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COVER STORY
IN THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE
The House Is Up For Trump, Biden take wildly divergent approaches to housing policy. BY LEW SICHELMAN | NATIONAL MORTGAGE PROFESSIONAL CONTRIBUTING WRITER
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ext month’s presidential elections likely will swing on any number of issues – the virus, abortion, immigration, race relations, law and order, just to name a few. But how the candidates stack up on housing probably isn’t one of them. Still, since housing is how you make your living, either as a lender or in one of the many ancillary disciplines that feed upon the buying and selling of property, it should be of at least some import as to where the incumbent and the challenger stand. Unfortunately, while Joe Biden’s plans for housing is pages long and covers practically the entire
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waterfront, Donald Trump’s plank is all but bereft. In fact, the Republicans have no platform this year. But no matter, the topic hardly drew a mention from the GOP in 2016. However, the Administration showed its contempt for fair housing this summer when it swept back an Obama-era rule that required municipalities to show they were taking steps to eliminate barriers to fair housing in order to receive federal funds. After the initial furor over the rollback died down, the President and his Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Ben Carson, penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in
| NATIONAL MORTGAGE PROFESSIONAL MAGAZINE
which they touted the move, accusing Democrats of planning to “remake the suburbs in their image so they resemble the dysfunctional cities they now govern.” “We won’t let them export their failures to America’s suburbs,” they wrote. “We will save our cities, from which these terrible policies have come, and we will save our suburbs.”
WOOING HOUSEWIVES But prior to that editorial, Trump, perhaps showing his true colors, tweeted this: “The ‘suburban housewife’ will be voting for me. They want safety & are thrilled that I ended the long running program where low-
