San Antonio’s housing authority plans to “play defense” with new HUD administration

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Housing industry stakeholders and affordability advocates across the country are waiting to see how Republican President-elect Donald Trump’s second administration will impact housing production and subsidy programs over the next four years.

Trump’s nomination of former two-term Texas state Rep. Scott Turner to lead the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) may offer a glimpse of what may come, but former HUD Secretary and former San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros offered some advice to the community.

“Let’s not get overly exercised until we know exactly what they’re going to do,” Cisneros, who was appointed to HUD by former Democratic President Bill Clinton, told the San Antonio Report. “Let’s not get overly anxious even when they state certain things, because there are still checks and balances in the system.

“The Congress, while it is Republican, it’s very close, and so they’re not going to give the administration everything it wants,” he added.

While some affordable housing advocates fear Trump will use a right-wing think tank’s policy proposal called Project 2025 to dismantle HUD, others point to an executive order Trump signed in 2021 for “Eliminating Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing: Federal, State, Local and Tribal Opportunities” as a more accurate policy blueprint. It outlines proposals to deregulate housing production, including environmental review regulations and consolidating housing assistance programs.

Turner is a former professional football player who grew up in a Dallas suburb. He is an associate pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano and chair of the Center for Education Opportunity at the right-wing think tank America First Policy Institute. The institute was connected to Trump’s campaign for a second presidential campaign.

Trump has a professional background in residential development and Turner led the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council that focused on HUD’s “Opportunity Zones” that use federal tax incentives to attract investment in economically depressed areas, Cisneros noted.

“For all those reasons, there’s reason to be hopeful that they’re at least knowledgeable, and that’s an important first step,” he said. “I think there’s always the opportunity to … explain how serious the problem is and we explain what our options are [to] solving it.”

Nationwide, HUD houses more than 4.3 million low-income families through public housing, vouchers and other rental subsidies by funding thousands of local housing authorities like San Antonio’s Opportunity Home. The federal agency also oversees fair housing laws.

Under the leadership of Trump’s first HUD secretary, Ben Carson, drastic cuts or eliminations were proposed for housing programs including vouchers, the Public Housing Operating Fund, Community Development Block Grants, the Public Housing Capital Fund, HOME Grants, housing vouchers for veterans, housing block grants for Native Americans and the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative among others.

Carson, an evangelical Christian, also proposed rolling back the Equal Access Rule, which protects LGBQT people from being turned away at homeless shelters.

“We’re just expecting more of what we saw in the last administration” in terms of discrimination protections, said Katie Wilson, executive director of Close to Home, the nonprofit agency that coordinates funding for programs designed to end homelessness in Bexar County.

Wilson is optimistic that funding for the local homelessness response system is safe.

“Our model has a lot of bipartisan support because there’s so much local monitoring and control,” she said. “We were just renewed for a two-year cycle of [federal] funding.”

While the previous Congress blocked most of Carson’s proposals, others aren’t optimistic the new one will push back against an emboldened Trump administration.

Michael Reyes, Opportunity Home’s acting president and CEO, said there isn’t yet a solid coalition of members of the current Congress that champions affordable housing. While attending a meeting of the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials last month, a strategy became clear to him.

“Moving forward, beginning January 20th, we are going to play defense versus offense,” said Reyes, referencing Trump’s inauguration date. “Traditionally, we play political offense and try to request additional funding for capital [and] funding for the backlog of maintenance. … [Now the goal is to] just defend what we already have and cross our fingers that there won’t be additional decreases across the board.”

The National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials has released a “Presidential Transition Report” as a recommendation guide for officials to use as they talk to lawmakers in the coming years. It emphasizes the importance of strengthening rental assistance programs, preserving existing affordable units and increasing the supply of affordable housing — not unlike San Antonio’s housing affordability plan.

Reyes said Opportunity Home and other affordable housing advocates should start to organize a broad educational campaign for members of Congress who may not understand the impact that cuts could have on their constituents.

“Right now, we’re focused on the Texas Legislature, but we’ll also be focused on what we take to Washington,” he said. “This is not a time to dig into the weeds with local policy divisions, this is the time to speak as one voice. … We have bigger fish to fry here.”

Some of Trump’s other policies outside of HUD could also impact housing affordability, including mass deportations (about a third of construction workers in the U.S. are immigrants) and tariffs that could increase construction costs.

But state and local governments also have a role to play in housing affordability, Cisneros said, where “we have to rethink” everything from zoning to parking requirements to building codes.

Much of that work is already underway in San Antonio thanks to the Strategic Housing Implementation Plan, which is supported by a $150 million bond, and the local Housing Commission’s Removing Barriers to Affordable Housing Subcommittee, Cisneros noted.

He hopes that more Americans will start to appreciate that it’s in their own interest to ensure their neighbors are housed.

“All the social goals we have for our society — whether it’s better jobs, better incomes, better education, better health — they all are predicated on people having a decent place to live,” he said. “You cannot have a place for your children to study and get ahead in school if they don’t have a stable home.”