"Onerous" rules that multiplied during the Obama administration make it difficult to provide affordable housing for those who need it, but work is being done to roll them back, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson said Friday.
"The Affirmative Fair Housing rule is part of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and a few sentences that simply say that if you're receiving federal money, you have an obligation to attempt to further fair housing," Carson told Fox Business' Stuart Varney. "The previous administration had taken those few sentences and multiplied them into hundreds of pages of onerous regulations."
As a result, housing authorities were complaining that the process was far too complex, said Carson.
"Why is there lack of affordable housing?" asked Carson. "Because we have the restrictive zoning regulations based on archaic thinking. The National Multi Housing Council has said that over 30 percent of the cost of multifamily housing is regulations. So if we now encourage the municipalities that are receiving HUD funding to actually tackle those zoning and regulatory barriers, then we can actually create fair housing."
In addition, HUD finally has a chief financial officer, Irv Dennis, after going for over eight years without such an official, said Carson.
"He came from Ernst & Young," said Carson. "He looked at our books and said we would have never taken you on as a client. He's got us now and is making the regulatory changes to run this thing like a business and not a bureaucracy."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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