Last week The Donald’s Housing Secretary Ben Carson swung through Dallas as part of a broader national “listening tour.” And, as you might expect, the visit elicited some strong reactions. Over on the Dallas Observer website, Jim Schutze frames Carson’s time in town within the context of Dallas’ ongoing struggle to find out what happened to some $54 million in HUD funding that Dallas received but city hall can’t figure out where it went.
Dallas County Schools trustee and district 6 Dallas City Council candidate Omar Narvaez also weighed in, speculating that the rushed and quieted nature of Carson’s tour is an effort to keep a lid on the impact Trump’s budget cuts to the federal housing program if it is passed:
Secretary Carson may be ducking a lot of public events, for example, so that he doesn’t have to look over 13,000 residents in the eye. That’s how many Texas families stand to lose vouchers that help provide stable homes and a chance to climb that ladder of opportunity. Like with most cruel and mindless policies emanating from the Trump administration, this would disproportionately impact those who can least afford it, and cost all of us much more in the long-run.
Narvaez wrote about the Carson visit on a new website called CarsonWatch.org. City Lab reports that the website was started by three housing and justice organizations — the Poverty & Race Research Action Council, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and PolicyLink — and it may represent the first time in which an entire watchdog site has been launched to follow the actions of a single cabinet member:
So far, CarsonWatch has been highlighting moments of hypocrisy from the listening tour, such as when Secretary Carson “praise[d] effective HUD programs during his visits that the Trump budget proposes to eliminate with his consent.” Those discrepancies have not been hard to spot. On March 16, Carson appeared with Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan in a photo-op for a ribbon cutting for a senior living center. As Next City notes, more than 70 percent of the funding that led to this development originated with HUD—funds that would disappear from Trump’s budget.
