Coming from the desk of a housing and architecture expert, this letter urges Housing and Urban Development secretary nominee Ben Carson to take a hard look at America’s housing situation and see that it’s an “everyone problem.”

Mark Lamster, a professor at the University of Texas at Arlington and a Loeb Fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Design studying urban planning, wrote an open letter to Carson on how to solve the housing crisis in The Dallas Morning News.

Here’s the start of the letter:

I hope you will read this and take it on advisement, as it is written with sincerity and from someone who has struggled with a subject you are about to confront: the challenges of the American housing system. Perhaps you are thinking, well, at least it's not brain surgery — something at which you are expert — and in that I would agree. 

It is far, far more difficult. I do not mean to be facetious; I presume there have been considerable developments in neurosurgery over the last 50 years. Our housing situation, on the other hand, seems only to have gotten worse.

Lest you think this is principally a story about African-American poverty, let me correct you. The majority of Americans in subsidized housing are white and elderly. Housing is an everyone problem.

For other viewpoints on Carson, check here.