February 20, 2024
The left promises that the government’s vast resources can alleviate poverty through wealth redistribution and targeted services. In fact, the government is slow, inefficient, non-responsive, vulnerable to corruption, and dismissive of human nature. Christopher Bourne had a front-row seat to all these problems when he worked with Dr. Ben Carson at HUD during President Trump’s administration. When he left HUD, he took those lessons to the private sector, and, as I learned in conversation with him, what he’s doing is both fascinating and promising.
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Congress created the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1965 as part of the “Great Society” “War on Poverty.” Its core mission was to ensure housing for low-income Americans or those affected by natural disasters. Today, HUD identifies its areas of responsibility as housing, fairness, rental assistance, and climate policy.
When Trump appointed Dr. Carson as HUD Secretary, Mr. Bourne, a former Marine officer, went with Dr. Carson to work in HUD’s Office of Policy, Development and Research. Dr. Carson and Mr. Bourne immediately recognized that HUD was struggling to achieve its core mission: While its system is funded to support about 9.5 to 10 million people, there were about 40 million people eligible for HUD assistance. All this was worsened by a rash of natural disasters in late 2017 and early 2018.
Dr. Carson’s goal was to create new ways for HUD to operate that would more swiftly move more people into housing and, eventually, off government rolls. To that end, he established the Office of Innovation and put Mr. Bourne in charge.
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Mr. Bourne quickly discovered that a serious problem was that there weren’t enough landlords lining up to take advantage of the Housing Choice Voucher program. Considering that vouchers meant that landlords were guaranteed rent payment, their unwillingness to step up was peculiar. A little research revealed something counterintuitive.
Contrary to most assumptions, massive, faceless corporations aren’t HUD’s only housing providers. Instead, about half of HUD’s housing comes from small businesses and retirees offering six to ten units. Many of these landlords have experienced poverty themselves and are genuinely dedicated to providing low-income housing. And yet, they were dropping out of the program.
Mr. Bourne’s investigation revealed they were reluctant to participate because HUD’s processes and procedures are so laborious, convoluted, and time-consuming that even the vouchers couldn’t make up for lost profits. In the private sector, when a property is repaired and inspected between tenants, that process can take a few days. Under HUD’s aegis, though, it sometimes took up to three months to get a HUD employee out to approve a property for new tenants, during which time the property sat vacant.
These delays weren’t because HUD employees were slacking off. Instead, it’s the nature of the bureaucracy. As with any institution, HUD is bounded by procedures that are aimed at the worst-case scenarios. The fact that most situations aren’t worst-case scenarios is irrelevant to the bureaucratic machinery. Additionally, inevitable institutional inertia made HUD resistant to change. Ideology matters, too, for HUD’s diagnosis, identified via a study it commissioned, was that landlords were racists who were more interested in discriminating than making money.
HUD beneficiaries were also stymied by HUD’s byzantine processes, which were exacerbated by the problems of poverty. For example, if you have small children and no car, traipsing from one government office to another to put together the pieces of housing, childcare, furniture, and possibly employment is overwhelming, if not impossible.
To meet these problems, Dr. Carson and Mr. Bourne created EnVision centers that still exist at HUD: “EnVision Centers are centralized hubs that provide people with resources and support needed to excel.” If you follow the link, you’ll see that these are brick-and-mortar facilities in locations across the continental U.S. and in Hawaii and Puerto Rico. They put under one roof all the services that are available to people, both providers and recipients, greatly streamlining the process.
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Mr. Bourne also began to look for money and programs within the government to bolster HUD innovations. He discovered that the government has massive bureaucratic duplication and overlap. Several agencies might have funding for the same services, but the services were inefficiently allocated. Mr. Bourne found myriad programs sprinkled throughout the government that could be brought into HUD’s orbit to help people.
Another problem was that many HUD programs hand things to impoverished people without changing the habits of poverty. They’re perpetual bandaids that never heal the wounds. Mr. Bourne’s goal was to use HUD resources to develop the four pillars of self-sufficiency: Economic Empowerment, Educational Advancement, Health and Wellness, and Character and Leadership.
To effectuate these pillars, the government must work with the communities in which people live. Community leaders and resources understand best what specific communities offer and what they need, so they, too, were brought into the EnVision centers.
Mr. Bourne also wanted to use modern technology. One simple use was to streamline property inspections by using a reliable app that would allow a landlord to take pictures of repairs on a property rather than having everyone wait for an available HUD agent to make a physical inspection.
He realized, though, that technology could go much deeper by providing virtual EnVision centers that would bring together services and people. Additionally, through built-in incentives, a well-designed app can change the patterns of poverty.
When you’re dependent on government aid and charity, your life is depersonalized and peppered with broken promises and handouts unanchored to accomplishments. This makes people cynical and destroys ambition. Mr. Bourne imagined an app that would contain a self-directed incentive structure that rewarded both recipients and service providers.
Importantly, an app would also provide data. One of the inefficiencies of government is that it has no idea whether its programs work. Just recently, the city of North Charleston, South Carolina, poured more than a million dollars into a program to end gun violence…and then didn’t track the program’s performance. No one knows whether it worked. The same is true for HUD, where it may take five to seven years before the agency will have a report on whether a program worked. Information so long delayed becomes meaningless. Apps, however, provide real-time information.
To offset the huge expense of developing an app, Mr. Bourne interested private companies in working on app ideas and submitting them to the Census Bureau’s The Opportunity Project contest for urban issues, which awards government money to ideas that enhance data collection. (Yes, that’s a bit creepy, but Mr. Bourne’s work shows it can be used for good.)
The winning project was The EnVision App by Organizational Performance Systems, Inc. (“OPS1”). As an added benefit, OPS1 keeps its IP on the project.
Part of why OPS1 won is because the CEO has a doctorate in human performance. The app is about using behaviorism—gentle nudging and tangible rewards—to keep people moving along, whether it’s landlords to provide housing or recipients to develop the habits of self-sufficiency. Ideally, ambitious people will use it first, and those who see that disciplined ambition pays off will sign up, too.
The app is currently getting its trial in Charleston, South Carolina, which is a medium-sized urban area with a complex infrastructure plus multiple military resources (which is where lots of federal money for anti-poverty programs is tucked away). If the trial works, the EnVision app can expand to other areas.
What’s great about Dr. Carson’s and Mr. Bourne’s idea is that it doesn’t see government as the be-it-and-end-all, a perpetual trickling spigot of goods and services that effectively traps people in a marginal existence, sometimes for generations. Instead, it’s aimed at using technology not only to ease the process of matching the needy with public and private resources but also to wean people off of government and introduce them to self-sufficiency.
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