3 Questions for Gate House’s Hunter Kurtz

Hunter Kurtz, Vice Chair and Founding Partner at Gate House Strategies, has spent his professional career working in the affordable housing industry at the local, state and federal levels. In the first Trump Administration, he served as Assistant Secretary for Public and Indian Housing at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, as well Deputy Chief of Staff to HUD Secretary Ben Carson. At the local level, Hurtz served as Director of the City of Detroit’s Department of Housing and Revitalization, in Mayor Mike Duggan’s administration.

Tell us about your work at Gate House.

I’m on the affordable housing and community development side of the business. I work with local governments, affordable housing developers and public housing authorities, helping them solve problems and unwind the larger issues they face in their work to create more housing opportunities in their communities. Housing needs and solutions are always uniquely local. Boise isn’t Fort Wayne which isn’t Mobile which isn’t San Antonio. We know how to guide local officials and their partners to be as effective in meeting their goals as possible. We help identify what they can seek from the federal government and other sources of financing, tools and unique solutions that are best suited for them. And because the full Gate House team covers a full spectrum of experience in the government, the private sector and the financial markets, we are effective in helping clients navigate the different players and cultures involved in successful community development efforts. Public housing authorities have their unique language, as do lenders, federal officials, and housing developers, just to name a few of key players in any proposed project. Gate House specializes in helping all of them better understand each other and work together for results.
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What can the federal government do under the incoming administration to make things better for localities working to create affordable housing?

Mostly get out of the way. Look, housing is having a moment right now because the affordability crisis has risen to the level of an urgent national policy agenda matter. The new administration will be under pressure from all sides to produce real solutions. But for the most part, the biggest hurdles that local affordable housing practitioners face are rules and regulations.
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Going after unnecessary regulatory barriers sounds like something the incoming administration would be very focused on.

Absolutely. For instance, there are so many federal requirements for reports which are quite outdated, and frankly useless. Still, they demand an enormous amount of valuable staff time that could otherwise be spent on solving real problems and creating opportunities. We did an analysis, for example, that revealed public housing authority and tribal housing staffs spend  over 20 percent of their work week producing reports.  Many of these reports sent back to Washington are never read and serve no purpose, yet they are legally required to be submitted. I’m confident the new HUD Secretary will be looking at unnecessary regs that hinder real progress toward greater housing affordability in America.