Housing After Dark Episode 18: Brian McCabe, Former Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development at HUD, on His Innovative Work on Housing Vouchers and Washington Today

Amidst uncertainty in Washington, what we can learn from direct rental assistance programs?

Welcome to Season 3 of Housing After Dark. We’re doing our best in 2025 to find the right balance between discussing the current crisis coming out of Washington and maintaining focus on the broader, necessary changes in our housing system. Today’s episode will attempt to do both.

I’m truly grateful to all our listeners who’ve made this podcast worth doing. It’s hard to believe it’s already Season 3, and we’re excited to bring an incredible cast of housers over the course of 2025. Housing After Dark is a production of Schafran Strategies, which is still our only sponsor. So if you like what you hear and want to help us reach more people without charging them money, please reach out. Our listeners are the who’s who of housers—young and old, newcomers and veterans alike—and I promise you, you won’t regret having them hear your organization or company’s name every time we do an episode.

About This Episode

Our guest, Brian McCabe, is a Georgetown sociology professor, a veteran of New York City’s housing department, and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary at HUD during the Biden Administration. Join us for a conversation about what he’s hearing from friends and colleagues still at HUD, his innovative work on housing vouchers while he was at the agency, and his hopes and dreams for our housing future. We also talk about his path between academia and the policy world, and his advice for others seeking to do the same. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back if you’ve been here before, and if this is your first time, welcome to Housing After Dark.

This Episode’s Guest

Interview Transcript

Alex Schafran: Brian McCabe, welcome to Housing After Dark. It’s wonderful to have you.

Brian McCabe: Thanks, Alex. It’s great to be with you.

Alex Schafran: As you and our listeners know, we have a bit of a tradition here: we start by asking people about their story. So, how did you become a houser?

Brian McCabe: My housing story starts as I was wrapping up my college career. I was an international relations major and felt disenchanted with the career paths that were available to me. I took a course on urbanism and political thought, and by the end of college, I realized there was this big field of urbanism. I went on to get my master’s degree at the London School of Economics and then landed my first job at New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD). I held two positions at HPD.

The first was in the Tenant Interim Lease (TIL) program, which involved properties—primarily in Harlem but also throughout the city—that had gone into foreclosure in the 1970s. The city was trying, through alternative management programs, to transfer them out of city ownership into other forms of ownership. Some became low-income co-ops, which is the program I worked on. Then I moved into the planning division at HPD, where I worked on the ULURP process and the disposition of city-owned property.

I was at HPD for about two years. While there, I realized that I was really taken by the policy work we were doing—the big ideas about how the city used its properties, how we created affordability. But I didn’t love the day-to-day work of being in HPD. I didn’t enjoy the grind of being in a city agency. At that time, I spent a lot of time running ULURP applications from planning over to Gold Street, where HPD was headquartered. So I applied to Ph.D. programs, ended up at NYU, and fell in with a group of researchers at the Furman Center. Initially, I worked on the State of the City report in 2006 or 2007. I worked closely with Ingrid Ellen and other folks at the Furman Center. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the politics of homeownership, and that’s how I started down this path.

Alex Schafran: Interesting. I want to come back to the politics of homeowners. But it’s really exciting—listeners will know that we have a trend of guests who are alumni of the NYC housing system in some way. ULURP and TIL are bringing me back. My start as a housing organizer was in some of those same previously foreclosed or soon-to-be foreclosed buildings in Harlem, often connected to a different scandal—one involving the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). You’re really bringing me back.

You had a career that started in the policy space. I appreciate what you said about not liking the daily work because, whenever I have the opportunity to mentor younger folks, I emphasize that it’s not just about subject matter. You have to enjoy the grind. What are you making? What are you selling? You might like housing, but you also have to align with the incentive structures and people you work with every day.

Brian McCabe: Yeah, I think that’s right. I have similar conversations with my students who want to enter the housing space. A lot of my work now is research and writing, which can often be a lonely life. But there are so many ways to engage in housing: as an organizer, an advocate, a policymaker at the federal or local level, or even as an expert on a specific housing policy like LIHTC.

It’s important to ask not just what housing issues drive me, but also what do I want to do every day to move my work forward?

Alex Schafran: I wish there were more flexibility to do what you do—moving between policy and academia. I also made that switch at one point, probably because I enjoyed the rhythm of academia. But it wasn’t the right cultural fit for me, which is why I’m now sitting on this side of the microphone. You, however, have navigated this back-and-forth career, which is common overseas but less so here.

Tell me more about your journey to working for HUD under the Biden administration.

Brian McCabe: So I had been at Georgetown for a decade (I’m on faculty here in sociology at Georgetown). I have written about a number of housing issues. I had done work, obviously, on the politics of homeowners. I had done quite a bit of work on evictions in DC, looking at patterns and prevalence of evictions in the city. I had started a new research project on housing vouchers and the way that public housing agencies administer vouchers (which we can come back to later). I had done research across a bunch of different policy domains that were relevant to HUD, and in 2022 I was asked if I would be interested in coming to HUD on an IPA (which is basically a six-month fellowship to work on a specific project). That didn’t work out because of the timing of my semester. But after that, I was asked to come on board in the Office of Policy Development and Research.

For listeners out there who are less familiar with the organizational structure of HUD, it’s a complicated structure, but I’ll just say a little bit about where that office is positioned in HUD.

So, PD&R—I often think of it as the internal think tank of HUD. It’s the office within the agency where we do contracted research. So, all the program evaluations that are contracted out, we monitor programs, things like the Picture of Subsidized Housing, any data coming in on our programs. We calculate things like income limits, payment standards, fair market rents—all that data is processed through HUD. We organize and run survey work with the Census Bureau, including the American Housing Survey. So, all of the data and research that inform HUD programs and policy come through the Office of Policy Development and Research.

Some of the work is done internally—it’s a staff of about 200 folks, lots of PhDs, lots of researchers doing internal work. There’s also a lot of work done with external contractors to understand our programs. Additionally, this office is responsible for disseminating research—when folks go on HUD User, which is the public access site for research reports, it’s our office that handles that.

I had a role as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy Development, overseeing the Policy Development Division, the Research Utilization Division, our international work and programs, and various special projects that came up.

Alex Schafran: I love that you talk about it in the present tense. Let’s talk about what you are hearing from colleagues about what is happening in Washington. Anybody who reads my Substack or the daily news will get some sense of what is going on when it comes to cuts or proposed cuts or DOJ actions. What are you hearing from your former colleagues at HUD, PD&R, HUD User, or anything else you worked on?

Brian McCabe: I think at the moment—and often on a podcast, we have to date the moment that we’re talking. So, it’s Thursday, March 13th, at 2 in the afternoon Eastern Time. One of the things I’ve learned in DC over the past couple of years in the administration is that things often change fast and are uncertain.

As of this conversation, the sense that I’m getting is a lot of uncertainty—both about the future of PD&R and the agency overall, and about what the vision for the agency is. One of the things I took part in when I was part of the Biden team was that the political appointees (there are 100 of us at HUD) are responsible for steering the ship. We’re responsible for deciding what policies the administration wants to put forward, how we want to reform programs, what we want to propose that’s new, and we work with the really terrific career staff to help move the ship. We help to plot the course we’re on, and the career staff, who have deep knowledge about what’s going on, help move that ship forward.

I think I’m getting a sense of two kinds of uncertainty at HUD. One is uncertainty about what the goals of this administration are vis-à-vis housing. There are some things that we universally agree on. We agree that there’s a housing supply crisis, and we can come back to talk about the limited levers to move that at the federal level. But I don’t think this administration has clearly articulated what the housing goals are for HUD—what we want the agency to be doing.

The second piece is that they’ve created a lot of uncertainty about who is going to be working in the agency. We know that across agencies in DC, a lot of probationary employees (those that have just been there a year or two) and PMFs (Presidential Management Fellows) have universally been let go. And that’s really a problem for the agency. Some of the most exciting, interesting talent are new folks that have come on with fresh ideas and up-to-date research skills. To let that talent go—especially in a place where we’re doing cutting-edge research to understand our problems—is really problematic.

The other concern is that folks at the agency don’t have a sense of job security or the goals of the administration. From my experience with the career staff, it’s a really dedicated team. They deeply understand the programs they work on and their role in supporting political staff. I remember having conversations at HUD about different secretaries over the years, their different political priorities, and how career staff worked through both Republican and Democratic administrations to implement those policy goals.

What I’m really hearing about is uncertainty—how things trickling down from the news are going to affect the agency. When we hear concerns about DEI, considering all the agencies HUD works with—the PHAs, the local governments—it’s troubling. If those agencies are negatively impacted by doing DEI work or even referencing DEI on their websites, that’s a problem. At the end of the day, that’s not the important stuff—it’s just weaponizing political terminology. These agencies are doing really important work. The uncertainty that exists at this moment—Thursday, March 13th—is permeating the agency.

Alex Schafran: I think we’re all waiting with bated breath and also trying to figure out what there is to do. CHPC put out an analysis at the Housing California conference about how many millions of dollars in various forms of housing assistance flowing through HUD to California are seemingly at risk. There’s just a huge amount of uncertainty. And it’s particularly difficult because, as important as HUD is, the biggest impact on our housing system is labor, the cost of lumber, and other factors affected by broader economic priorities. The only thing that seems coordinated is the intensity of the attack and noise. Even if HUD, Fannie, Freddie, or the FHA were to shift and start doing all the right things, the damage is already being done—to people’s lives, to those who build housing, and to the materials we need to build housing.

Brian McCabe: One of the things I’m proud of from my time at HUD is that I was a real outsider to the agency. I had worked with a lot of HUD data before, but I had never worked at HUD or closely with the different program offices. In many ways, I came in somewhat naïve to the agency and asked big, existential questions.

I remember one of the earliest questions I asked was whether we could fill some of the vacant office space with advocacy groups or other housing groups to create a little community ecosystem. One of the things I was ultimately praised for at HUD was asking big questions that the bureaucracy often doesn’t ask. There’s a lot of value in asking: What is the goal of this agency? Are our programs being run as effectively as they could be? Do we need new formulas for some of our programs? Do we need new programs because HUD is addressing different housing challenges today than it did in 1965 when the agency was founded?

A different administration—one that wasn’t focused on destruction—would be asking a very different set of questions. Fair questions like: Does this program work? Is it staffed at the right level? Do we need the Weaver Building as our headquarters? Federal agencies don’t often ask themselves these big questions. There was a moment—and that moment has since passed—when a new administration could have come in, asked those hard questions, and moved forward. Unfortunately, that’s not what this administration has done. They’re not putting forward a plan to build a better, more effective HUD with a clear mission. It seems like they are taking an axe to the federal government for its own sake. That’s not only unfortunate but will harm a lot of people in the long run—including federal workers and the millions of people who rely on HUD for rental assistance and public housing programs.

Alex Schafran: I consider myself a true progressive, believing in change, wanting change, always willing to consider changes to systems that we’ve had even if those systems are partially working and people depend on them. And actually, you’ve been part of proposing, or at least considering, a very radical change which I want to talk about in a second, which is about vouchers—this sort of holy program that I believe in—but it’s just so hard to be reform-minded when what is being marketed at times as reform is really just razing it to the ground. Maybe one thing we can think about and come back to is how you act as a reformer when you’re trying to defend the system that is being destroyed. You could come up with a hundred critiques of the system. Give me any HUD program, and I can get a group together and we can come up with ways that it’s not working as well as it needs to or it could be shifted to another program. And that’s unfortunately the moment we’re at.

But one of the things I followed a lot of what you and Solome and others were doing, which I thought was a really brave attempt to take a pause and think a little differently about how we provide rental assistance to people. I’ve written in my 2025 Hope and Dreams for Housing that this is the first pillar of my Project 2029, which is this recommitment to providing low-income people the ability to consume housing. We have all these production-side and supply-side problems that we need to deal with. But we’ll never deal with those if we don’t fix the problem that people actually just don’t have enough money. This is my favorite part of Jenny Schuetz’s book, recognizing that people just don’t have enough money, and housing is always going to be expensive.

So you all did an experiment at HUD. Tell us a bit more about what you did with direct cash assistance and the whole thing.

Brian McCabe: In 2023, I wrote a post with my colleague Aaron Shroyer advocating for HUD to really think seriously about direct rental assistance. So for your listeners who are less familiar with the voucher program, the key things to know are that right now, the way the program works is that an assisted tenant, they go out and find a unit on the private market, they pay 30% of their income, and the public housing authority through the voucher pays the landlord the rest of the rent. The PHA pays that landlord directly for the remaining portion. One of the really important conversations inside HUD, led by our terrific deputy secretary Adrianne Todman, who used to run the DC Housing Authority and the executive director of NAHRO, was about voucher reform. What can we do to improve the Housing Choice Voucher program now?

And I should say, for households that can access a voucher that can find a unit on the private market, a landlord who is willing to rent to them, the program is great. It’s a really important program; it creates housing stability, it creates housing affordability. But waitlists are incredibly long, there aren’t enough vouchers, landlords are increasingly unwilling to accept tenants with a voucher. About 40% of people who get a voucher ultimately return it because they can’t use it, they can’t find a unit or a landlord willing to rent to them. So here’s somewhere where we have to acknowledge that for some people the program is working really well, but for a lot of people it’s just not. The Deputy Secretary was really a leader in having conversations around how to reform this program to make it easier for people to use, less burdensome, and increase landlord participation.

But a parallel conversation is about whether or not there is a better way to do this for some people. What we put forward, direct rental assistance, is the idea that instead of paying the landlord, we would give the money directly to tenants. We should give tenants direct cash assistance, that cash should be earmarked for housing. There are a lot of ways that we can track or observe whether people are actually spending the money on housing and let the tenant go out with the full amount they need to rent an apartment and find that unit. There were a number of reasons why this might improve voucher outcomes.

Tenants might face less discrimination on the rental market if they’re coming with cash instead of the stigma of a Section 8 housing choice voucher. It provides a lot more flexibility for tenants to pick and choose where they want to live. There’s a model in which maybe tenants choose to rent cheaper apartments, they end up keeping the additional cash they can use for other things. Cash is more flexible to use for security deposits, first month’s rent, things like that.

So there are a lot of reasons why I am excited about this model. I would just say two things: 1) I have some colleagues who are smarter than I am on the vouchers that are pretty skeptical that this would work. They’re skeptical about whether landlords will accept these tenants; landlords want to know where your cash is coming from, and they’re skeptical that this will create inflationary pressures on the housing market. I take their skepticism very seriously.

What we have been trying to do and what we are in agreement on is that what PD&R does best and what research does best is to test this model. There’s a whole set of experiments from before the HCV program was established in 1974, that started in the early 1970s—the EHAP experiment, the experiment housing allowance program. They were designed to test what the impact of a housing voucher program would be on tenants, for housing markets, for agencies that had to administer them. We’re in a moment with direct rental assistance where there’s this big excitement about the idea of providing cash to tenants. There are a number of groups that have floated different ways of doing this, different ways of getting cash to tenants, deciding how much cash folks should get, tracking how it’s used for housing. And now we’re at a moment where we need to go out and run some pilot programs.

Fortunately, these are just starting to get off the ground with different public housing agencies. There’s one in Philadelphia that’s already off the ground, there are a couple of other agencies that are close to doing it. But that’s really what PD&R does best: to test these ideas. I think it’s actually a potentially really bipartisan idea. Why do I want it? Because I think it will improve the experience of tenants. I think actually, with the same amount of money, we might be able to assist more people. I think cash gives dignity to people, it’s humanizing, it’s not governing in the same way that some of our other programs are.

But from the more conservative side, I can also see arguments for direct rental assistance. It can be more efficient, it can be administratively less complicated, we might need fewer bureaucrats working in public housing authorities if we’re not liaising with tenants and have all these rules around it. I hope that your listeners thinking about this from both a progressive and a conservative side see that actually, this might be a really important moment of agreement. The one positive rumbling I’ve heard from inside HUD is that there is some real interest in direct rental assistance, whether that turns out to be true or not, it’s a potentially really exciting thing going on.

Alex Schafran: Even though I am often skeptical of the intrusion of experiments and labs into our housing space, because we’re not scientists, we’re not a lab, a city is not a lab. It’s different than trying things. We have to try things and we have to be able to make mistakes, that’s how progress is made. One of the major problems, when we come back to the deeper politics of it all, is that our politics are the way they are—not just the right-wing fascism that’s happening now, but all of the politics, including and especially on the left—is that we immediately hop onto ideas and immediately criticize them to the nth degree, and then they’re branded a failure and we can never have nice things. When we talk about high-speed rail or BART, it’s all these kinds of things.

One of the reasons why I really appreciate this. There are a few reasons. The folks who raise the concern about inflationary pressures have done the same thing around the California Dream for All program, which is a similarly innovative attempt to provide people the ability to buy a home in California. You’re right, it’s not a substitute for supply; no one is claiming that it is. If you’re paying attention to problems of supply, it’s really hard to get financing to build things, partially around the questions of demand. I think that if we’re able to shore up demand, it can send a signal to the demand industry that a wider demand is possible.

The other thing I like about it. The numbers I’ve seen, which I’m sure are old, suggest that under current eligibility, 1/4 actually get it, let alone all the people who are not currently eligible for vouchers but need it. And if we’re going to expand it to the size that it needs, it just needs to become a much more flexible program, and it’s not just an either/or thing; it’s a both/and. The mistake would be, "Oh, we’re converting them all to cash." It’s like, give the people the choice. Give it to the landlord and the tenants and say "paper or plastic."

Some people need a third party. In fact, maybe they don’t even need the PHAs as a third party, maybe it’s one of the nonprofit housing providers or social service providers that is the third party because they’re coping with various disabilities or challenges in their lives. We have all kinds of third parties get involved in all kinds of cases, but give people the choice. Choice is one of those things that has been lost a lot of the time on the housing left as a goal because it’s such a right-wing buzzword, but don’t forget, choice is on our side too. We fight for the right to choose not just what we do with our bodies but what we should do in our housing, and I feel like you’re offering that.

Brian McCabe: Alex, I really think in this moment of political realignment, we are the party of choice. The Republican party wants you to think one very specific way. They want to ban your books, they want to tell you what’s taught in school, so there’s a way in which we are the party of choice. Going back to the voucher program, one thing I heard a lot in my research before I went to HUD, and I did a lot of research with public housing agencies, is that the voucher program works really well for some kinds of families. So for example, if you are a rent-burdened family but you can lease in place because you don’t have to search for a new housing unit. If you’re an elderly family, it’s usually pretty good because there’s less discrimination on the housing market against elderly families, and you typically have a fixed income so you don’t have to go through income certifications. Who is it hard for? People who have no experience on the private market. If you’ve never rented an apartment before, it’s doubly hard to do it with a voucher. It’s harder for big families. There’s a ton of discrimination and there’s not a lot of units for big families.

To this point, we have this one model, the voucher model. And it works really well for some categories of families, but it doesn’t work well for others. This is exactly what we need to do—iterate, whether it’s direct rental assistance or we’re talking about mobility counselors or navigation counselors to see if we can open up opportunities in neighborhoods. We need housing models that are more flexible, not just one size fits all, that will respond to housing needs as they change. Direct rental assistance, as we move forward, will be one of those tools. I’m excited to see the evidence, and I suspect the evidence will tell us that DRA works better for some households than it does for others, and that’s a really important piece of knowledge we should have.

Alex Schafran: Again, I can also hear various colleagues of mine in the affordable housing industry who would actually prefer that all the vouchers get converted to project-based vouchers. Neither of these are the answers that it’s about project-based vouchers. Even though I am a true liberal in the old-school sense and think that making everything project-based would be terrible, there is still an important role that certain types of buildings, run by certain types of agencies, need to know that every room has a voucher that it can put people in those rooms without any challenges. That person is in a situation where they’re not navigating the system, and it makes sense that a voucher can be attached to a room rather than the person. It’s that kind of mixed economy that we somehow forget about. It’s such a diverse country; we live so many different ways. I’ve done all this work recently on multifamily homeownership and all the different ways that people are living, and it frustrates me so endlessly that we have this.

The one other thing that we say about vouchers is that there are two things that it really has going forward as a space. One is its connection to the universal basic income conversation. When you move thinking about cash, it suddenly connects it to this very global conversation we’re having about how humans, especially low-income folks, are going to consume the most basic stuff in a world with AI. I love that you’ve connected us in housing. That’s one of the things you’ve done in bringing cash in. The other thing that I think vouchers can be used for that I don’t generally see it used for is homeownership. You can pay a mortgage on Section 8 if your public housing authority opts into this program, and it’s a really underutilized program. Oakland used to have a homeownership program, but it shut down. By bringing more attention and being really experimental, you’ve opened up this space for all of us to talk about “Okay, what does the future of direct assistance look like?”

On that note, you arrive in 2022, you and others, there are the political appointees, the people who run the Section 8 program, and you’re trying to get the permission needed and get people to be convinced to try this experiment without feeling like it’s an attack on what they’ve built and what they’ve tried so hard to maintain. How did you go about that process of socializing it and getting support?

Brian McCabe: To begin, the way that Aaron and I put this out publicly was to say “HUD is interested in learning from PHAs that might be able to do this,” not to say HUD is going to do this or HUD is going to put money behind it. Instead, we said, “Hey, here’s an idea that’s out there. Philadelphia’s doing it. HUD would be interested in learning from other PHAs doing it.” This was part of a longer, middle-term strategy.

The ideal trajectory for this (and we are still early in the process) is that a number of PHAs would jump on board and say “Yeah, we’re interested in doing this.” And actually, before I left HUD, the agency approved this as something MTWA offices could do. They would have to go through the same processes as any other MTWA offices would, but they have the flexibility to apply to do a direct rental assistance program. Our hope was that there would be a handful of agencies out there that would start to test these DRA models.

At some point in the coming years, as we built up some evidence that it was working well, we could ask for money from Congress for a demonstration project. The hope was that sometime in the next administration, we’d have some evidence that could then create a much bigger demonstration project. I mean, this is what’s going on with the community choice demonstration now. Some local things bubbled up, and Congress then put millions of dollars behind this eight- or nine-site demonstration project. So that was the hope.

PD&R and HUD have a great history of running these big projects. Socializing it within the building was a little more challenging. When we first put this idea out there, there was actually quite a bit of resistance. In fact, this wasn’t necessarily Biden-era policy, this wasn’t policy coming from HUD, and we were just making clear within PD&R that this was something we wanted to learn about, and that’s our role within the agency.

It really took some time. There was some resistance. There is resistance within bureaucracies to new ideas, and I think there’s resistance from some leadership to new ideas. To Solomone’s credit, he was a really big advocate of this among the leadership at the agency, and I think by the end of the administration, folks had really gotten on board that this is really worth thinking about and worth trying. And that took, frankly, a little rocking the boat. It took making people a little uncomfortable. It took presenting it as a complement to all the other good work that is being done on vouchers, which it was. Eventually, I think we got there where people were excited about this as a thing we should learn about. Not that we are recommitting the voucher program to this, not that we’re doing wholesale reform, but that this is something worth learning about.

Alex Schafran: Well, I hope that folks that are listening to this, who are either lower down at small agencies or higher up, can draw some inspiration from this. I really appreciate just how challenging it is to get something like this, to get initial support and get through skepticism at a large agency.

I think in the current moment, to come back to what we talked about, when what we will most likely have to do in Washington is be the resistance to a lot of things. That doesn’t mean as reformers, as progressives, as agents of change, that we can’t do the change ourselves internally. I have been trying to convince Team Housing to spend more time looking in the mirror, and I think, in these scary times, I know that there are leaders of major housing authorities, major nonprofit housing developers, and major policy advocacy organizations, that they draw inspiration from this and are pushing for change internally, internal to their industry. And unfortunately, there are those who are not. We have a certain percentage of leaders that I think are really holding the line, and I’m hoping that one of the things we can do is not lose sight of the necessity to change internally.

Alex Schafran: Any last things that you want to talk about in terms of what you’re seeing at HUD? I did actually check while we were talking that HUD User does appear to be back up. I can’t tell you what’s disappeared from it and what has not, but perhaps if there are listeners who are following more closely, they can tell us. Anything else you want to give us an update about the situation?

Brian McCabe: The other thing that has been on my mind has been scarcity in our housing programs and opportunities more broadly for us to address. You know, you mentioned earlier the number of income-eligible households that are not able to access vouchers or other forms of assistance. What we’re seeing in this moment outside of the administration itself and in the housing crisis is both the depth of need and the depth of scarcity in our resources. As I’ve talked to folks about this, there’s a policy piece we’ve actually cracked really well. We know how to build ourselves out of a housing crisis. We know, in many ways, the demand-side programs that would work to create opportunities. We know a lot of the policy pieces. Addressing scarcity really requires a change in how we think about housing, think about housing as a social resource, not just a thing for individuals—our unhoused neighbors—that impacts all of us, right. It has implications for our entire cities, our budget, and our well-being.

There’s a political moment where we need to start thinking about housing differently and address housing that runs on scarcity. That’s the other piece I’ve been thinking a lot about and hoping that, in this political moment, we’ll be able to start to address.

Alex Schafran: It’s funny. I’m trying in this moment to not use the word "abundance," just because it’s now become itself a political term, and I appreciate what Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and others are trying to do around this movement. There are some ways in which I am an abundance-r, and there are ways in which the approach leaves me a little bit lacking. But I do agree that this sort of particular scarcity mentality is really tough. We’ve underproduced for so long, and we’ve just created these really sclerotic systems that don’t work. Get people housed, keep people housed, keep the housing industry moving in a positive direction and not constantly going up and down like a yo-yo. So very much appreciate what you’re saying.

Any final words for folks who want to have a career that goes back and forth between policy and academia, between teaching and doing, between all the ways that you’ve done? If they want to become Brian McCabe, how do they do it?

Brian McCabe: I don’t recommend wanting to become Brian McCabe. The world is not ready for a second one. There are parts of the world that are not ready for a first one.

There are opportunities that I didn’t know existed in the policy world until I was either in the policy world or I asked about them. For example, the previous Deputy Assistant Secretary was the one who had asked me if I could do an IPA, and at the time, I had no idea what an IPA was, and he essentially had an eviction project. An IPA, in addition to being my favorite kind of beer, is an interagency personnel agreement. I’m sure that’s not exactly what it is, but essentially what it is, is universities can essentially loan somebody to the federal government. So when I went to HUD for two years, I was on the federal payroll and off of Georgetown’s payroll. But as an IPA, essentially Georgetown would give me a semester, continue to pay for me, and send me over to the federal government. It’s pretty common, not just in universities, but other places do it. It’s basically to provide the expertise of folks who work on a project.

There are a lot of IPA opportunities. Solomone and I had talked about bringing on some IPAs to work on various things. That’s one way to really get involved, to get a foot in the door. Another thing I think is really important, there are folks that are experts on all sorts of topics and data sets within HUD. We very regularly had folks presenting their research in HUD, and that got people in the door. We were doing work on small-area FMRs, and we had a couple of different research teams that were external to the agency come in and present to us, and that starts to build relationships and conversations that make it so the HUD staff know who to go to for data analytics questions. I think that’s another way, especially for younger scholars that are working on relevant topics.

I will say my teams at HUD were really, really eager for research and data presented in a way that was accessible to full teams at HUD. I think folks should be open about reaching out to policymakers or to professional staff at HUD and sharing what they have, sharing their knowledge. There’s a lot of interest at the agency in really learning about programs, and there’s a lot of expertise in the academy and other places.

The last piece, particularly for HUD: Every presidential transition has a transition team that works on the agency. The transition teams are really quite large; there were hundreds of people that were part of the HUD transition team, and a lot of folks on the transition team ended up filling political appointments. I was on the transition, Solomone was on the transition, lots of our colleagues that were DASs, PDASs, and Special Assistants were part of the transition team, so that’s another way to get a foot in the door and again to lend your very specific expertise in what the agency should do. That’s the time to do it because it’s at that transition. Now, in 2029, that transition team is going to draw up what the plan for HUD is for the next four years, right, and the Secretary and the team are going to start implementing those. That’s the other way to think about getting a foot in the door.

Alex Schafran: This kind of back-and-forth between academia and the policy world is something, as we’re marching hopefully down a path towards whether you want to call it social housing or just a transformation of our housing system into a better one, like they have in other places, which is my definition of social housing. Not only does it include more people, but those countries are just much better at including academia as an integral place, especially now that knowledge and learning and academia and science and universities are all also under attack, just like with vouchers and other programs. As we defend what are the reforms and changes we can put in, I know a lot of people that have been dissatisfied with this separation.

If you look at the history of California and the role of universities of California, the planning departments at Berkeley and UCLA and other places in the CSU system, we had a prominent role in an earlier era, and we made some mistakes. And as a response to the mistakes that we made and our involvement in urban renewal, the kind of racist city unbuilding we did, a lot of times we retreated. Increasingly in California, it just became more separate, and there are a lot of folks that have been working in the last bunch of years to really try to reconnect public higher education and private higher education (go Jesuits in particular) to the system that governs and thinks about and plans and does policy. And I think that’s really important. I hope we continue in that direction, shoutout to all the folks in California who are working in that direction and repairing that relationship and hopefully they open up more opportunities for folks like you. And maybe even some old guys like me.

Brian McCabe: Yeah, and the guys that come after us when we retire. When we retire, soon enough.

Alex Schafran: Thank you. On that note, for our listeners, this is the first episode of season 3, and we’re going to do our best all season long to try to balance real talk about what’s happening with this administration and what’s going on with continuing to build what we were working on beforehand, to change the institutions we know are not working and making sure that we can become that party of choice, that party of change, and we can be true progressives.

Brian McCabe: Thanks, Alex.