The Trump administration on Wednesday revoked a Biden-era fair housing proposed rule requiring localities to track and address patterns of segregation in their communities in order to receive federal funds.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development in 2023 proposed the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule — a reworked version of an Obama-era rule that President Donald Trump had scrapped in 2020 — to crack down on housing discrimination.
But the Biden White House never finalized the rule, much to the chagrin of fair housing advocates and some Democrats in Congress, in part because of campaign concerns. Trump had weaponized the earlier version of the rule during the 2020 campaign, declaring that Democrats wanted to “abolish the suburbs.”
Had the 2021 rule been finalized, HUD would have been required to go through formal notice-and-comment rulemaking to revise or repeal it, a time-consuming process. The Biden administration withdrew the proposal in the Federal Register in January, and HUD put out an interim final rule replacing it on Wednesday.
“Local and state governments understand the needs of their communities much better than bureaucrats in Washington DC,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said in a statement. “Terminating this rule restores trust in local communities and property owners, while protecting America’s suburbs and neighborhood integrity.”
Going forward, the agency will accept a locality’s self-certification that it is affirmatively furthering fair housing in accordance with the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
“[L]ocalities will no longer be required to complete onerous paperwork and drain their budgets to comply with the extreme and restrictive demands made up by the federal government,” Turner added. “This action also returns decisions on zoning, home building, transportation, and more to local leaders.”
The move comes amid the Trump administration’s campaign to stamp out “diversity, equity and inclusion” programs across the federal government.
Some 74 percent of white Americans own their own homes compared with just 46 percent of Black Americans. That 28-point gap is actually wider than it was in 1960 — when housing discrimination was still legal.
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