As Donald Trump’s nominee to run the U.S. Division of Housing and City Growth, Scott Turner might quickly oversee the nation’s efforts to construct reasonably priced flats, defend poor tenants and help the homeless. As a lawmaker within the Texas Home of Representatives, Turner voted in opposition to these very initiatives.
Turner supported a bill making certain landlords may refuse flats to candidates as a result of they acquired federal housing help. He opposed a bill to develop reasonably priced rental housing. He voted against funding public-private partnerships to help the homeless and against two bills that called merely to check homelessness amongst younger individuals and veterans.
Behind these votes lay a deep-seated skepticism in regards to the worth of presidency efforts to alleviate poverty, a skepticism that Turner has voiced many times. He has called welfare “harmful, dangerous” and “one of the damaging issues for the household.” When one interviewer stated receiving authorities help was maintaining recipients in “bondage” of “a worse type 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 company that serves as a backstop in opposition to homelessness for tens of millions of the nation’s poor, aged and disabled. With an annual discretionary price range of $72 billion, the division supplies rental help to 2 million households, oversees the nation’s 800,000 public housing models, fights housing discrimination and segregation and supplies help to the nation’s 650,000 homeless. If Turner’s report signifies how he’ll direct the company’s agenda, it’s these clinging to the underside of the housing market who’ve probably the most to lose, researchers and advocates stated.
“It simply doesn’t appear to me like that is somebody who’s in any respect aligned with what the values of that company needs to be,” stated Cea Weaver, director of the advocacy group Housing Justice for All. “It’s a deregulatory agenda, and it’s an anti-poor individuals agenda.”
Shamus Curler, govt director of the Nationwide Housing Legislation Challenge, stated Turner’s views, if translated into coverage, may enhance homelessness. “If, at a elementary degree, you imagine that folks getting help with their lease once they’re very poor and struggling, for those who assume that’s truly dependence and a nasty factor, you’re going to attempt to undermine these applications,” he stated.
One former colleague provided a extra optimistic view of Turner’s stewardship of HUD. “My sense of him is he’ll attempt to assist individuals,” stated Richard Peña Raymond, a Democratic Texas Home member who served on a committee with Turner. “I do assume he’ll do job.”
Turner didn’t reply to detailed questions. A spokesperson for the nominee stated: “In fact ProPublica would try to paint a unfavorable image of Mr. Turner earlier than he’s even given the chance to testify. We’d anticipate nothing much less from a publication that solely serves as a liberal mouthpiece.”
The Trump transition crew and HUD didn’t reply to requests for remark. Trump’s announcement of Turner’s nomination praised him for “serving to lead an Unprecedented Effort that Remodeled our Nation’s most distressed communities” as head of a White Home council that promoted alternative zones, a plan to spur funding in low-income neighborhoods by providing beneficiant tax breaks, throughout Trump’s first administration. “Below Scott’s management,” the announcement went on, “Alternative Zones acquired over $50 Billion {Dollars} in Non-public Funding!”
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Turner is hardly the one Trump cupboard nominee to show skepticism or outright hostility towards the work of companies they could lead. However, whereas different nominees have confronted intense scrutiny in current weeks, Turner has attracted little public consideration and stated even much less about his intentions, past vowing to “deliver much-needed change” to HUD, as he wrote on Fb final month. ProPublica pieced collectively his views on housing via a evaluate of legislative information and of Turner’s public speeches, podcast appearances and sermons on the Plano, Texas, megachurch the place he’s a pastor.
A attainable HUD agenda for Turner might be present in Challenge 2025, the Heritage Basis’s suggestions for a conservative presidential administration. The report requires chopping funding for reasonably priced housing, repealing laws that battle housing discrimination, growing work necessities and including closing dates for rental help and eliminating anti-homelessness insurance policies, amongst different adjustments. The Challenge 2025 chapter on HUD lists Ben Carson, the division secretary in the course of the first Trump administration and a mentor to Turner, as its writer. Carson, as secretary, was concerned in efforts to end an anti-segregation rule, add work requirements for housing help and make it more durable to prove housing discrimination.
Turner’s views seem like deeply rooted in his upbringing exterior Dallas, the place he was, as he later put it, “a younger child from a damaged dwelling, from a poor household.” His mother and father’ relationship was “full of violence, home violence, abuse, plenty of anger [and] alcohol.” Years later, as a legislator, Turner said that his sister had been “on state help and wasn’t feeding [Turner’s] nephew whereas she was on medication.” (ProPublica was unable to find Turner’s sister for remark.)
Soccer proved an escape. Turner acquired a scholarship to play for the College of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, after which he went on to an almost decadelong profession within the Nationwide Soccer League. He started transitioning into politics whereas nonetheless within the league, interning for California Rep. Duncan L. Hunter. After an unsuccessful run for a California congressional seat in 2006, Turner moved again to Texas and was elected in 2012 to the state Home of Representatives, the place he served for 4 years.
There, Turner solidified his place as a deeply conservative member against many authorities interventions into the housing market, legislative information present. He voted against supporting foreclosures prevention applications. He opposed legislation to assist public housing authorities exchange or rehabilitate their property (though he voted for a minor expansion of that bill two years later). He additionally sought to require drug testing for poor households making use of for presidency help, the Houston Chronicle reported on the time. Turner did help some modest housing help measures, comparable to payments serving to housing developments for seniors and in rural areas search low-income housing tax credit.
Throughout his time in workplace, Turner was the lead writer of 17 substantive payments. None had been associated to housing, and none of them turned legislation.
“He’s a really good man,” however “he didn’t actually make a lot of a legislative impression,” stated a former high-ranking Republican Texas lawmaker, who requested anonymity to talk candidly a couple of former colleague. “He didn’t go away a deep footprint.”
That didn’t cease Turner, nonetheless, from mounting an audacious bid for the Home speakership, a transfer reportedly backed by Tim Dunn, a West Texas pastor and oil billionaire who has used his fortune to push the state Legislature far to the right. Turner’s speaker marketing campaign failed, but it surely helped solidify his place inside Texas’ deep-red Christian political milieu, the place he has remained ever since.
Turner is an affiliate pastor at Prestonwood Baptist Church, a political power in Texas that has counted quite a few statewide elected officers as congregants. Jack Graham, the church’s senior pastor, prayed over Trump at an occasion in October and praised his electoral victory from the pulpit in November. Turner’s skepticism about authorities help has discovered its manner into his sermons there, the place he has derided the “perverse incentives created by the federal government and the welfare system, which in flip creates an epidemic of fatherlessness in our nation.”
Turner or his political staffers additionally used marketing campaign cash to attend three conferences held by WallBuilders, a company that seeks “to disclose the historic truths” in regards to the “Christian basis of our nation,” marketing campaign finance information present. In 2016, Turner gave a $10,000 reward to WallBuilders from his marketing campaign account.
Turner’s allies on the Christian far proper additionally embody Ziklag, a secretive community of ultrawealthy Christian households and spiritual influencers that help Trump. As ProPublica reported, Ziklag has raised tens of millions of {dollars} as half of a bigger mission to assist Christian leaders “take dominion” over key areas of American society, from training and enterprise to media and authorities. This 12 months, Ziklag spent tens of millions of {dollars} to mobilize Republican-leaning voters in swing states regardless of being a tax-exempt charity that isn’t allowed to intervene in politics. (A lawyer for Ziklag beforehand instructed ProPublica that the group doesn’t endorse candidates for political workplace.)
In June 2019, Turner and his spouse, Robin, attended a personal Ziklag convention on the Broadmoor luxurious resort in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in line with images of the occasion posted by an attendee. On the time, Turner was working within the first Trump administration as govt director of the White Home Alternative and Revitalization Council, the place he served as a public salesman for the chance zones initiative. Turner has praised the program as a manner to enhance neighborhoods with excessive poverty and unemployment charges. Previous reporting by ProPublica discovered that this system was exploited by rich, politically related buyers, which drew scrutiny from members of Congress.
Inside paperwork obtained by ProPublica and Documented present that Ziklag members sought to reap the benefits of this system; in Could 2019, Ziklag stated in one in all its newsletters that members of the group had met with three administration officers about alternative zones. “The administration knowledgeable the group they’re in a state of listening and studying about this system,” the doc reads. “Ziklaggers are exploring extra avenues to make an influence on this system shifting ahead.”
After leaving the Trump administration, Turner started a nonprofit that promotes “Christ-centered studying enhancement applications” for youngsters and helps individuals get driver’s licenses. He additionally turned “chief visionary officer” on the multifamily housing developer JPI.
Now, if confirmed, Turner shall be answerable for an company with some 10,000 workers at a vital time. “We’re coping with a fairly horrible housing disaster all throughout the nation,” stated Curler, of the Nationwide Housing Legislation Challenge. HUD shall be “important to any effort” to resolve it.
Dec. 24, 2024: This story initially misidentified the member of Congress for whom Scott Turner interned. It was Rep. Duncan L. Hunter, not his son, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter.
Jesse Coburn covers cities, housing and transportation for ProPublica. He’s inquisitive about how the second Trump administration will reshape federal coverage in these areas, significantly on the Division of Housing and City Growth and the Division of Transportation. In case you work for a kind of companies or are affected by their work, he’d like to listen to from you. You’ll be able to electronic mail him at [email protected], or attain him through telephone, Sign or WhatsApp at 917-239-6642. His mailing handle is: Jesse Coburn, ProPublica, 155 sixth Avenue, thirteenth Ground, New York, NY 10013.