New York City Isn’t Waiting for the White House to Enforce Fair Housing
Even after the Trump administration scrapped the Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, NYC pressed ahead with its review of city efforts to combat discrimination.
A pedestrian stands in front of the New York City Housing Authority’s Ocean Bay Apartments complex in 2018.
Photographer: Bess Adler/BloombergLate into his second term, President Barack Obama introduced a new regulation, known as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, to try to give teeth to a half-century’s worth of mostly failed efforts to uproot housing segregation. Ten years later, that rule has produced little in the way of tangible results — with perhaps one exception.
Named for a provision in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the AFFH rule required cities, states and counties to conduct fair housing assessments to ensure that they were using federal housing dollars in ways that don’t exacerbate patterns of racial segregation. But few jurisdictions had even digested the 2015 rule by the time President Donald Trump arrived in the White House and undid his predecessor’s work. Housing Secretary Ben Carson proposed a new rule with a focus on promoting construction before the president scrapped the rule altogether — an effort to persuade voters that then-candidate Joe Biden wanted to “abolish the suburbs.”