The city of Los Angeles only just started to get the ball rolling on its efforts to solve its homelessness crisis when President Donald Trump revealed his budget proposal that would severely cut costs for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
To be exact, Trump’s proposed budget for the 2018 fiscal year includes a $6.2 billion cut to HUD.
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times by Gale Holland, the proposed budget cuts into federal rent subsidies that had been expected to cover operating costs for thousands of new housing units.
From the article:
Limitations built into the spending plan for the Department of Housing and Urban Development would force the loss of 200,000 vouchers from the federal Section 8 program, 4,000 to 5,000 of them in the city of Los Angeles, officials estimated.
Douglas Guthrie, president and chief executive of the city’s housing authority, said the cuts would eliminate all new vouchers and probably rescind some from families already on the Section 8 rolls.
“There are a lot of moving parts, none of them good,” Guthrie said.
The concerns echo recent comments from former HUD secretary Julián Castro, who led HUD from 2014 to 2017 under former President Barack Obama.
In an exclusive interview with HousingWire, Castro said the budget will “severely limit the ability of local communities and states to meet the needs of the middle class and poor when it comes to housing.”
