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 Donald Trump to evoke racist tropes in housing matters and has been explicitly sold by the president as an avenue for preserving the racial segregation of American suburbs.
The shift in regulation will likely make multi-family housing more difficult to build in suburban areas and deals a blow to efforts aimed at bringing more affordable housing to these areas as a long-term housing crisis challenges people across the country.
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11 Comments
"The shift represents the latest aspect of a life-long effort by President Donald Trump to evoke racist tropes in housing matters and has been explicitly sold by the president as an avenue for preserving the racial segregation of American suburbs."
...in your opinion :-)
But why should there be affordable multi-family housing in suburbs so badly, why is that so important? There is nothing in the suburbs, it would mean even more traffic and congestion towards cities. And more time away from home, stuck in traffic in the bus or car, less time people can spend with their kids and families etc. If you really want to counter socio-economic segregation, why not build better quality homes in the cities, to stop or prevent the escape of the more affluent people? And...by keeping people with plenty of spending power in the cities you will create more jobs there, for the people in affordable multi-family housing!
no offense Archinect, in case you choose to delete randomised's post, but has it not occurred to you why "gated" communities exist, why people move to the suburbs, and why if you put affordable housing in a suburb (many areas) the property values drop? its because of people, people leave, some people who make more money than others do not like poor people. some people are racist. some people only want to live with people like them for whatever reason. its effectively a waste of tax payer dollars to force something on them they do no agree with whether openly or sub-consciously. i hope you see the error in this way?
Why don't I hear anything and where did all these dogs come from?
hey it's a doggy-dog world!
dog eat dog
thank you though for the document link, I appreciate the journalism...Sneaky, you'll have to catch me up some day on "millenial internet lingo", my kids are helping but I can't make sense of it.
dogs eat dogs? that's disgusting!
what about snoop dogg?
There is no bottom to how low this administration will go to prop up rich white people.
are there no rich non-white people living in the suburbs?
The AFH rule required suburbs to plan for addressing segregation at risk of losing key HUD funding
This was not a federal zoning mandate. At stake is HUD funding. Doesn't this mean that neighborhoods were getting public funding, and HUD was setting guidelines for its use? And if they were getting funding, doesn't that mean that they were, in fact, building lower cost housing? With the new plan, who will get the money and how will it be used? Or not used?
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