Remarks Prior to a Meeting With the Advisory Commission on Regulatory Barriers to Affordable Housing

Let me just thank all the members of this advisory committee and, particularly, our Secretary and Governor Kean and Lud Ashley. We've got a topflight commission. Earlier on with the leadership of Secretary Kemp, we set a goal for the administration, one million new homeowners by the year 1992. Jack tells me that we've got a good start on that. I think it's some 650,000 new, and low- and moderate-income homeowners to date. And that's at a time when the economy hasn't been all the best for a lot of people out there.

But if we want to have affordable housing for all -- and that's certainly our objective and goal -- we've got to confront this problem of regulation and excessive redtape, the bureaucracy in times interfering. And these are obstacles that make it difficult to construct housing for low-income families.

So, that's why our Secretary and this Commission have focused on the maze of bureaucratic barriers. And I'm very anxious to get a detailed report from everybody here about how it's going. But again, I want to end by thanking you, Governor, and Lud; of course, our Secretary and other key members of all this who devoted a lot of time to studying how we can make housing more affordable. It is a worthy national goal, and we've got to succeed. And I commend Jack and others at HUD on the start, but we recognize it's just the beginning.

So, thank you all for coming.