City Lab, October 22, 2018: What HUD sees
This week, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development launched a new social experiment called Humans of HUD. It’s about what you’d expect, if you were at all inclined to guess that the federal government was getting into the photoblog game. This new HUD.gov site features portraits of individuals (these would be the humans) alongside testimonials about their experience with housing aid (that’s HUD).
“Humans of HUD exhibits the best part of our agency—the people we serve through our programs, grants and initiatives,” said HUD Secretary Ben Carson, in a statement.
Sarah Blackwood, author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in Nineteenth-Century America, says that Humans of HUD neatly illustrates two historical and cultural functions of portraiture. On the one hand, there’s “the gauzy humanist ideal that portraits capture and reflect something real and deep about the people being portrayed”—a factor that may account for Humans of New York’s 8.2 million Instagram followers. The other component, Blackwood says, is “the bureaucratic function of portraiture, which is about tracking and identifying certain groups and types.”
On its surface, Humans of HUD celebrates the department’s success stories. These posts have a common pitch. Self-sufficiency—a watchword at HUD under the Trump administration—is one of the four navigational categories on the site (alongside veterans, homelessness, and Housing Choice Vouchers). In his public appearances, Carson has elevated self-sufficiency as a pillar of HUD’s work.
There’s nothing wrong with self-sufficiency, of course, or with the Family Self Sufficiency program, which has helped households receiving subsidized housing or rental assistance to find a better financial footing in life for more than 25 years. But Carson often frames other changes and developments at HUD in terms of self-sufficiency, namely the work requirements and rent hikes that he hopes to institute for recipients of housing aid. The secretary is working to dismantle rules on disparate impact and fair housing, standards that protect minority homeowners and renters and push the nation to desegregate. That’s where things get problematic for Humans of HUD, both in terms of what stories the department is telling and what stories it isn’t.
What’s human about Humans of HUD is right there to see. What’s political about Humans of HUD is readily apparent, too. By sharing sterling stories of perseverance, the department is building a narrative of upward mobility. In reality, the affordable housing crisis has only deepened since the Great Recession. Yet the Trump administration has proposed drastic cuts to HUD’s budget. Carson is pursuing legislative changes that would raise barriers to aid for vulnerable families. And if the GOP still holds Congress after the midterms, Republicans may turn to slashing social spending to offset the soaring deficits exacerbated by their tax cuts. Housing aid is critical for millions of poor households, and these programs work. But the view that the level of spending is sufficient or sustainable is a narrow fiction.
Humans of HUD is obviously lifting a page from Humans of New York. But they work in slightly different ways. HUD followers who mash the like button don’t then consider themselves recipients of housing aid, after all. But they might feel better about the notion of self-sufficiency after reading a personal appeal underneath a photo of a person who checks out as deserving. It’s a stream of sunny portraits that might be capable of convincing casual followers that self-sufficiency is working.
