Trump Pick for Housing Agency Chief Has Opposed Efforts to Aid the Poor: Propublica. (Ebenezer)

Daily Kos, Dec. 24, 2024. PHOTO: Scott Turner with Trump, the White House on April 17, 2019.

As HUD secretary, Scott Turner would oversee billions in housing aid, but as a Texas state legislator he voted against protections for poor tenants and has called government assistance “one of the most destructive things for the family.” By Jesse Coburn, Andy Kroll, ProPublica
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As Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Scott Turner may soon oversee the nation’s efforts to build affordable apartments, protect poor tenants and aid the homeless. As a lawmaker in the Texas House of Representatives, Turner voted against those very initiatives.

Turner supported a bill ensuring landlords could refuse apartments to applicants because they received federal housing assistance. He opposed a bill to expand affordable rental housing. He voted against funding public-private partnerships to support the homeless and against two bills that called merely to study homelessness among young people and veterans.

Behind those votes lay a deep-seated skepticism about the value of government efforts to alleviate poverty, a skepticism that Turner has voiced again and again. He has called welfare “dangerous, harmful” and “one of the most destructive things for the family.” When one interviewer said receiving government assistance was keeping recipients in “bondage” of “a worse form to find oneself in than slavery,” Turner agreed.

Such views would seemingly place Turner at odds with the core work of HUD, a sprawling federal agency that serves as a backstop against homelessness for millions of the nation’s poor, elderly and disabled. With an annual discretionary budget of $72 billion, the department provides rental assistance to 2 million families, oversees the country’s 800,000 public housing units, fights housing discrimination and segregation and provides support to the nation’s 650,000 homeless.

If Turner’s record indicates how he will direct the agency’s agenda, it is those clinging to the bottom of the housing market who have the most to lose, researchers and advocates said...
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/12/24/2293571/-Trump-s-pick-for-housing-agency-chief-has-opposed-efforts-to-aid-the-poor

Passages from Charles Dickens "A Christmas Carol" seem particularly relevant right now...

-- "At this festive season of the year, Mr Scrooge, ... it is more than usually desirable that we should make some slight provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir."

Scrooge-"Are there no prisons?" "Plenty of prisons..." Scrooge-"And the Union workhouses." . "Are they still in operation?" "Both very busy, sir..." "Those who are badly off must go there." "Many can't go there; and many would rather die." Scrooge- "If they would rather die," "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population." --