HUD Lays Out Its New 4-Year Strategy

On March 28, HUD released its strategic plan for fiscal years 2022–2026. This document covers the department’s objectives and priorities for the next four years as well as its strategies for assessing and achieving those objectives.

According to the plan, HUD’s overarching goal is to pursue transformative housing and community-building policy and programs. The department will ensure it centers its focus on people and their lived experiences, with policy and programs that are equity-focused, anti-discriminatory, and that advance housing justice so that everyone has an affordable, healthy place to live.

In her introductory remarks, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge emphasized the nation’s current affordable housing landscape. “We deliver this strategic plan at a pivotal moment. The United States is grappling with a crisis in affordable housing, made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, it is harder to find an affordable home in America than at any point since the 2008 financial crisis,” Fudge stated.

In the plan, HUD lays out five overarching strategic goals: (1) supporting underserved communities; (2) ensuring access to and increasing the production of affordable housing; (3) promoting homeownership; (4) advancing sustainable communities; and (5) strengthening HUD’s internal capacity.

As part of the ensuring access to affordable housing goal, HUD is seeking to improve rental assistance. Specifically, by Sept. 30, 2023, HUD intends to maximize the reach of its rental assistance programs by increasing the occupancy rates to 96 percent in the Public and Multifamily Housing programs and the budget utilization rate to 100 percent in the Housing Choice Voucher program. HUD also plans on working with PHAs to increase voucher utilization rates, including providing toolkits for PHAs on running voucher mobility programs and strengthening incentives for PHAs to expand households’ housing options.

In addition, to maximize the reach of HUD’s rental assistance programs to assist as many households as possible, HUD will focus on efforts to ensure housing tied to HUD rental assistance is consistently high quality, healthy, and safe. HUD will seek to eliminate the backlog in Public and Multifamily Housing inspections that have accrued since the beginning of the pandemic. HUD will also work to create new accountability procedures to hold property owners participating in HUD programs accountable for poor living conditions and modernize its information technology systems to better track voucher utilization and occupancy rates in HUD-assisted housing.

To further HUD’s strategic goal to advance sustainable communities, HUD plans to strengthen environmental justice by reducing exposure to health risks, environmental hazards, and substandard housing, especially for low-income households and communities of color. HUD is recognizing the threat to health and safety posed by lead-based paint, radon, and other environmental hazards. It has set a goal of “making an additional 20,000 units of at-risk housing units healthy and lead-safe” by the end of September 2023. HUD will work with other federal agencies to launch a whole-of-government approach to addressing lead hazards, including its new initiative RECLAIM, an interagency pilot program to support community-driven efforts to revitalize distressed neighborhoods located near hazardous waste sites. HUD also intends to develop department-wide and program-specific policies to reduce residents’ exposure to radon.