Bill Pulte’s St. Louis “Blight Authority” and the Rise of MAGA Disaster Capitalism
Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has made headlines lately for being a willing agent of President Donald Trump’s authoritarian retribution binge as well as an eager spokesman for the administration’s predatory homeownership policy trial balloons. Pulte helped build criminal mortgage fraud referrals for US Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA), New York Attorney General Letitia James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and US Representative Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Pulte also seems to have a hand in the Department of Justice’s newly-launched inquiry into supposed crimes committed by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, whom he has frequently attacked in numerous friendly FOX News interviews.
Beyond Pulte’s lapdog loyalty to Trump, he has used his official position to push Trumpian policies supposedly designed to address the housing affordability crisis. One, from which the administration is now retreating, was the idea of rewriting mortgage regulations to allow fifty-year mortgages offering lower monthly payments. Critics quickly pointed out that these mortgages would rob homeowners of the chance to build real equity that they could cash out in their own lifetimes – a primary source of upward mobility for working Americans. The increased interest paid over the longer term would also be a gift to lenders. Others noted that among proponents of these mortgages were investors, including private equity firms. Data shows that investors purchased 27% of all single dwellings for sale in the first quarter of 2025, and in some urban metropolitan areas, as much as 12.4% of single dwellings are owned by private equity firms.
Pulte and Trump clearly used the voters’ real concerns about affordability to push for a policy beneficial to investors looking to drop holding costs, ramp up profits, and lower risks. The backlash has burned the proposal for now, although other questionable policy ideas from Pulte seem to lie ahead.
Before his MAGA turn, though, Pulte made a stop in St. Louis, where he pitched a supposedly innovative program to eliminate urban blight that seems to have been another investor-friendly gimmick. Like his mortgage proposal, his St. Louis pitch also aimed to pull profit from economic disaster by accelerating the disaster. And it also ended pretty fast.
In July 2019, Pulte joined Twitter-founding tech billionaire and native son Jack Dorsey to announce the formation of the “St. Louis Blight Authority”. Previously, Pulte had joined his father, who was CEO of Detroit-area homebuilder Pulte Homes, to create a “Detroit Blight Authority” that demolished dozens of abandoned buildings and cleared hundreds of vacant lots in two phases. In St. Louis, Pulte promised that a prototype project demolishing 30 abandoned buildings across four blocks in the Wells-Goodfellow neighborhood would foment a long-term effort to rid the city of all blight by 2035. Pulte and Dorsey would run the operation as a charity, costing city government nothing while allowing the duo to recruit their wealthy friends as donors.
At the time of the St. Louis Blight Authority’s creation, then-Mayor Lyda Krewson lauded the effort as compatible with the city’s own Green City Coalition plan to ameliorate the problem of urban vacancy. Krewson and then-Alderman Jeffrey Boyd (D-22nd) attended the ceremonial start of demolition, giving the work the imprimatur of city government sanction. The right-wing think tank Show-Me Institute published a short essay claiming that the initiative would shift blight-busting back to free market forces and open St. Louis’ northern neighborhoods to reinvestment. A Manhattan Institute fellow even predicted that the St. Louis Blight Authority would reduce St. Louis’ crime rate.
There was one problem, though: Pulte and Dorsey never followed through after the initial project. The St. Louis Blight Authority was never even incorporated as a Missouri nonprofit corporation, and its name disappeared from the news just as quickly as it arrived. This matches the trajectory of the Detroit Blight Authority, which also went quiet relatively soon – although some observers have blamed Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan for pushing the project away. St. Louis hardly seems set to be “blight-free” by 2035, and Wells-Goodfellow has not seen substantial new investment since the 2019 pilot project. In fact, it has continued to bleed population, small businesses, and buildings.
Looking back, Pulte’s concoction of blight removal as a philanthropic effort today reads more like a project of redirecting control of demolition and land assemblage from public entities and public planning processes to private entities controlled by investors and developers themselves. Adopting a narrative of answering the call from city governments that blight remediation was a public emergency, as well as responding to city governments’ precarious fiscal positions, the “blight authorities” were presented as welcome partners who could accelerate financing of demolition and clearance.
In the end, the blight authorities would end up controlling where resources would be concentrated, subjugating public considerations to investor desires. The city’s bulldozer would still be steered by elected officials having to offer some semblance of participation to their constituents, but the faster-moving charitable bulldozer could be driven solely by seemingly-beneficent private forces trying to generate sites for redevelopment.
The problem that Pulte faced in Detroit and St. Louis alike was that the more stable sources of development lending (banks) remained resistant to lending in majority-Black neighborhoods, and the venture capital that the blight authorities imagined showing up never did. Broken old neighborhoods did not become the 2010s tech startups Pulte and Dorsey imagined. Paul J. McKee’s Northside Regeneration, built on properties cross-collateralized by traditional bank loans – including a major note from the Bank of Washington — heavily subsidized by its own boutique state tax credit, has proven the surer long-term bet on disaster capitalism in distressed St. Louis neighborhoods. McKee has not even bothered to pay for demolition, clearance, or maintenance. The exceptions have only occurred when politicians have placed pressure on him.
Now in charge of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, Pulte continues to pursue financial policies positioned to be disruptive and clever, while aimed at maximizing opportunities for extracting profits from homebuilding and development. The outcomes for people or places are, at best, an afterthought. Case in point: the administration’s new idea to allow people to cash out parts of their 401(k) retirement accounts to make down payments for houses, an idea that also fails to address the market manipulation by investors leading to distorted housing prices. Now hard-earned retirement savings would be forked over to lucrative closings, perhaps expanding the American Dream, but doing so at the expense of vital retirement funds and forcing longer durations in the workforce.
St. Louis can recall the moment when its Democratic mayor endorsed his antics, showing again that the valorization of the MAGA ideology has not been solely a right-wing policy. The part of MAGA that welcomes fast-moving opportunities for the wealthy to cash out while cities and workers burn often has aligned with the neoliberal dreams of urban Democrats. Bill Pulte came away from St. Louis with applause for a fake project. What if the city had said no, we have to listen to our people, instead?
