When Julin Castro announced his presidential candidacy in San Antonio, Texas, on Jan. 12, he promised to apply his experience as a former secretary of housing and urban development to address the escalating cost of living.

We have a housing affordability crisis in this country, he said . But you know what? You hardly ever hear about that in politics. Thats going to change. We will invest in housing thats affordable to the middle class and to the poor.

Housing is a deeply under-discussed issue, and Castro seems uniquely poised to tackle it. But during his time as housing secretary under President Barack Obama , Castro faced scrutiny for exacerbating the home affordability crisis. He inherited a problematic program that activists say he should have worked more quickly to address, and he oversaw the sale of tens of thousands of mortgages to Wall Streets foreclosure mill. And it took years of bruising public pressure to get him to change course.

If Castro does take on housing as a signature theme, hell have to grapple with these criticisms.

Homeowners and tenants had been trying for years to get his attention to the problems in this program, said Maurice Weeks, at the time a housing rights organizer for the Center for Popular Democracy, which organizes low-income families. The only way that happened was when his name was more in the public setting and... more people were paying attention.

Privatizing A Public Function?

The housing crisis, of course, well predated Castros time as HUD secretary. From 2006 to 2014, more than 9.3 million homeowners lost their homes to foreclosure or a similar arrangement. The crisis had a disproportionate effect on black homeowners, who were targeted for predatory loans.

Banking reform experts, low-income advocacy groups and their progressive allies in Congress were desperate for the Obama administration to do more to stop a vicious cycle plaguing American households whose mortgages were underwater, meaning that they owed more to a lender than the home was worth.

It worked like this: A distressed homeowner, no longer able to borrow against their home and likely suffering from the economic downturn, might lose their house to foreclosure. That, in turn, would depress the value of their neighbors homes and jeopardize homeownership on an entire block.

Former Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who served on the House Financial Services Committee from 2003 to 2013, called on the federal government to address the crisis through the kind of direct action it employed during the Great Depression. He wanted the Obama administration to buy up the mortgages of homeowners facing foreclosure and reduce their debts.

The Obama administration balked at the idea of a new, large-scale program moving troubled mortgages off bank balance sheets and into government stewardship. But under HUDs program for first-time homeowners and borrowers with moderate earnings, the government already had direct control over thousands of loans.

Here was an agency that had a lot of homes, had the power to renegotiate them and did not, Miller said, referring to HUD.

Instead, in 2012, then-HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan created the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program to sell off the mortgages of first-time homeowners whose lenders had effectively given up on them. The goal of the program, which turbo-charged existing home-sale initiatives, was to replenish HUDs badly depleted finances and at least in theory to help homeowners facing foreclosure.

In practice, however, the programs focus on rapidly selling the homes to minimize HUDs losses took priority over relieving homeowners and Wall Street came out on top.

They basically shoveled [the mortgages] out the door in a fire sale to get rid of them and make some money without thinking about what the better thing would have been to do, said Julia Gordon, a former federal housing policy official who ran housing policy at the liberal Center for American Progress from 2012 to 2015.