Ben Carson touts relaxed fair housing rule in Charlotte. Critics call it ‘dangerous’
The Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to reduce Obama-era fair housing regulations intended to decrease segregation, Secretary Ben Carson announced Tuesday in Charlotte.
The proposal would relax municipalities’ requirements to document its obstacles to fair housing, which Carson called costly and burdensome, and change the metrics for how federal money is awarded.
It “empowers local leaders to employ federal funds as they see necessary to increase affordable housing options across the board for their local citizenry,” he said.
But fair housing advocates criticized the proposal, saying it would jeopardize efforts to undo decades of housing segregation and inequality.
“It is deceptive and dangerous in that it conflates affordable housing with fair housing and they are not the same thing,” said Stella Adams, a Durham-based fair housing consultant who retired last year as the chief of equity and inclusion for the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.
“Cities and counties have to have an affirmative duty to protect fair housing and to not adopt policies that further segregation.”
Carson said relaxing the rule wouldn’t increase housing segregation and HUD will continue to enforce anti-discrimination policies.
“There are no George Wallace-type people standing in doorways saying, ‘You can’t come in here,’” he said, referring to the former Alabama governor and stringent segregationist. Poverty, he said, is a greater force in housing segregation.
“People don’t have the finances to go anywhere,” he said. “So really, the financial segregation looks like racial segregation.”
He criticized a previous emphasis on building affordable housing in more affluent “areas of opportunity,” which he said “was suffocating investment in some of the neighborhoods that needed it most.”
“In cities like Charlotte, low-income areas were actually ‘red-lined’ out of affordable housing development plans and federal resources were redirected to high-income areas. The very areas that need the most attention were being neglected,” he said, using a term that typically refers to policies that kept minority renters and buyers out of certain neighborhoods.
Several national fair housing advocacy groups, including the National Fair Housing Alliance and the National Low Income Housing Coalition, also oppose the change.
Reversal of Obama-era rule
The proposal would reduce how extensively municipalities must document their efforts to “affirmatively furthering fair housing” to comply with the 1968 Fair Housing Act and get federal funding.
The current rule calls for “significant actions to overcome historic patterns of segregation, achieve truly balanced and integrated living patterns, promote fair housing choice, and foster inclusive communities that are free from discrimination.”
That included extensive data collection and mapping of historic housing segregation by both government and commercial entities like banks and landlords, which for years denied loans or rental units to minority customers.
Instead, the Trump administration proposes a less detailed documentation process, where municipalities identify fair housing barriers specific to local concerns.
New metrics would rank jurisdictions based on if they are free of adjudicated fair housing claims and have adequate supply of quality affordable housing throughout the area. It would also eliminate the segregation mapping tool created by the previous administration.
Adams, the Durham fair housing consultant, said large metro areas with long-standing histories of segregation and inequality would lose out under this new formula.
Directing affordable housing development toward “opportunity areas” in an effort to break up concentrated poverty has been a priority for Charlotte affordable housing efforts including at Inlivian, formerly the Charlotte Housing Authority.
“Given the concerns regarding gentrification, access to areas of high opportunity, and a history of discrimination that has placed Charlotte 50th out of 50 in economic mobility among the country’s largest cities we feel that it is imperative to be prudent as we review the proposed changes to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule,” Inlivian President and CEO A. Fulton Meachem Jr. said in a statement.
“We are supportive of any efforts that encourage the creation and preservation of quality affordable housing while not jeopardizing essential anti-discriminatory protections for the families we serve — households that are most vulnerable to these challenges.”
When the rule is published, it will have a 60-day public comment period. If implemented, this would be the latest of several moves to ease fair housing regulations at HUD during the Trump administration.
North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein signed on with nearly two dozen state attorneys general in October to oppose a rule that weakens fair housing laws around claims of disparate impact, or discrimination regardless of intent.
This work was made possible in part by grant funding from Report for America/GroundTruth Project and the Foundation For The Carolinas.
This story was originally published January 7, 2020 at 11:35 AM.
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