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38 WHERE HUD BUDGET CUTS WILL HIT THE HARDEST President Trump released his "America First" 2018 budget blueprint in March, which, if passed, would reduce spending in nearly every federal department, including e Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). e President's plan is to cut $6 billion from HUD, 13 percent of the department's budget. e question is, who could feel this affect the most? Two HUD programs will be hit particularly hard: e Community Development Block Program (CDBG), and the Section Eight rental assistance program. Section Eight would receive a $3 billion cut, while CDBG is slated to be eliminated entirely. e Federal Government has spent more than $150 billion on the CDBG program since its inception in 1974. e reasoning behind the cut is that the program is not well-targeted to the poorest populations and has not yielded results. Trulia found that the Section Eight cut would disproportionately affect young, urban, African-American households. Using data from the 2016 CPS Annual Social and Economic Supplement, Trulia found that people under the age of 35 make up nearly 60 percent of voucher holders under Section Eight programs even though they make up just 48 percent of the population. Additionally, 49 percent of voucher holders are white, while 41 percent of are African-American, even though African Americans only make up about 13 percent of the population. African-Americans are vastly overrepresented as a share of those receiving federal rental assistance. On top of this, Trulia found that the majority of those receiving Section Eight assistance live in urban city centers. Only 28 percent of the population lives in city centers, yet 44 percent of voucher holders live in these areas. Other HUD programs slated to be cut are the HOME Investment Partnerships Program, Choice Neighborhoods, and the Self-help Homeownership Opportunity Program, a total savings of $1.1 billion. CORELOGIC LOOKS BACK AT CRISIS CLIMATE CoreLogic released a report titled "United States Residential Foreclosure Crisis: Ten Years Later" to examine how the country handled and recovered from the foreclosure crisis in the years since. e report, released in March, also gave background information from the early 2000s leading into the crisis. e foreclosure crisis began in 2007, and peaked in September 2010. In that month alone, approximately 120,000 homes entered foreclosure. Economists tend to mark the bankruptcy of two Bear Stearns subprime funds in June 2007 as the beginning of the crisis, followed by a worsening crisis when Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy in September 2008. In 2009, unemployment peaked as well, adding to the crisis. "e country experienced a wild ride in the mortgage market between 2008 and 2012, with the foreclosure peak occurring in 2010," said Dr. Frank Nothaft, Chief Economist for CoreLogic. "As we look back over 10 years of the foreclosure crisis, we cannot ignore the connection between jobs and homeownership. A healthy economy is driven by jobs coupled with consumer confidence that usually leads to homeownership." More than 1 million foreclosures occurred in in 2010 when the crisis peaked. Following this peak, foreclosures began to steadily decline year by year, dropping by 100,000 per year through 2016. By state, Florida experienced the highest number of foreclosures during the crisis, with 12.5 percent of homes in the foreclosure process in June 2011. In addition to foreclosures, CoreLogic reported the number of mortgages in serious delinquency, or more than 30 days past due, during the housing crisis. At the end of 2016, 1 million mortgages—2.6 percent of homes with a mortgage—were in serious delinquency. Serious delinquency had previously peaked in January 2010 at 3.7 million—8.6 percent—of homes with a mortgage in delinquency. Currently, 385,748 completed foreclosures are in effect, below the 2010 peak of 1,178,234, and the number is expected to continue to fall. In 2013, as the market began its repair, then CEO and President of CoreLogic Anand Nallathambi stated, "e housing market is clearly on the mend, but we expect the ultimate conclusion of the present housing cycle to be another several years away."

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