Cities and counties that want federal grants for development projects will have to start taking segregation much more seriously under a set of rules to be announced Wednesday by Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julian Castro. The new system will require cities to report regularly and in far greater detail on segregation in their communities, making it harder for towns to quietly maintain existing racial inequities in development.
The rules overhaul targets a document called the Analysis of Impediments (AI), which cities and counties that seek HUD funding must prepare. Local officials are supposed to report on all manner of obstacles to fair housing opportunity, whether town rules that make it impossible to build affordable housing or realtor practices that steer brown people away from white communities. The AI is the building block of HUD’s anti-segregation work. If these documents misidentify or understate the obstacles that a community faces, or cover up the policies that keep a community lily-white, the entire system of federal grants to combat segregation collapses.
The current AI system is riddled with failure. Communities are inconsistent about even updating their analyses on a running basis, and the reports they do submit are often patchy or unrealistic. But lax oversight of the system has allowed federal fair housing money to get spent in those places anyhow. By stiffening the reporting requirements, setting new expectations for routine updates, and furnishing robust datasets that will allow local officials to do the kind of thorough analysis that the AI system is supposed to incentivize, the new HUD proposal hopes to repair a serious and fundamental flaw in the nation’s approach to housing segregation.
But conservatives are decrying the new rules as an attack on local control of housing rules. Betsy McCaughey calls it an “assault on suburbs nationwide” and says that Castro and other liberals just want to “prevent the rich from enjoying the suburbs.” The National Review says it’s all part of the plan to force Americans into denser communities and rely on public transit instead of personal cars. The American Enterprise Institute is concerned that taking Fair Housing Act obligations seriously will turn us all into Soviets.
Suburbs and other communities will remain just as free as they ever were to maintain zoning laws that make it impossible for the poor, mostly brown people who serve their burritos downtown from actually living alongside them. They will just have to find private money to do so instead of using taxpayer money granted under a half-century-old law explicitly intended to combat that kind of subtle segregation in the housing market.
That law’s failure to produce significant reductions in segregation in many parts of the United States stems from a glaring and systemic failure in the system that HUD uses to enforce the Fair Housing Act of 1968. It all starts with the erosion of the AI reporting system.
A long-time fair housing advocate in Milwaukee testified in 2008 that city and county housing officials in his area have essentially blown off their “Analysis of Impediments” obligation for years. The City of Kenosha concluded that housing discrimination wasn’t really a thing in its jurisdiction “based solely on discussions with the local Board of Realtors,” the testimony said. Relying on realtors themselves to tell you if the real estate market operates in a racist fashion is not exactly a robust evaluation of all the dynamics facing people of color in the housing market. But such garbage in-garbage out forms of inquiry have long been standard practice for local governments that must submit AIs to HUD to assure continued access to federal housing funds, according to a 2010 review by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).
The GAO examined both HUD’s own practices with regard to local governments’ reports, and a sample of over 400 actual AIs prepared by localities. Roughly a third of that sample were several years out of date. Even the up-to-date documents were often too brief to fulfill to purpose of the AI, or failed to include any substantive information about actual impediments to housing fairness.
The review found not just that HUD was failing to monitor these often-shoddy reports closely, but also that it never bothered to really review a given AI’s claims “unless evidence to the contrary emerges from complaints or through the department’s routine monitoring activities.” By outsourcing the nitty-gritty work of making sure cities submit realistic AIs to non-profit housing advocates, HUD allowed the fact-finding that determines how almost all federal fair housing dollars get spent to break down, undermining the entire system.
Governments took advantage of the department’s lax oversight of the reports, and routinely won federal grants to fund development practices that would further segregation. In Westchester County, NY, housing officials submitted AIs that made no mention of the area’s various exclusionary zoning codes that restrict multifamily housing and other types of living spaces primarily used by minority citizens. Yet the county still won Community Development Block Grants from HUD for projects that were never intended to grapple with the segregation that the county omitted from its reports.
When local activists sued and won a decision against the county’s plans, HUD got Westchester officials to commit to spending over $50 million on affordable housing in accordance with a plan that would target segregationist policies and practices. That suit peaked shortly after President Obama took office, and is credited with spurring the GAO review and subsequent HUD rules overhaul.
The rules overhaul being announced Wednesday is designed to prevent a repeat of that Westchester story and similar sagas. If local jurisdictions can’t flout the basic requirements of the AI analysis, that will make it harder for public fair housing dollars to get spent on policies that don’t combat segregation. And if HUD gets serious about shouldering the responsibility for auditing city and county proposals and AIs, it’ll be less likely that the work of holding housing officials accountable to the Fair Housing Act falls to non-profits and activists as it did in Westchester.
Housing segregation is at the root of much of the country’s racial tensions, from police violence and unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore to the battle for local control in Detroit. It has also been alarmingly persistent decades after banks stopped refusing to loan to black homeowners, thanks primarily to local building codes and neighborhood covenants that stepped into the void created when lenders abandoned “redlining” policies.
Segregation has been able to thrive despite official policies targeting it, because the mechanics of those policies are broken. Wednesday’s rules aim to fix those mechanics and prevent cities from writing the reality of segregation out of the official record.