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HUD Eliminates Obama Era Fair Housing Rule
Friday, July 24, 2020
It had been threatened from the beginning of the Trump administration, but this week the hammer fell. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson has announced the formal termination of the Obama Administration's Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation issued in 2015. In a press release Carson called the regulation "complicated, costly, and ineffective." Under the rule, any community receiving HUD money was required to analyze its housing occupancy by race, disability, familial status, economic status, English proficiency, and other categories and analyze any factors that present barriers to housing. It then must then formulate a plan to eliminate those barriers which must be approved or disapproved by HUD. This must be done every five years at both a local and regional level. Federal funds could be withheld from any jurisdiction that didn't make sufficient effort to comply. HUD had been nibbling away at the regulation for several years. In January 2018 it suspended the regulation's 92 question grading tool and announced it was suspending local government's obligation to comply with the rule until late 2020. In January of this year the agency published a substitute regulation called "Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice" and invited public comment. According to the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), 19,500 comments were submitted.
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