While Carson was on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University medical school, located in one of the nation’s poorest and most troubled big cities, he took little interest in urban issues. In his ill-fated primary campaign, he railed against “social engineering,” a swipe at efforts to open housing in mostly well-to-do, overwhelmingly white communities to minority home buyers and renters.
.. Trump’s selection of Carson echoes Ronald Reagan’s choice of Samuel Pierce as his HUD secretary. Like Trump, Reagan had lashed out against inner cities and pledged to slash social spending. Like Trump’s supporters, the majority of Reagan’s voters did not live in cities. And like Trump, he had little support among African Americans. But like Trump, Reagan wanted a black face in a high place for a little legitimacy in a post-civil-rights-movement White House. And, like Trump, Reagan had pledged to loosen housing and financial regulations.
.. HUD was an easy target for Reagan, as it is for Trump. It had been created by Lyndon B. Johnson at the peak of his Great Society to meet the huge demand for affordable housing in American cities and to grapple with the ravages of mass suburbanization, nearly complete racial segregation and capital flight from cities, all of which had been heavily bankrolled by the federal government.
.. In 1968, HUD took on the additional responsibility of “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” the gargantuan task of undoing decades of discriminatory real estate and home-lending practices.
.. None of these missions was popular: Republicans criticized HUD as a meddling “big government” agency. Southern Democrats railed against its civil rights goals. And suburban whites fiercely resisted even modest efforts to open the housing market to racial minorities.
.. the department became a bastion of crony capitalism, particularly under Republican presidents.
.. real estate speculators and politically connected developers, who sold shabby houses to desperate buyers at above-market prices, backed by inflated appraisals
.. One of Pierce’s assistant secretaries resigned when it came out that HUD staffers had helped him type and proofread his book, “Privatizing the Public Sector.”
.. Staffers directed money to Republican-connected lawyers, consulting firms and developers. One of the dozens swept up in the resulting investigations by federal prosecutors and Congress was Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort , who had successfully lobbied for about $43 million in federal subsidies for a shabby New Jersey housing complex. He received $326,000 in fees
.. Like Pierce, Carson is shaping up to be a token black Cabinet member. Trump has not appointed any other black officials so far
.. We don’t know much yet about how Carson will run HUD, but his lack of experience with urban policy, his bromides about socialist planning, his indifference to fair housing and his calls for individual boot-strapping don’t bode well for the future of metropolitan America. And in a climate of privatization and deregulation, championed by the country’s new real estate developer in chief, Carson’s inexperience could be a serious liability.