HUD Secretary Scott Turner announced: "It is time to turn the page on the Weaver Building and relocate to a new headquarters that prioritizes the well-being of HUD employees and properly reflects the passion and excellence of our team."

HUD posted a video exposing the ramshackle condition of its existing headquarters in D.C. and touting its new much fancier offices in Alexandria, Virginia. The video took its title from Secretary Turner's promise of "The New Golden Age of HUD."

And if you believe HUD will have a Golden Age, I have some bridge in Brooklyn I will sell you at a fire sale price.

The Trump administration is seeking to sell HUD headquarters of the Department of Housing, which Secretary Turner says is "the ugliest building in D.C." The Trump administration talked of terminating half of HUD's staffs but fell far short of their lofty goal.

LBJ's Great Society

HUD has vexed America since the launch of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Irving Welfeld, a long-time HUD employee, noted in a 1992 book: "When the urban riots of the late sixties occurred, it was more than coincidental that in many cities the centers of the disturbances were in public housing projects." The National Journal reported in 1971, "The Federal Housing Administration … is financing the collapse of large residential areas of the center cities." In 1973, President Richard M. Nixon bemoaned: "All across America, the federal government has become the biggest slumlord in history." In 1975, the Chicago Tribune howled: "No natural disaster on record has caused destruction on the scale of the government's housing programs." In 1976, Detroit City Council president (and future U.S. senator) Carl Levin denounced the agency as "Hurricane HUD" for ravaging the Motor City with reckless subsidized mortgages with stratospheric default rates. June Ridgway of the Detroit Board of Assessors declared, "HUD has cost every citizen in Detroit 20 percent on his house," due to a general decline in residential property values. By decimating housing values, government housing policies effectively destroyed much of the life savings of the average Detroit family.

HUD in Laredo

Jacob Hornberger, the president and founder of the Future of Freedom Foundation, gave HUD a black eye in Texas in the late 1970s. After Hornberger bought his first home in a new subdivision in Laredo, HUD announced it would build a new housing project right next to the subdivision to "relocate poor people from the poorest parts of Laredo … to mix with 'the rich' and provide them with the incentive to become 'rich' themselves." But most all the homeowners in the new subdivision had themselves grown up poor and had just purchased new homes that were their biggest asset. Public housing projects were notorious for spawning crime and lowering nearby property values. At the time of the HUD announcement, Hornberger relates, "I had discovered libertarianism and understood that the worst thing that could ever be done for the poor was to have the government try to eliminate poverty." Hornberger took the lead in organizing protests against the HUD project, testifying locally and even placing an ad in the Washington Post.

Hornberger notes in his memoir My Passion for Liberty, "We carried out a very public protest with signs at the Alamo informing people of HUD's tyrannical conduct." Hornberger received an invitation from the chairman of the House Committee on Banking, Currency, and Housing to testify on the controversy; he accepted the invite but was ghosted on Capitol Hill, hearing nothing back. Even though 99 percent of the homeowners in the projects were Mexican-Americans, the advocates of the HUD project hurled the nastiest epitaphs you can ever imagine about how opponents of the project hated the poor and were a bunch of racial bigots.