Regaining Momentum for Fair Housing
JUSTIN P. STEIL AND NICHOLAS F. KELLY
This volume illustrates the promises of, protests against, and prospects for affirmatively furthering fair housing in the twenty-first century. From its nineteenth-century roots in Reconstruction through the civil rights movement and extending to recent battles within and beyond the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to rigorously enforce it, fair housing has changed not only in its meaning but in its implementation. For the last half century, the very concept of “affirmatively furthering fair housing” has existed in a kind of suspended animation. How can we move from suspension to revival and renewal?
As Nicholas Kelly, Maia Woluchem, Reed Jordan, and Justin Steil show in Chapter 3, the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule was a substantial improvement over the previous regulations that so weakly supported past efforts at advancing fair housing. It led to a dramatic increase in the number of goals that municipalities set regarding fair housing and, even more importantly, enhanced the robustness of those goals—measured in terms of the concrete metrics that municipalities put forward to evaluate progress and in terms of the policies or programs that municipalities created to realize the goals. Second, contrary to expectations, it was not only large, coastal cities or liberal or left-leaning local governments that engaged deeply with the AFFH Rule. Instead, local governments across the country, from cities, to suburbs, counties, and metropolitan regions, with a range of political ideologies, set out thoughtful and ambitious goals regarding fair housing. Indeed, one of the strongest predictors of goal strength was a high level of racial segregation in the municipality, suggesting that localities may see segregation as a salient challenge and regard the AFFH Rule as an opportunity to address the disparities to which that segregation contributes. Third, the approaches that localities were proposing to advance fair housing were not solely mobility solutions, as some critics feared. The solutions certainly included supporting the mobility of low-income households, but they also embraced investing in low-income communities, improving public housing, creating new affordable housing in gentrifying neighborhoods, enhancing transportation options, channeling resources to local schools, and more. The initial results suggest that the AFFH Rule at the outset managed to chart a productive path through the complicated federalist balance of power, encouraging meaningful local innovation through required community engagement, robust technical assistance, and the threat of HUD review and rejection. The preliminary results from the forty-nine Assessments of Fair Housing (AFHs) that were submitted before the rule was suspended point in promising directions and suggest that the AFFH Rule is worth continued public attention and engagement. Indeed, cities engaged in the fair housing assessment process submitted comments to HUD opposing the suspension and proposed changes. For instance, New York City wrote that “we believe that the AFFH rule and its associated tools present significant progress in providing clear guidance and helping local governments shift operations toward a more meaningful fair housing approach,” adding that “the City has already benefited from the process conceived in the AFFH rule, particularly its thorough and comprehensive community engagement requirements.”1
At the same time, despite setbacks, potential future revisions to the rule present opportunities to strengthen and enhance it. Improving the quality of the data provided to HUD program participants is one important place to start. As Michael C. Lens points out in Chapter 7, it would be particularly valuable to invest in improving the data about neighborhood characteristics that have been shown to be most salient in affecting life outcomes, especially school performance and crime. Relatedly, Lens as well as Howard Husock (in Chapter 4) highlight the importance of continuing research about how neighborhoods influence the lives of their residents, analyzing with care exactly how concentrated poverty and racial segregation come to be correlated with negative socioeconomic outcomes across generations and which policy tools can most effectively improve socioeconomic mobility. As changes to the AFFH Rule are considered or altogether new policies are created, it is essential to continue to ask who is bearing the burden of these housing and neighborhood policies and whether they are actually improving the lives of their intended beneficiaries, as Husock, Vicki Been (in Chapter 6), Edward Goetz (in Chapter 5), and Alexander von Hoffman (in Chapter 1) all note. It is also essential to continually interrogate the balance between attempts to increase access to resources in low-income communities and parallel efforts to give low-income households the ability to choose homes and neighborhoods freely.
Since the AFFH Rule was finalized, concerns over gentrification and the implications of these neighborhood changes for racial equity have only grown. Been highlights how the relationships among racial equity, economic justice, and housing and neighborhood policy have shifted since the Fair Housing Act’s passage in 1968. Conceptions of fair housing as defined primarily by the fight to access high-income suburban neighborhoods are already outdated as investments and jobs flow again into many central cities. In low-income communities of color within high-cost cities enmeshed in fights for the right to the city and struggles over access to space, displacement and resegregation are often the most salient concerns. In addition to isolating low-income households from growing central-city resources, displacement caused by gentrification may exacerbate cultural dispossession, again marking African American individuals as the “displaced persons” of American democracy.2 Many of the AFHs already submitted explicitly mention concerns about gentrification and put forward concrete anti-displacement strategies. In high-cost cities, anti-displacement strategies are likely to be a growing focus of fair housing efforts. Been’s chapter highlights many of the complex questions that policy makers must ask as they consider the fair housing and racial equity implications of new urban investments.
Many of the early AFHs set out plans to rewrite specific zoning policies to prevent displacement, to enable more affordable and multifamily developments in neighborhoods with substantial resources, to ease the construction of homes for individuals with disabilities, and others. This renewed attention to the details of land-use policy is particularly important because of what von Hoffman describes as the “web of land-use regulations” that enables exclusionary suburbs and because, as Been describes, land-use policy determines where growth goes and who benefits or is burdened by that growth. Attention to land use brings with it a focus on the regional nature of housing markets and the need for regional collaboration when creating AFHs. In Chapter 8, Megan Haberle articulates the importance of greater incentives for regional collaboration in future versions of the rule. Stronger incentives for regional efforts are a crucial starting point, and so too are greater resources for HUD to continue to meaningfully enforce the rule. One of the largest surprises of its initial implementation was the close attention that most HUD regional offices and the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity paid to the details of the AFHs—including their willingness not to accept seventeen initial submissions and insistence that they be sent back for revision. The combination of technical assistance, support, and, ultimately, enforcement was a crucial part of the rule’s initial success but will, as HUD has noted, require more resources to continue and to expand.
In Chapter 2, reflecting on their time as federal policy makers, Raphael Bostic, Katherine O’Regan, and Patrick Pontius (with assistance from Nicholas Kelly) set out the blueprint for how difficult conversations can happen within HUD as future revisions are considered. They describe in detail best practices of governance and community engagement in the initial drafting of the rule. The level of dialogue that HUD leadership developed among agency employees who disagreed on various aspects of the rule was essential to finding a meaningful path forward and creating an effective final rule. The methods they detail suggest not only what the obstacles may be but, even more importantly, what is possible as the rule is revised or as other related efforts are undertaken.
Indeed, Kelly and colleagues found support for the utility of the cooperative planning process outlined by Bostic, O’Regan, and Pontius, since grantees whose plans were initially rejected by HUD worked collaboratively with the agency to improve their submissions. This research suggests that despite HUD’s post-2017 claims about its ineffectiveness, if the AFFH Rule were reinstated, it could have a powerful impact on encouraging cities to develop plans to reduce segregation in their communities.
The issuance of the AFFH Rule in 2015 seemed like a sea change in the long effort to finally address the significant disparities in access to place-based opportunities that still characterize U.S. metropolitan areas. Crafted with careful input from civil rights advocates, state and local government officials, public housing authorities (PHAs), and others, it provided valuable tools to state and local governments and PHAs to help them identify and address harmful patterns of discrimination, disinvestment, and inequality in access to transportation, jobs, schools, and healthy environments. The revisions that HUD proposed in 2019 eliminated any requirements to analyze segregation or identify or redress place-based disparities in access to resources, substituting a focus on housing supply. These 2019 revisions proposed transforming the AFFH Rule into a platform for state and local deregulation, potentially threatening important environmental protections, subsidized housing production, and tenants’ rights. As this book went to press, HUD abruptly repealed the rule altogether. But does this mean that the broad promises of the 2015 AFFH Rule have irreversibly met a premature end?
As in the Reconstruction era and in the civil rights era, promises for racial equity in America’s neighborhoods provoke strong resistance. Resistance to fair housing policies that call into question white supremacist norms and that challenge wealthy, white opportunity hoarding have set back movements for racial equity in housing before, but each time, new plans and new policies are made to push equality forward again. Recent state and local policy developments, such as California’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Law (A.B. 686) or New York City’s Assessment of Fair Housing (Where We Live NYC), suggest that the 2015 issuance of the AFFH Rule may have just been the next step in the ongoing journey to address the intersection of housing, neighborhoods, and racial equity. Many municipalities have continued to work on AFHs despite the suspension of the rule, and future research could examine how these municipalities’ efforts have been shaped by regulatory uncertainty.
The expansion of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 further highlighted the need to directly confront and uproot white supremacy to create a truly multiracial democracy. Addressing the wide racial disparities in wealth, health, and other outcomes in the United States will require dramatic changes to housing and land-use policies. Advancing racial and economic justice will require reimagining local government structures and the functioning of U.S. regions and reconceptualizing the funding of public services and the relationships among local governments. The AFFH Rule is an important catalyst for these conversations.
As this volume demonstrates, efforts continue to envision how future federal policy makers could more effectively work with state and local governments to reshape our metropolitan areas in ways that can improve socioeconomic mobility for all and advance racial justice in America’s neighborhoods. This book provides a starting point for these discussions and for a future generation of efforts to realize the Reconstruction-era hopes for a truly multiracial democracy, one that might finally support Black liberation and be politically, socially, and economically inclusive of all residents.
ENDNOTES
1. City of New York, comment re: Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing: Streamlining and Enhancements, Docket No. FR-6123-A-01, October 11, 2018.
2. Ralph Ellison, “Harlem Is Nowhere” in Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), 294–302; Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, Harlem Is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America (New York: Little, Brown, 2011), 117.