HUD SDDAs and "High Opportunity Neighborhoods"

---

HUD will use various sources of data, including when you may have so proudly filled out the 2020 Census listing your household income, to designate geographic areas as "Difficult to Develop Areas" or "Small Develop to Difficult Areas." 

A mix of language and narrative will describe the area has having a high cost of housing and high cost of construction. Any taxpayer would understand that an area can be higher in construction costs because of the geography and terrain and associated logistics to perform construction there.

Nonetheless, the higher cost of construction is at least correlated, if not caused by, the the value of the land itself, regardless of the geography and terrain.

So, one must understand what makes land of higher value in this context:  typically high quality schools, low crime, and a general state of attractiveness of that area, as a result of the hard-working Texas communities and their values that live in those areas. 

Thus, HUD will craft language to minimize and gloss over why land is higher in value based upon the aforementioned factors.

And because of the various political goals and objectives, and the political and social beliefs behind them, HUD will incentivize Section 8, low-income housing developers, and "Affordable Housing" developers to target land and property acquisitions in SDDAs. 

HUD, and the special interests lobbyists that maintain the same political goals and objectives, can also describe SDDAs, although they can be designated independent of SDDAs, as "High Opportunity Neighborhoods."  This is a political and social belief in the concept of absorbing someone else's success through "osmosis."  

These programs and goals describe a germane and broad increase in upward social mobility by utilizing taxpayer monies to place lower-income families into higher income neighborhoods, yet fail to provide any real proof of success. Nor, do these programs address that this "osmosis" swings both ways. 

A study by the Texas A&M Department of Economics and published in 2016, describes how Section 8 Voucher programs not only increase crime, but result in an increase in violent crime amongst men in that area.  ("Our results highlight an unintended consequence of the Section 8 Housing Voucher Program – an increase in arrests for violent crime.") 

So, these HUD programs, and the political and social goals and objectives behind them, hand someone else the same caliber of home or community other hard working Texans have spent the fruits of their lives' long labor to earn the ability to live in. And in some cases, those hard-working Texans spent an entire generations themselves doing so.