Black homeownership should be a GOP selling point, not a HUD target

On Oct. 7, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner opened an investigation into Wells Fargo over its pledges to increase black homeownership. He said the bank’s conduct was “immoral, unethical and un-American” even if it broke no law.Raising black homeownership is a Republican goal, and a Republican administration is investigating a bank for pursuing it, weeks before the Nov. 3 midterm elections. Black Republicans call that a mistake in private. Few will say it on the record, so I will.Start with what is at stake. President Donald Trump doubled his share of black voters in 2024, from 8% to 16%. Public safety and immigration will not hold them this year or in 2028. An economic message could, and the administration has not written one. Guy Benson made the same case about energy in these pages this month: Republicans, starting with the president, should have been “consistently seeding the message.” With black voters, the message is sitting in plain sight.That message is ownership: property and capital in private hands, not dependence on government. Republicans have a claim to it that goes back to President Richard Nixon, who created the federal minority business office in 1969. Former President George W. Bush set a goal of 5.5 million new minority homeowners. Trump’s own 2020 Platinum Plan promised to advance homeownership in black communities, and Wells Fargo made its $60 billion pledge in his first year in office.Candidates have numbers to work with. Black household income rose 4.8% last year after falling 3.3% in 2024. Black homeownership was 45.4% this spring, up from 43.9% a year earlier, and the black Conservative Federation’s new report sets a goal of a 5-point gain within a decade.Not every number flatters. Black unemployment rose to 7% in September, a statistically significant jump. Good or bad, numbers like these are how Washington measures progress. It rarely writes black-only policy, whatever the loudest voices on either side claim. It keeps score, as former President Barack Obama’s White House did in 2016, crediting work to improve the lives of “all Americans, including African Americans.”In Trump’s first term, the message had authors. Ja’Ron Smith, a domestic policy aide who worked closely with Jared Kushner, got credit for opportunity zones, criminal justice reform and funding for historically black colleges and universities. Turner ran the opportunity zone council, which ended in 2020 and was never restored. Last year, the president ordered Nixon’s minority business agency cut to the legal minimum.Candidates cannot deliver a message the administration has not articulated.What it has conveyed is opposition. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, the Justice Department’s civil rights chief, has described past enforcement as a form of “benevolent racism.” She has a point. Government should not sort citizens by race. But opposition alone tells black voters what Republicans are against. It does not tell them what Republicans offer.Turner turned that opposition into an investigation. Equal treatment under the law is the right standard. So look at the law. Congress wrote special-purpose credit programs into the Equal Credit Opportunity Act in 1976, and President Gerald Ford signed it. Federal regulators encouraged lenders to create them in February 2022. That April, Wells Fargo announced one: $150 million to help minority homeowners refinance at lower rates, paid from its own lending division. This August, seven agencies led by HUD withdrew the guidance. HUD opened its inquiry six weeks later.Washington wrote the law, encouraged the program and then investigated the bank that took it at its word.Conservatives were right to fight quotas, but a private company spending its own capital is the market at work. If those programs offend equal treatment, change the rule or change the statute. No candidate can brag about black homeownership while Washington investigates a pledge to raise it.Candidates are writing their own message instead. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), one of three nominees who would be the first black Republican elected governor in their respective states, held a town hall at Florida A&M University, a historically black university in Tallahassee. Students pressed him on his loyalty to the GOP, and he turned the question back on the party they support. “You’ve been faithful to that party,” Donalds said. “Have they been faithful to you?”It is the right question. He has also bought BET airtime for an ad touting his support for the school. Nobody calls that un-American. It’s called competing. But a candidate who asks whether Democrats delivered has to say what Republicans will deliver, and Washington is not helping him.So why do so few black Republicans say this out loud? There are not many of us, and for us, access is the currency. Black Democrats make the same trade. Three weeks after then-President Joe Biden’s debate, just one of roughly 60 Congressional Black Caucus members had called for him to go. The caucus stood by him, and it did not save him. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris later won 83% of black voters, down from Biden’s 91%.SPIKE IN MORTGAGE RATES COMPOUNDS INFLATION AND DEBT WOESThe path forward is short. Charge a violation or close the investigation. Restore the council. Adopt a number, such as the federation’s five-point homeownership goal, and reach it through sound credit, not loosened standards. Give every Republican candidate the same sentence to say in November and 2028.Black Democrats’ loyalty did not save Biden. Our silence will not save this coalition.Melik Abdul is a Washington-based public affairs professional, writer, and Republican strategist.