NLIHC submitted a comment letter to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on January 28 addressing the four focus areas identified by the department for its “Draft Strategic Plan” for 2022 to 2026: supporting underserved communities, ensuring access to and increased production of affordable housing, promoting homeownership, and advancing sustainable communities. NLIHC urged HUD to make racial equity an explicit goal of federal housing programs and to actively pursue the anti-racist reforms needed to ensure households with the lowest incomes have affordable places to call home.
NLIHC urged HUD to support these racial equity efforts by collecting, analyzing, and making public data on all programs to clarify whether they exacerbate, ameliorate, or simply leave in place existing or historic patterns of segregation and discrimination in housing and infrastructure, and to remedy those programs found wanting.
NLIHC also asked HUD to seek and incorporate feedback from people with lived experience when formulating policy priorities like those reflected in the department’s strategic plan. People with direct experience of housing insecurity and homelessness have important insights into HUD programs and valuable ideas about how to reform these programs to better serve households in need. More generally, the letter urged HUD to commit to a robust process for public comment on its strategic plan and all other policy changes.
Regarding HUD’s focus on affordable housing, NLIHC encouraged HUD to outline a vision for putting the nation on a path to universal housing assistance, a core tenet of President Biden’s housing platform. Because the housing crisis most severely impacts the lowest-income and most marginalized households, NLIHC urged HUD to identify in its strategic plan ways to increase and better target federal housing resources to serve extremely low-income households.
In response to HUD’s continued focus on sustainability, NLIHC requested that the department center the needs of the country’s lowest-income and most marginalized people in its Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) and Community Development Block Grant-Mitigation (CDBG-MIT) programs. In particular, the letter asked HUD to endorse the “Reforming Disaster Recovery Act” introduced by Senators Brian Schatz (D-HI) and Susan Collins (R-ME) to permanently authorize the programs and urged the department to commit to activating the Disaster Housing Assistance Program (DHAP) after every major disaster to provide the longer-term housing assistance, services, and case management needed to help the lowest-income survivors recover.
Read the full letter here.