obviously can be done in many different ways. One, it can be audited to make sure that people are really engaging with using the money to ensure that their communities are equitable, or it can be used to segregate which has been done in the past, or it can be used to entrench inequality which it has been done in the past. Fudge has the opportunity here to make sure that the administration of these programs is truly equitable, which is something that HUD has usually not even had the staffing to do and that's going to be a big challenge.

Matt Katz: Jerusalem Demsas is a reporter with Vox. Jerusalem, HUD is not an agency that many of us think about every day, so very glad you're on this story. Thanks for coming on The Takeaway.

Jerusalem Demsas: Thanks for having me.

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