Candace Valenzuela

In April 2022, Candace Valenzuela was appointed by the Biden-Harris Administration to serve as the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Regional Administrator in the Southwest Region. As regional administrator, Candace Valenzuela is based in Fort Worth and oversees HUD operations, eight field offices and federal housing assistance throughout the five- state region, which covers Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. She is one of 10 HUD regional administrators.  She is a mother, an educator, and a proud former school board trustee of Carrollton-Farmers Branch. She credits HUD and public education with giving her the stability she and her family needed to thrive as she experienced food and housing insecurity throughout childhood. After becoming the first in her family to graduate college, Valenzuela has since devoted her life to fighting for opportunities for others. She first ran for office in 2017 to improve her neighborhood schools, becoming the first Latina and first Black woman to serve on the Carrollton-Farmers Branch school board. While on the board, she worked to ensure that faculty and staff would receive more pay to be able to afford to live in the district they served and that students would have a strong education to help them overcome life’s challenges. Valenzuela was the Democratic nominee for Congress in Texas’ 24th District in 2020, receiving early endorsements from Texas AFL-CIO and the AFT. 

Before her time at HUD, she worked as a development manager for Metrocrest Services, a half-century-old non-profit that has worked hard to fight hunger, housing insecurity, and unemployment in her community.