Trump administration backs off mandate addressing housing segregation and discrimination
Summarize
The Trump administration terminated Biden's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule.
New York CNN —
In 2021, Boston began requiring real estate developers to consider how their projects could hurt residents historically discriminated against in housing and take steps to reduce those impacts.
In creating its zoning ordinance, Boston relied on an underused mandate in the 1968 Fair Housing Act — one that the Obama administration put teeth into for the first time in decades.
“Without the Obama rule, we would have been left with the same flowery language that had been dormant for 50 years,” said Massachusetts State Senator Lydia Edwards, then a Boston city councilor. “The point of rules attached to federal funding is to push cities and towns to do more and to prevent them from slipping back to old patterns.”
But the Trump administration is now stepping back from that mandate.
The mandate, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), requires states, cities and public housing agencies that receive federal funding from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to actively tackle housing discrimination and promote equal housing opportunities. It was enacted after a long history of discriminatory federal housing policies discriminating, such as denying mortgage insurance to Black homebuyers in White neighborhoods, known as redlining.
The Trump administration’s new AFFH rule requires jurisdictions only to certify that they took any action at all to promote fair housing. Instead of requiring localities to analyze barriers to equal housing choices or develop specific plans to remedy them, HUD will require a “general commitment” to take active steps to promote fair housing.
Protests outside the Department of Housing and Urban Development on March 3 in Washington. The Trump administration is reportedly planning to make cuts to the agency.
The Trump’s administration’s retreat — coupled with its funding cuts to nonprofit groups that enforce rules to prevent housing discrimination — will make it harder to build affordable housing and promote equal housing opportunities, researchers and advocates warn.
And it couldn’t come at a worse time, these experts say. Housing discrimination complaints are on the rise, and the United States is in the throes of the worst housing shortage in decades, disproportionately hurting people of color, seniors and people with disabilities.
“The federal government is stating ‘we are not making integration a priority,’” said Brandon Weiss, a law professor at American University who specializes in housing. “There’s also a practical impact. Jurisdictions will not be given the support or planning they need to eliminate residential racial segregation.”
A spokesperson for HUD told CNN that the agency will “continue to fight discrimination tooth and nail.” HUD will develop “new and more effective strategies to provide low-cost housing to all Americans, but it will not exceed its authority and experiment with the American people’s homes and neighborhoods.”
Obama revived fair housing mandate
The Obama administration was the first in decades to bolster the AFFH.
The AFFH mandate had mainly been dead letter law since George Romney, President Richard Nixon’s HUD secretary from 1969 to 1973, tried and failed to create a program that sought to deny federal funding to suburbs and cities that refused to allow affordable housing to be built.
Facing fierce resistance from middle-class White suburban voters and officials, Nixon blocked the plan and later pushed Romney out of office.
But in 2015, the Obama administration released an updated AFFH rule to require jurisdictions to assess barriers to equal housing in their communities and develop local plans to address those obstacles. The Obama rule also equipped jurisdictions with more sophisticated data and federal support to identify concentrated poverty and racial segregation, and it required stronger community engagement and planning to develop fair housing plans.
A 2019 study by MIT researchers found that the first municipalities to submit their fair housing plans after the Obama rule went into effect had significantly more robust goals with “measurable objectives” than they did under previous AFFH standards.
HUD Secretary George Romney in 1971. The Nixon administration thwarted a Romney initiative to further fair housing.
In Philadelphia, housing rights advocates relied on Obama’s strengthened AFFH rule to compel the city to analyze how eviction rates were disproportionally impacting Black tenants. Black tenants made up 74% of eviction cases in Philadelphia, and 70% involved women.
The updated rule also gave advocates and the city more technical assistance and tools to reduce evictions, said Rasheedah Phillips, the director of housing at the nonprofit PolicyLink, who worked on Philadelphia’s AFFH process.
“The AFFH assessment process forced the city to do an analysis around eviction systems. It gave the city the political will and justification,” Phillips said.
Their efforts worked: In 2019, Philadelphia passed a law guaranteeing renters the right to an attorney in two predominantly Black zip codes to address soaring eviction rates of Black women. That’s helped drive down evictions by 37% from pre-pandemic levels, advocates say.
Trump steps back
The AFFH has become a political football in recent administrations.
Trump suspended Obama’s updated rule in his first term. During the 2020 election campaign, Trump said the AFFH rule would ruin the suburbs by forcing more affordable housing.
“I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” Trump said in 2020.
Joe Biden’s administration in 2023 proposed a reworked version of Obama’s rule, but the Biden administration never finalized the rule, frustrating advocates.
The Trump administration this month scrapped Biden’s rule and month released a narrower version.
“Terminating this rule restores trust in local communities and property owners, while protecting America’s suburbs and neighborhood integrity,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement last month. Biden’s rule was a “zoning tax” that increased costs and “red tape” for local and state governments.
The 1968 Fair Housing Act banned discrimination in housing. It remains America's most important civil rights law protecting where people can live.
Howard Husock, a senior fellow in domestic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said thant Obama and Biden’s AFFH rules were “heavy handed” and “got in the way of organic growth and change at the local and state level.”
But other housing researchers and advocates say the Obama and Biden rules did not impose burdens on local jurisdictions. Without stronger standards and accountability, they say, communities will slide backwards on fair housing efforts.
And they dispute HUD Secretary Turner’s claim that scrapping the rule will encourage new housing or lead to lower costs for renters and buyers.
The Trump administration’s change “takes away a tool that encouraged more housing opportunities for middle-class and working-class households,” said Justin Steil, a professor of law and urban planning at MIT who studies housing.
“The implications are higher-cost housing and fewer opportunities for people to have a choice in where they live,” he said — in all communities, not just the suburbs.
