As far as federal agencies go, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development doesn't get a ton of attention in the news. It makes sense then that Donald Trump's pick to head it, former Trump administration official and former Texas state lawmaker Scott Turner, didn't attract the same level of scrutiny as many of the president-elect's other head-turning picks.
But Turner's background underscores how poor of a choice he is for an agency tasked with keeping many of America's most vulnerable people housed. Turner's hard-line right-wing positions on housing policy foreshadow how he's likely to undermine the purpose of the agency he's been picked to head. It's a reminder of how Trump's campaign promises to address cost of living grievances were a charade.
Turner's record shows a commitment to oblique and often ineffective programs to help the poor.
The point of HUD is to help Americans meet their housing needs through, among other things, rental assistance for low-income households, mortgage insurance and combating housing discrimination. Its very premise is that the government has a serious role to play in the housing market. But Turner's record shows a commitment to oblique and often ineffective programs to help the poor and, in some cases, outright opposition to assisting them.
As head of Trump’s White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council during Trump's first term, Turner advocated for “opportunity zones,” a concept ostensibly designed to offer tax breaks for investment in select low-income communities under Trump's 2017 tax law. But this group failed at that goal in practice: Low-income areas were largely neglected while financially well-off areas received investment, in part because politically connected players steered "opportunity zone" designations and investment to areas that benefited their own pocketbooks. As PBS reported in 2021, “There are 8,764 Opportunity Zones across the country. In 2019, 84 percent of the Opportunity Zones got no money at all, and half the money went to the best-off 1 percent of zones.” (Notably, economically flourishing downtown Portland, Oregon, was designated an opportunity zone, and a Ritz Carlton complex was among the beneficiaries.) None of this is encouraging as far as Turner taking a position designed to help people in need.
And reporting from ProPublica shows that Turner took positions that hurt people in need on housing policy during two terms as a member of the Texas House of Representatives in the 2010s:
Turner supported a bill ensuring landlords could refuse apartments to applicants because they received federal housing assistance. He opposed a bill to expand affordable rental housing. He voted against funding public-private partnerships to support the homeless and against two bills that called merely to study homelessness among young people and veterans.
As ill-advised as this pick may be, it also makes a lot of sense. Turner’s instincts on housing align with the directives of Project 2025, the right-wing policy program and personnel database that Trump unconvincingly disavowed on the campaign trail and has since returned to for making hires. As ProPublica reports, among other things, Project 2025 calls for "cutting funding for affordable housing, repealing regulations that fight housing discrimination, increasing work requirements and adding time limits for rental assistance and eliminating anti-homelessness policies."
A big part of why Trump won the White House again is because of widespread anger over inflation and the general sense that basic costs of living are too high. From what we can see, Trump's federal housing policy program will only make that problem worse.
