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Sure, Ben Carson is a nice guy with a great ghetto-to-Gold-Coast, pull-up-your-bootstraps narrative. The retired neurosurgeon has been the subject of best-selling books and a made-for-TV movie, "Gifted Hands," starring Cuba Gooding Jr. as Dr. Ben.

But what does he know about housing and urban development policy? Well, he owns a house and grew up in Detroit. Fine. But driving a car does now make you an auto mechanic.

HUD doesn't need a brain surgeon. It needs people with good brains for housing and urban development. Carson's views on fighting poverty, expressed in his speeches and writings, leans heavily on quaint, old-fashioned, self-help values. Poverty, he once told a television interview in a much-replayed clip, "is really more of a choice than anything else."

That might be true for those of us who were born poor but fortunate enough to have resources at hand, such as a fully functional family and good schools. But what do you do for those who were not born so lucky?

Trump's urban "disaster" views sound frozen in the riot years of the '60s. Poverty fighters in both parties whom I have covered in recent decades have learned a lot of valuable lessons about what works and what doesn't in urban policy.

Sometimes the lessons have come with unintended consequences. For example, the demolition of Chicago's public housing high-rises restored peace to some violently troubled real estate. But it led to a dispersal of street gangs into some of the city's poorest neighborhoods -- and one of the highest gun violence rates in the nation.

But there's enough good news in public-private partnerships, housing vouchers and other innovations to make many "inner-city" neighborhoods into oases of gentrification. To help those who have been left behind by these signs of urban hope, our nation needs wise leadership that doesn't require on-the-job training.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.)

(c) 2016 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.