More than half a century after the milestones of the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, the United States is still segregated. People of color, even affluent and middle-class people of color, are statistically more likely to live in lower-opportunity neighborhoods. This persistent residential segregation limits the neighborhoods that people of color and low-income people have access to. Where you live impacts your access to everything from clean air to high quality schools, resulting in vulnerable families living in communities where residents have lower life expectancies, lower incomes, and lower educational attainment.
Segregation was not an accident. Richard Rothstein explains in his influential book The Color of Law that, “Today’s residential segregation…is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.” It is because of deliberate decisions such as the subsidization of exclusively white communities in the mid 20th century that our current public leaders have a “constitutional as well as moral obligation,” as Rothstein puts it, to reverse residential segregation and discriminatory housing policies.
Housing has been a constant topic in the news in recent years, but the focus is almost always affordability. Significantly less attention is paid to progress in fair housing, or the lack thereof. This has enabled the Trump administration to undo the legacy of the Fair Housing Act by dismantling long-standing fair housing protections, with relatively muted pushback. Recent federal actions have impacted state and local governments’ ability to locally plan for equitable uses of federal funding, harmed people in need that are actively seeking assistance, and broken avenues for accountability when discrimination occurs.
The Trump administration’s actions have targeted and damaged fundamental fair housing protections. It is incumbent on housing advocates to place fair housing back at the center of our advocacy, before it is completely eliminated.
Rejecting the legal duty to affirmatively further fair housing
The 1968 Fair Housing Act requires that federally funded programs and policies be administered “in a manner to affirmatively further the purposes of” the Fair Housing Act. This means not just eliminating discrimination, but proactively addressing past segregation by ensuring that people can choose where they live and correcting the impact of disinvestment in segregated, majority non-white communities.
Both the Obama and Biden administrations attempted to enact Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rules for the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). These rules would clarify HUD’s interpretation of the Fair Housing Act’s “affirmatively further” clause, allowing the agency to meaningfully implement and enforce this requirement and help address the government’s obligation to undo segregation. However, on February 26 of this year, HUD, now under the guidance of the Trump administration, terminated the Biden-era 2021 AFFH rule, signaling an abandonment of the federal government’s obligation to undo the legacy of segregation.
The elimination of the most recent AFFH rule was expected. However, newly appointed HUD Secretary Scott Turner’s provided reasoning was weaker than expected. Abandoning all pretense that eliminating the AFFH rule has anything to do with fair housing, Turner’s announcement stated that “the Biden-era AFFH rule was, in effect, a ‘zoning tax,’ which fueled an increase in the cost and a decrease in the supply of affordable housing due to restrictions on local land.”
This claim does not hold up to scrutiny.
Two of the three-mentions of zoning in the Biden-era rule are simple requirements for grantees to analyze how local policies contribute to patterns of segregation and impact the ability of low-income households to access housing in well-resourced neighborhoods. The third mention suggests that a possible fair housing goal for grantees is to “increase housing and neighborhood access” by “reducing land use and zoning restrictions that limit housing supply and increase housing costs” to increase low income families’ access to affordable housing in well-resourced communities. Not only is this one of eight suggestions for ways that grantees could potentially address fair housing needs, but it is quite literally the opposite of the accusation in Turner’s announcement.
In fact, Vice President of the United States JD Vance celebrated Austin’s recent land use regulation reforms that increase density in single-family residential neighborhoods, despite Austin’s policies being perfectly in line with the Biden-era AFFH rule. Putting aside the limitations of land use deregulation to undo the legacy of racial segregation (which we have written about extensively), Turner’s statement is out of step with the position of his own administration.
Gutting fair housing enforcement and civil rights protections
Ensuring that members of protected classes (people who may face discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, or disability) have equal access to housing requires strong regulations, monitoring, and enforcement. The federal government under current leadership is dismantling this framework.
The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle Fair Housing protections is not just limited to racial discrimination. One of the administration’s first actions was to rescind a Biden-era executive order that extended federal non-discrimination protections based on sex, including in the Fair Housing Act, to also protect against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. On February 7, shortly before eliminating the Biden-era AFFH rule, HUD stopped enforcing a rule that ensured equal access to programs for individuals based on their gender identity. This put many people, including those in need of emergency shelter, directly at risk as part of a widespread anti-LGBTQ+ campaign across the federal government. HUD is not just ignoring its fair housing obligations, but actively endangering the lives of vulnerable people.
The day after announcing the elimination of the Biden-era AFFH rule, on February 27, the US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) canceled grants to dozens of fair housing organizations across the country. The grant program in question was created by Congress in 1988 specifically to fund nonprofit organizations that counter housing discrimination and enforce fair housing laws. DOGE claimed that the canceled funding “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities” with no explanation or evidence to support that claim. This move resulted in a severe loss of funding for organizations across the country that handle tens of thousands of fair housing complaints a year.
In March, HUD entered an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to end the “wasteful misappropriation of taxpayer dollars to benefit illegal aliens.” This is a blatant misrepresentation of current policy, which pro-rates assistance to mixed-status households so that only family members with eligible immigration status receive assistance. This agreement, along with other Executive Orders and federal policies targeting immigrants, are scare tactics to deter people from accessing benefits that they qualify for.
In mid April, reporting revealed that DOGE was collecting data on tenants without legal status in public housing. This information would inform a new rule to reverse the current policy and ban mixed-status households. The resulting evictions would not only displace the household member without status, but the entire household. These actions target households based on national origin and contradict fair housing principles, putting vulnerable people at risk.
Current HUD leadership claims that they will still enforce the Fair Housing Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act “to the highest standard.” But Sec. Turner has indicated that HUD staff at the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity will be cut by 77%. How can HUD possibly enforce the law to the fullest extent with a severely weakened network of national fair housing organizations and a decimated federal enforcement staff?
Restricting equitable planning in disaster recovery
One way that HUD has supported Fair Housing outcomes is by requiring that state and local plans guiding the use of federal funds adequately consider the housing needs of vulnerable people. But on March 12, HUD rejected Asheville, North Carolina’s action plan for the use of Hurricane Helene federal disaster recovery funds because the plan “included DEI criteria.” Specifically, HUD objected that the plan’s Small Business Support Program prioritized assistance for Minority and Women Owned Businesses.
This is a complete contradiction to other established federal priorities. Programs to help businesses owned by women, veterans, and minorities exist across all levels of government. For example, the Small Business Act requires the federal government to award a percentage of all federal contracting dollars each year to Small Disadvantaged Businesses, Women-Owned Small Businesses, and Historically Underutilized Businesses.
The rejection of Asheville’s action plan is a signal to other HUD grantees that plans must be purged of anything that could remotely be considered to be encouraging diversity, equity, or inclusion before submitting to HUD. One week after rejecting Asheville’s plan, HUD officially changed the federal rules that guide how disaster recovery grantees design their programs and use of funds. The updated rules removed mentions of disaster resilience, community participation, federal oversight, fair housing, and civil rights requirements. The rules blatantly contradict research findings that members of protected classes – including people of color, households with children, and people with disabilities – have reduced capacity to prepare for, safely endure, and recover from disasters.
People of color are more vulnerable at all stages of a natural disaster. Poor communities of color disproportionately experience death and injury in natural disasters. Socially vulnerable populations experience greater proportional losses, have less social capital to draw on, and face greater delays in receiving recovery funds. Disasters compound pre-existing inequities that have festered for decades and historic disinvestment increases the risk for flooding and other hazards, such as lack of proper drainage. Studies have even found relationships between historical redlining and flood risk in Houston. Rejecting action plans for “DEI criteria” will severely impair grantees’ ability to plan for fair and equitable use of federal disaster recovery funding to help those who will need it most.
Dismantling decades of fair housing policy
HUD released their new, weakened AFFH Interim Final Rule on March 3. This new rule rolls back the last 30 years of administrative rulemaking and contradicts decades of judicial decisions that have ensured that federal grantees work to eliminate housing discrimination. It not only removes the reporting requirements from the Biden-era AFFH rule, but also the requirement for an Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing (AI) from Clinton-era HUD rulemaking in 1994.
Until its removal this year, the AI was a planning process that HUD grantees performed every five years to identify barriers to fair housing choice, and plan for how to take actions to overcome the effects of those barriers. Through the AI, local governments that received funds were accountable for a bare minimum level of planning that supported equitable outcomes in the use of federal funds. Now, under the Trump administration, grantees are only required to give HUD “a general commitment that [they] will take active steps to promote fair housing.” This is a total and complete abandonment of accountability.
This shift enables grantees to make funding decisions based on political priorities. This did not happen due to an oversight. The current administration has explicitly championed the idea of funding-by-political-cronyism multiple times.
The new AFFH rule went into effect on April 2. Coincidentally, April happens to be Fair Housing Month, a time to celebrate the anniversary of the signing of the Fair Housing Act in April 1968, one of the legacy achievements of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In addition to eliminating strong AFFH requirements and the “Analysis of Impediments” requirement, HUD marked the occasion by indicating that they may also eliminate Affirmative Marketing, which requires recipients of federal funds to proactively connect underrepresented groups to new housing opportunities.
To finish Fair Housing Month, on April 23 the White House issued an executive order that directed all federal agencies – including HUD – to eliminate regulations that depend on the disparate impact standard. Disparate impact is an important legal concept used to prove that housing discrimination has occurred. Litigants can show that discrimination has occurred by showing that the action in question has resulted in an outcome that has harmed members of one protected group more than others, without needing to show explicit discriminatory intention, which is much more difficult to prove legally.
This executive order contradicts current law. Disparate impact has been written into multiple laws. The Supreme Court has explicitly recognized that people can bring disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act. As with HUD’s February announcement to eliminate the Biden-era AFFH rule, this announcement was filled with outrageous claims and weak reasoning, including the baffling claim that disparate impact “imperils the effectiveness of civil rights laws by mandating, rather than proscribing, discrimination.”
Undoing the legacy of the civil rights movement
Fair housing protections exist to ensure that everyone, including low-income people who are disproportionately members of protected classes, has access to the housing of their choice, in the community of their choice. These protections exist because the housing discrimination that exists today was caused and subsidized by federal, state, and local governments. These governments have an obligation to proactively address discriminatory policies and practices and remedy the effects of their past discrimination, whether intentional or not.
The Trump administration’s actions have impaired governments’ ability to plan to use federal funds in ways that affirmatively further fair housing, harmed vulnerable people actively seeking assistance funded by the federal government, and severely damaged or destroyed policies and programs that people rely on for accountability after they are harmed by discrimination.
Despite these drastic leaps backwards, fair housing is still relatively overlooked in mainstream housing coverage in favor of affordability. In the last month alone, the New York Times has published pieces suggesting that to lower housing costs we must encourage sprawl, build housing on federal land, and rent out spare bedrooms. Affordability (which is a critically important topic) is discussed often and through a variety of lenses that show how far-reaching of an issue it is. However, by comparison, the few articles that cover fair housing tend to highlight one or two of the administration’s major actions, but fail to connect the pieces to show the full scope of the harm being caused. The ongoing destruction of the fair housing framework deserves more attention from housing advocates of all stripes.
In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote that “government policy can powerfully facilitate an integrated society by refusing to subsidize planned segregation…and by requiring integrated communities.” Over half a century later, we are still struggling to realize the most basic actions to overcome the legacy of government-endorsed segregation and fighting to preserve the progress that we have made. Under the Trump administration, the slow march of progress is rapidly reversing.
