Wyoming is in the middle of an affordable housing crisis. There’s only five homes for every 10 low-income renters in the state, and while rent increased 32% between 2010 and 2021, the income of Wyoming renters only went up 18%.
In the president’s 2026 discretionary budget request, the Trump administration is proposing to scrap several programs that offer pathways to home ownership in rural communities, potentially exacerbating an already worsening housing shortage in the state.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Melodie Edwards discussed the proposed cuts with Samantha Booth, the government relations manager for the Housing Assistance Council, a national nonprofit that supports affordable housing efforts across rural America.
Editor’s Note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.
Melodie Edwards: So to start, I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about what your takeaway is from seeing these budget proposed cuts and how they could affect rural communities.
Samantha Booth: At HAC [Housing Assistance Council], we really closely monitor the rural housing programs at USDA, and in the skinny budget proposal that the president released – there weren't detailed program-by-program numbers for every single program that we're interested in – but they certainly listed a few programs at USDA that they're proposing eliminating entirely.
At HUD [U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development], similarly, the big block grant programs like CDBG [Community Development Block Grants] and HOME were also proposed for elimination.
This really does kind of line up with what we saw from this administration in their first iteration. Back in 2017 through 2020, they frequently proposed eliminating most of these programs, and Congress always pushed back at that time, so we're hoping that we'll see that again this year.
But on the more positive side, something that this administration proposed increasing in their skinny budget was rural rental assistance through the Section 521 program. That rental assistance goes specifically to tenants who are living in USDA multifamily properties, and they did acknowledge in the budget that that program was gonna need more funding in the next fiscal year to reflect increasing rents and inflation. So that was good to see.
ME: I know that a lot of the states that are really struggling with housing shortages, a lot of them are in the American West and are very rural. I wonder if you can just talk a little bit about how all of these cuts could affect us.
SB: Often when folks in D.C. think about the affordable housing crisis, they think about big coastal cities. They don't often think about rural communities, and there really is a housing affordability crisis in rural America. Even though the cost of a mortgage or rent might not be quite as high as it is in New York City or San Francisco, the incomes in those communities are also really low. So a lot of people in rural places have a big affordability gap there. And these USDA programs have really stepped into that gap over the last many decades. I think over two million families have purchased homes with the Section 502 direct mortgage program. It's a great option for low-income families who aren't able to access traditional mortgages from their local bank.
I think that rural communities are especially at risk in this kind of budget because they don't have any fallback. They don't have that local capacity or local access to capital, the same way that larger communities might have. We see small towns where all the bank branches in town have closed and there aren't any really high-powered, high-capacity local nonprofits or groups in town who are working on affordable housing issues. So without that kind of safety net of high-quality local financial services access and local capacity, these programs really are all the more important for our rural places.
ME: Do you have state-by-state numbers, in terms of how many people have been relying on some of these programs?
SB: In Wyoming, currently there are around 1,300 units of USDA multifamily rental housing. So that's 1,300 families across the state who are living in those affordable rental units.
Then on the single-family mortgage side for USDA, just last year in fiscal year 2024, around 230 Wyoming families got a mortgage through USDA through either the 502 direct program or its kind of sister program, the guarantee program. It's definitely being used in these communities.
ME: Can you talk a little bit about the history of some of these programs? Maybe people are thinking of them as something that's just come along in the last 10 years or something, and that they're easy to scrap.
SB: These USDA housing programs have been around since the 1950s. The multifamily programs really kind of had their heyday in the '70s and '80s. Since the peak of those programs in the early 1980s, they've already been cut by more than 90%. These are programs that have really been operating on fumes for a long time now.
When the program was first created, the thought was, ‘Okay, we'll have properties aging out of the system at the end of their mortgage, but we'll have new ones coming online.’ That just has not been the case because there has been no funding for new properties in the last couple of decades. There's just the mismatch between the need in that multifamily program and the funding that they've been receiving [that’s] just astronomical.
It's a really low cost to the government. You get great return on investment because you're taking a low-income family, who otherwise wouldn't be able to achieve home ownership and build equity in their own home, and you're helping them get this no down payment, low-interest rate mortgage. It really allows these families to invest in the communities where they're living and to build their own equity and home ownership.
ME: I wonder if you can articulate why it is important to make sure that rural communities are able to build and rent and have homes.
SB: I think over the last few decades, unfortunately, we've seen a bit of a kind of bipartisan disinvestment in some of these rural programs. I think that really is to the detriment of the country as a whole, because if you have these really high-needs rural regions who are just mired in generational poverty, that impacts the nation at large. It could drive up housing costs in larger cities because all the kids in these small towns are leaving and moving to cities where they feel like they might have better opportunities.
It's a bit of a symbiotic ecosystem. If you have these challenges weighing down rural America, it really does impact the country across the board. There's an argument to be made that members of Congress, urban or rural, should consider themselves to have a stake in this conversation, for sure.
ME: I wonder if you can talk a little bit about some of the arguments that are being made for why they want to cut some of these programs, and if you have any sort of pushback on some of those arguments.
SB: There is some truth in those arguments and there's a lot of conversation happening right now about regulatory streamlining and how can we reduce the burden of accessing some of these programs. We would love to be part of those conversations. There are definitely proposals out there that would make sense as far as cutting some of the red tape around these programs.
But I think that the way that we would push back on the strategy that the administration is taking is that the solution is not just to indiscriminately zero out the entire federal affordable housing infrastructure. We need a much more targeted and thoughtful approach.
