The Trump administration plans to propose pulling back Obama-era efforts to desegregate housing, saying that people should have the opportunity to live where they want as long as they are protected from discrimination and housing is affordable.
The Obama administration argued that in order to fulfill the Fair Housing Act of 1968, states, local governments and public housing agencies had to address disparities in housing, integrate neighborhoods and transform racially concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity.
An Obama-era rule pressed state and local governments and public housing agencies to collect local and regional data on patterns of integration and segregation, and use it to promote fair housing and equal opportunity.
The Trump administration plans to propose a rule next week that will pull back those guidelines, arguing that they are onerous and actually holding back the construction of affordable housing. “Fair housing choice,” the new proposal says, is ensuring that people have the opportunity and option to live “where they choose” as long as there is no “unlawful discrimination.”
Ben Carson, the secretary of housing and urban development, said in August 2018 that the current rule, “which was designed to expand affordable housing choices, is actually suffocating investment in some of our most distressed neighborhoods that need our investment the most.”
Fair housing experts worry that the Trump administration is merely trying to get the Department of Housing and Urban Development out of civil rights enforcement.
If the rule is finalized, “ongoing housing discrimination and segregation will likely continue to be swept under the rug, and HUD resources will do far less to reduce segregation and expand housing opportunities” for protected groups, said Peggy Bailey, vice president for housing policy at the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The housing department has not released its annual fair housing report since 2017, but the National Fair Housing Alliance found that the number of housing discrimination complaints rose 8% in 2018 over 2017, the highest increase since 1995.
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The New York Times obtained a copy of the proposed rule after The Washington Post published its account. The housing department did not respond to requests for comment on the proposed rule.
The proposed rule comes as the nation’s biggest cities are trying to cope with housing crises and as homelessness rates have increased, especially on the West Coast. Black homeownership rates have declined to levels not seen since the 1960s. The department has already proposed a rule that would raise the bar for proving housing discrimination. The public comment period for that rule closed last August, and it is still under consideration.
The Fair Housing Act requires that recipients of HUD funding “affirmatively further” fair housing and equal opportunity but leaves it to the secretary of housing and urban development to decide what that means.
The Obama administration defined furthering fair housing as addressing “significant disparities in housing needs and in access to opportunity, replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns, transforming racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity, and fostering and maintaining compliance with civil rights and fair housing laws.”
The Trump administration would drastically pare that back to simply saying people should live “where they choose, within their means, without unlawful discrimination related to race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability.” No mention of segregation appears in the new definition.
The 2015 Obama rule required recipients of HUD funding to work with the agency to assess the state of fair housing in their community. The recipients were then required to create fair housing goals. The Obama administration estimated that the rule would cost local entities $25 million a year and HUD $9 million annually.
Housing advocates saw that as money well spent.
“After several years of considerable input from stakeholders across the spectrum, the Obama administration’s fair housing rule made the strongest effort in decades to reverse harmful patterns of segregation and discriminatory practices in communities across the country,” Diane Yentel, president of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, said in a statement.
The proposed rule would change how the housing department evaluates whether local governments and housing agencies are advancing its fair housing goals. Under the rule, local governments would be evaluated based on whether they have been sued by the Departments of Housing and Urban Development or Justice and whether they have provided an adequate supply of quality affordable housing. Fair housing lawsuits by advocacy organizations like the National Fair Housing Alliance would not count against the local entities.
Localities would be free to come up with their own goals to address housing discrimination.
“This approach would allow jurisdictions to act as they deem necessary to achieve their results while allowing HUD to avoid micromanaging localities,” the proposed rule says.
The proposed rule also lists 17 obstacles that jurisdictions can choose to address, like wetland or environmental regulations, but those do not include racial discrimination.
Conservative housing experts agreed with the new direction.
“Too often, government mandates, restrictions and subsidies fuel rising costs,” said Joel Griffith, a research fellow at the conservative Heritage Foundation. “On the state level, onerous restrictions on zoning — and on environmental regulations — can add dramatically to the costs of housing,”
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Advocates for fair housing say that focusing on the supply and quality of housing does not mean that racial minorities and other groups in the protected classes under the Fair Housing Act actually have access to the housing stock that is there. Nearly all of the obstacles listed in the proposed rule are focused on the supply of housing, not barriers to obtaining it.
There will be a 60-day public comment period once the rule is proposed. The department will have to consider the comments before finalizing the rule.
The latest proposal joins three other proposed rules that have elicited criticism from housing advocates. In addition to one that would raise the bar for proving housing discrimination, another would bar families with undocumented immigrants from receiving housing assistance. The public comment period closed last July, and over 30,000 public comments were submitted. The department must consider those comments before completing the rule. The other would weaken legal protections for transgender people in homeless shelters.
Source: PulseGh
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