Archinect - News

AIA condemns changes to Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule

2020-07-29T19:36:00-04:00

The American Institute of Architects (AIA) has issued a statement condemning recently announced changes to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) provision of the 1968 Fair Housing Act by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Last week, HUD Secretary Ben Carson announced changes to the landmark Obama-era directive that effectively remove requirements for municipalities to analyze and ultimately reverse patterns of segregation within their neighborhoods.

Previously on Archinect: "Trump administration terminates Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule." View of the HUD headquarters in Washington, D.C.Image courtesy of Wikimedia user dbking

The change has been in the works since 2018 and news of its final implementation was met with strong resistance from housing activists.

In a statement condemning the changes, AIA EVP/Chief Executive Officer Robert Ivy, FAIA writes, "AIA strongly opposes the Administration’s dismantling of this critical r...

Trump administration terminates Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule

2020-07-23T18:29:00-04:00

United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson has finalized a plan to dismantle the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation that sought to rectify entrenched racial and economic segregation in American suburbs.

The AFH ruling was crafted during the administration of Barack Obama as part of an effort to more effectively enforce the 1968 Fair Housing Act legislation. The AFH rule required suburbs to plan for addressing segregation at risk of losing key HUD funding and was meant to support wider desegregation efforts.

The latest directive, long in the making, relieves municipalities of their duty to address patterns of segregation within their boundaries and is being effectively replaced with a new directive titled Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice, a rule that grants municipalities much more leeway in meeting softened AFH guidelines. The shift represents the latest aspect of a life-long effort by President Don...

HUD continues to whittle away at the Fair Housing Act

2020-01-21T16:24:00-05:00

The Fair Housing Act [...] prohibits not only intentional segregation, but also policies and practices whose effect is to discriminate for no defensible reason, even if there is no evidence of a racial motive. Lawyers describe such actions as having a “disparate impact” on minorities. Now, however, the Trump administration is about to put into effect procedures to make it virtually impossible to prove disparate impact, no matter how egregious a discriminatory policy or practice may be.

Richard Rothstein, author of the influential book The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, presents an opinion piece in The New York Times highlighting the latest multi-pronged efforts on the part of the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to dismantle the effectiveness and legal significance of the Fair Housing Act under the administration of President Donald Trump.

The latest efforts aim to make filing lawsuits arguing that policies and practices generate acts of de-facto racial segregation more difficult and onerous.

Trump administration to help L.A. homelessness efforts. But there's a catch

2020-01-17T11:29:00-05:00

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson told Mayor Eric Garcetti in a letter last Thursday that Trump officials are prepared to offer Los Angeles an array of resources, including emergency healthcare services and federal land. However, Carson also suggested in his letter that the government expects changes from L.A. in how it manages homelessness...he wrote, “the city and county of Los Angeles must partner with our efforts and make necessary policy changes.”

The offer follows recent talks between senior Trump administration officials, Mayor Garcetti and Los Angeles County Supervisor Kathryn Barger, reports the Los Angeles Times. It includes potential provision of emergency healthcare services, supplemental emergency shelters and transitional housing, federal land, assistance for law enforcement and "voucher utilization support," writes Times reporters Dakota Smith, Benjamin Oreskes, and Noah Bierman. Moreover, Carson outlined a number of stipulations, including reallocating funding, "empowering and utilizing local law enforcement," and reducing regulations to expedite the construction of affordable housing.

Federal government takes another step away from "affirmatively furthering fair housing"

2020-01-13T14:14:00-05:00

The history of housing discrimination in this country is in significant part a history of deliberate government policy, not market forces or individual choice. Ghettos such as those in Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland and Baltimore, in fact, reflect federal policies of the mid-20th century that made segregation a condition for federal support of various kinds. That was social engineering of the most shameful sort.

The Washington Post editorial board sounds off on a recent plan advanced by United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson that seeks to further weaken Obama-era "affirmatively furthering fair housing" regulations.

According to the editorial, the wording of the 2015 ruling has been changed by Carson to shift its focus from advancing "meaningful actions" to "replac[e] segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns," according to The Washington Post, with a new focus on "advancing fair housing choice within the program participant’s control or influence."

The change is one of many recent retreats on the part of the current presidential administration aimed at reversing progressive housing reforms enacted before 2016.

Private funding for repairs and improvements could come to America's senior housing for the first time under new HUD rule

2019-08-01T19:09:00-04:00

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is close to finalizing a major reform of its extensive senior housing portfolio, allowing nonprofit owners of 125,000 apartments to tap private sources of financing for the first time. HUD built nearly 2,900 of these properties over the past three decades. Though owned by nonprofits, the federal government funded their construction and subsidized tenant rents.

The nation's recent crop of senior housing projects could see much-needed improvements come to reality as the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) loosens rules dictating where nonprofit building owners can draw funds from to make building repairs.

Tom Davis, director of the Office of Recapitalization at HUD told The Wall Street Journal, “Fundamentally what we’re trying to do is avoid the kind of capital backlog problem that other parts of the affordable housing portfolio have, like public housing."

HUD planning to allow anti-trans discrimination in homeless shelters

2019-05-24T14:51:00-04:00

The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is moving to allow federally-funded homeless shelters to deny people admission based on their gender identity.

A proposed HUD rule will allow federally-funded shelters to establish policies “consistent with state and local law” with regards to how shelters “consider an individual’s sex” when they are being admitted by facilities where people are placed into same-sex or gender-segregated accommodations. The ruling will also allow shelters to use a range of factors in making gender determinations, including “privacy, safety, practical concerns, religious beliefs, any relevant considerations under civil rights and nondiscrimination authorities, the individual’s sex as reflected in official government documents, as well as the gender which a person identifies with.”

According to LGBTQ advocates, the proposed rule will effectively gut the Obama-era Equal Access Rule, a 2012 directive that sought to “ensure core [HUD] pr...

NYCHA in danger of a federal takeover

2019-01-02T14:50:00-05:00

According to the United States’ General Accounting Office, receiverships in housing authorities generally result from “longstanding, severe, and persistent management problems that led to deterioration of housing stock.” NYCHA, who took the public advocate’s top spot for the city’s worst landlord in 2018, faces mounting repair costs in excess of $25 billion and has exhibited failures eliminating mold and lead paint, among a laundry list of other nightmarish woes for its tenants.

Mayor Bill De Blasio and the Department of Housing and Urban Development have until the 31st of January to agree on how to run the agency. If that does not happen and Ben Carson declares New York City Housing Authority in substantial default, NYCHA which oversees housing for over 400,000 New Yorkers might be taken over by the federal government.

In the case of an administrative receivership, NYCHA’s affairs would be taken over by HUD, which could potentially involve working together as partners. However, if placed into a judicial receivership, NYCHA would be appointed a receiver, ranging anywhere between HUD officials and private firms, that after personal assessment would have full authority to change the agency and manage its properties to their liking, backed by the court.

Ben Carson recommends raising rents for low-income Americans receiving rental assistance

2018-04-26T14:45:00-04:00

Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson has announced a proposal to raise rents for low-income Americans relying on federal housing subsidies.

Currently, families and individuals living in subsidized housing are traditionally asked to spend 30% of their adjusted income on rent, with a cap on rent for the program's lowest earners at $50 per month. According to the Washington Post, Carson's new initiative would raise the standard for tenants to 35% of their gross incomes, with the cap on rent for the poorest families rising to $150 a month.

Though the 30-percent rule for measuring affordability has long been accepted as the standard rule of thumb, for families at lower income brackets, even this percentage is way too high when factoring in other necessary expenses as well as the need to save for emergencies. Increasing this by 5% would put further strain on millions of households already burdened by our current system, and would likely force many into homelessness.

In addit...

"Dismantling of the administrative state" under Ben Carson

2017-08-24T13:23:00-04:00

HUD has emerged as the perfect distillation of the right’s antipathy to governing. If the great radical-conservative dream was, in Grover Norquist’s famous words, to “drown government in a bathtub,” then this was what the final gasps of one department might look like.

In his new piece for New York Magazine, Alec MacGillis examines Ben Carson's turbulent and confusing time at HUD. He describes in detail, the situation at the headquarters, the Trump Cuts, and the secretary's July trip to Baltimore.

He had been chosen for a job he had few qualifications for by a man who had few obvious qualifications for his own job, and he was now being left to his own devices to defend the dismantling of the department he was supposed to run, with an underpopulated corps of deputies at his side.

HUD has long been something of an overlooked stepchild within the federal government. Founded in 1965 in a burst of Great Society resolve to confront the “urban crisis,” it has seen its manpower slide by more than half since the Reagan Revolution. (The HUD headquarters is now so eerily underpopulated that it can’t even support a cafeteria; it sits vacant on the first floor.) But HUD still serves a function that millions of low-income Americans depend on — it funds 3,300 p...

Poverty is "a state of mind," states HUD Secretary Ben Carson

2017-05-25T17:36:00-04:00

Poverty is largely “a state of mind”, housing secretary Ben Carson has claimed, dismaying observers who had modest hopes for his tenure. Carson, the neurosurgeon who heads the agency charged with helping low-income Americans gain access to affordable housing, told Sirius XM radio: “You take somebody who has the right mindset, you can take everything from them and put them on the street, and I guarantee in a little while they’ll be right back up there.”

"And you take somebody with the wrong mindset, you can give them everything in the world, they’ll work their way back down to the bottom," Carson continued. The remarks were widely condemned by experts on poverty and homelessness.

As the Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Carson is in charge of providing affordable and public housing to the disenfranchised. According to almost universal consensus by experts, poverty is not a choice, but rather a condition attributable to a range of a factors, from where you were born to the color of your skin to bad luck.

Most Americans will live below the poverty line at some point in their life, research by the US government has discovered. In 2015, 13.5% (43.1 million) Americans lived in poverty. This far exceeds most other wealthy countries. And, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, "the United States has the greatest share of renters (28.5%) who are severely cost burdened, spending more than half of t...

HUD head Ben Carson thinks creature comforts are not for those on Section 8

2017-05-09T13:22:00-04:00

As he toured facilities for the poor in Ohio last week, Mr. Carson, the neurosurgeon-turned-housing secretary, joked that a relatively well-appointed apartment complex for veterans lacked “only pool tables.” He inquired at one stop whether animals were allowed. At yet another, he nodded, plainly happy, as officials explained how they had stacked dozens of bunk beds inside a homeless shelter and purposefully did not provide televisions.

In a recent visit to a public housing facility in Columbus, Ohio, HUD head Ben Carson reiterated his stance that anyone receiving Section 8 housing vouchers or federal assistance should not get too comfortable, as this would lead them to simply want to stay in their federally provided digs. Ironically, studies have shown that for the chronic homeless population, remaining in one place is actually much cheaper for the state than having them constantly bouncing between shelters and the street once emergency room visits and legal fees are added into the mix. Carson did make allowances for those who are mentally ill or unable to provide for themselves, but in his view there is to be no rest for who he defines as the able-bodied.

Ben Carson gets stuck in an elevator during a tour of a public housing complex

2017-04-12T12:24:00-04:00

With limited funds, many American affordable housing projects aren’t in great shape. Their fate is ever more tenuous with the impending budget cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed by the Trump Administration. In an ironic twist of fate, the often-sorry state of affordable housing was brought to the attention of the controversial new secretary of the HUD, Ben Carson, when he and his wife were trapped in an elevator at a Miami public complex on Wednesday, as reported by the Miami Herald. The couple were stuck for a full fifteen minutes before firefighters freed them.

Neurosurgeon Ben Carson officially confirmed to run HUD

2017-03-02T13:09:00-05:00

Urban policy experts and progressive activists have expressed intense concern that Carson, in keeping with his strong conservative positions, will seek to cut money for government assistance programs and wear down the social safety net. The Trump administration has recently signaled that many government agencies can expect budget reductions in favor of increasing defense spending.

Realizing the latent dream of every neurosurgeon to one day run the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson has been officially confirmed by the U.S. Senate to start operating on the HUD. Although his plans for the agency are vague, Carson has spoken of being against granting "extra rights" to any community.

Senator Elizabeth Warren voted to support Carson's confirmation in committee before voting against his actual confirmation, explaining in a written statement that "Dr. Carson’s answers weren’t perfect. But at his hearing, he committed to track and report on conflicts of interest at the agency. If President Trump goes to his second choice, I don’t think we will get another HUD nominee who will even make these promises — much less follow through on them.”

Don’t want Ben Carson to become Secretary of HUD? Sign this letter

2017-01-09T14:32:00-05:00

A growing list of urban planners, designers, architects, and scholars are putting their weight behind a petition intended to prevent Dr. Ben Carson from becoming the next Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). He has no prior experience with housing and holds widely-unpopular positions on public housing and other issues. For instance, Carson has described the Fair Housing Act as “socialist”, suggesting he would not enforce it.

Here's how the letter, which is still being edited and written collaboratively, begins:

We, the undersigned, are strongly opposed to the appointment of Dr. Ben Carson as the next Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Apart from his personal views on a variety of political and social issues, we consider Dr. Carson completely unqualified to anticipate or promote appropriate solutions to the pressing housing and urban needs facing our country.

Created in 1965 to further the nation’s housing and urban...

5 housing experts offer opinions about Ben Carson's direction as HUD head

2016-12-06T14:09:00-05:00

What are the likely policy goals of a neurosurgeon appointed secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development by a man who can't stop disappointedly tweeting at Alec Baldwin? "There’s not a dearth of qualified Republicans for that job, so if you choose somebody with no background in housing, it says something about your priorities,” says Julia Gordon, executive vice president of the National Community Stabilization Trust, according to an article in NextCity. Various other housing experts, including Barbara Sard and Benjamin Dulchin, voiced concern about the man with no actual federal housing experience, although former HUD official Maurice Jones was cautiously optimistic, saying that "whatever agenda or whatever priority they have, I look forward to learning what that is." The article goes on to note that:

"a Washington Times op-ed by Ben Carson published in July 2015 indicates that he either does not understand or does not support the AFFH rule [Affirmatively Furtherin...

HUD-winked: Ben Carson takes on housing for Trump and ZHA distances itself from Patrik Schumacher on Archinect Sessions #90, ft. special guest Marc Miller

2016-12-01T15:46:00-05:00

When president-elect Donald Trump nominated Ben Carson to lead the department of Housing and Urban Development, the response was resoundingly: huh?

The neurosurgeon came onto the national political scene in 2015, during his run for the Republican nomination, but after Trump took the presidency and started throwing around the idea of offering a Cabinet position to Carson, a spokesperson said "Dr. Carson feels he has no government experience, he's never run a federal agency. The last thing he would want to do was take a position that could cripple the presidency." Despite all that, Carson is now (almost definitely officially) secretary of HUD (which he knows just enough about to seriously backtrack the agency's work as pushed by Obama). So here we are.

Special guest Marc Miller joins us on the podcast to discuss the implications of Carson's inexperience for HUD, as well as chew on the latest Schumacher-induced controversy: when the architect promoted the privatization of public space an...

What Ben Carson's federal inexperience means for HUD

2016-11-30T16:08:00-05:00

If Carson wants to dramatically change the nature of HUD, all he needs to do is nothing — a course of action he seems temperamentally inclined to accept. Under Carson, HUD could stop enforcement of that "socialist" Fair Housing Act. It could stop prodding local governments to increase access to homes. It could look the other way when local ordinances sequester government-mandated affordable housing away from those with enough pull to say "not in my backyard."

Related on Archinect:

President-elect Trump offers HUD post to Ben Carson

2016-11-23T13:19:00-05:00

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has offered the post of secretary of housing and urban development to former presidential candidate Ben Carson, who will consider it over the Thanksgiving holiday, a Carson spokesman said on Tuesday. "The president-elected asked him to consider it and he's considering it," Carson spokesman Armstrong Williams said. Carson, a retired surgeon, dropped out of the 2016 presidential race in March and backed Trump.

More on the US Department of Housing and Urban Development: