The Trump Administration's Highly- Politicized Roll Back of Obama-Era Fair Housing Rule Raises Concerns

With a presidential election now less than 100 days away, the Trump administration has ramped up its efforts to consolidate support among his base of older, whiter voters. Those efforts now include the reversal of an Obama-era HUD policy, in a not-so-subtle appeal to the racialized fears of white suburban voters.

Last week, Trump and the Department of Housing and Urban Development, led by Ben Carson, officially scrapped a rule meant to ensure compliance with the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Enshrined in 2015, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing policy held communities accountable for providing fair housing by requiring any town that wanted to receive HUD funding to document and publicly report patterns of racial bias. 

The AFFH aimed to push local governments to track poverty and segregation in their communities, tying access to federal funding for housing to their completion of a 92-point questionnaire. A HUD proposal released back in January initially aimed to augment AFFH, but feedback on these changes ultimately pushed Ben Carson’s HUD to scrap it altogether.

From the HUD chief, former surgeon, and expensive chair-lover’s perspective, doing away with AFFH—which HUD hasn’t enforced since 2018—is an effort to help local communities cut through red tape.

“After reviewing thousands of comments on the proposed changes to the [AFFH] regulation, we found it to be unworkable and ultimately a waste of time for localities to comply with, too often resulting in funds being steered away from communities that need them most,” Carson told Politico.

The new, final rule (which is not subject to public input) essentially lets municipalities declare that they’re in compliance with the tenets of the 1968 Fair Housing Act without any major documentation or accountability. As long as they show a “general commitment that grantees will use the funds to take active steps to promote fair housing,” HUD will essentially take their word for it.

While Carson may frame the move as an attempt to cut red tape and do away with a rule he described as “a ruse for social engineering under the guise of desegregation,” the president’s messaging on the subject has all the subtlety of a jackhammer.

“I am studying the AFFH housing regulation that is having a devastating impact on these once thriving Suburban areas,” Trump tweeted on June 30th. “Corrupt Joe Biden wants to make them MUCH WORSE. Not fair to homeowners, I may END!”

In the month since, Trump has falsely accused Biden of pushing to “abolish our beautiful and successful suburbs” both in speeches and on social media. On July 29th, Trump’s dog whistling about AFFH and the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream” grew even louder, implicitly connecting low income housing and crime. A 2016 Stanford Business School study focused on housing built using the Low Income Tax Credit found that adding affordable housing to high-income neighborhoods does not lead to an increase in crime.

Given that any path to a (free and fair) reelection for Trump will require chipping away at Biden’s lead with suburban voters, it’s hard to interpret the rollback as much more than a thinly-veiled appeal to the racist fears of white voters. The Fair Housing Act (technically Titles VIII and IX of the Civil Rights Act of 1968) made the act of overt redlining, which denied minority communities access to loans and other services, illegal.

The act’s passage occurred amid a period of “white flight” out of cities and into more racially homogenized suburbs, one of the defining demographic shifts of the 20th century. In some metropolitan areas, this trend was exacerbated by urban planning and infrastructure decisions both before and after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. In the decades that followed, presidents from Nixon to Reagan and Clinton deployed “tough on crime” rhetoric, a loaded shorthand used to draw distinctions between the peace and quiet of the predominantly white suburbs and the poverty and violence of inner cities.

However, the current administration’s passive approach to compliance with the Fair Housing Act via the non-enforcement and now abolition of the AFFH rule has led to a sharp increase in housing discrimination complaints. A 2019 report from the National Fair Housing Alliance found that there were 31,202 complaints of housing discrimination in 2018, the highest number since the NFHA began collecting such data in 1995. In essence, HUD’s current approach perpetuates housing discrimination by allowing—even encouraging—communities to look the other way.

The Trump administration’s lack of subtlety over why it’s scrapping AFFH requirements has been met quickly with opposition from progressives in Congress. New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has already introduced amendments to a congressional appropriations bill that would block the use of federal funds for the new HUD rules proposed by Ben Carson, including the AFFH rollback.

“We must hinder President Trump’s efforts to segregate communities and to discriminate against Black and Brown homeowners and renters,” Ocasio-Cortez told Bloomberg CityLab. “We cannot return to the days of redlining and white flight.”

Though it’s unlikely the appropriations bill will make its way through Congress before the election, it at least serves as a public rebuke of HUD’s decision.

As Trump himself was once sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination, it is in many ways unsurprising that his administration would roll back enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, undoing an Obama-era rule in the process. This ruling comes as eviction moratoriums are running out and housing is becoming even more unstable for many of those affected by the economic downturn.

Even still, the timing of the announcement and its use of coded racist rhetoric to energize part of the president’s base is just one more cynical move from an administration that’s both deployed federal agents against its own citizens and spread misinformation about mail-in voting as the election nears.

Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest