The pullback from diversity, equity and inclusion programs — in government agencies and business — has focused on their impact at the individual level — on hiring, or college admission. But an under-the-radar initiative of the Biden administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development planned DEI for communities across the country. It would do so through required “equity plans” — emphasizing changes in planning and zoning — for virtually every community receiving HUD funds. 

Now, in the name of “cutting costly red tape imposed on localities and returning decision-making power to state and local governments,” new HUD Secretary Scott Turner has rolled that mandate back. HUD has replaced all the complications of the “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” rule with a simple requirement: a locality’s “own certification” that is complying with fair housing law. It’s as important a change as any Washington is making, affecting local governments across the country. 

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) program — first adopted by the Obama administration, then halted by Trump 45 before being brought back by Biden — literally demanded that any community receiving HUD funding submit an “equity plan,” based on responses to 92 questions, to continue to qualify for financial aid.  

HUD TERMINATES OBAMA-ERA HOUSING RULE THAT TRUMP WARNED WOULD ‘DESTROY’ HOME VALUES

Its name notwithstanding, AFFH went far beyond the commonsense idea of protecting minority renters and home buyers from racial discrimination. The details of its required “equity plan” portended what amounted to a federal takeover of local zoning for purposes that went far beyond overt housing discrimination. 

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program was pushed by both former Democrat Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden. FILE: Obama and Biden in October 2020. (Credit: Joe Biden/Instagram)

Per the Biden HUD description of the program: “The AFFH mandate requires the agency and its program participants to proactively take meaningful actions to overcome patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, eliminate disparities in opportunities, and foster inclusive communities free from discrimination.”  

Translated, that meant that in order to qualify for federal community assistance, communities would have to pledge not only to open their doors to “affordable” (i.e., subsidized) housing but to take steps to ensure that residents of such housing would have access to good schools, recreation, even supermarkets — and other “community assets.”  

In other words, both permitting affordable housing and pressuring communities to locate it in “high opportunity” (read, more affluent) neighborhoods. The impulse here is that of “deconcentrating poverty,” with the assumption that doing so will uplift the poor, notwithstanding the obvious practical limitations of relocating households en masse. 

The reach of the rule was as broad as its goals. HUD distributes community development block grant funds — meant to help lower-income communities, for purposes ranging from infrastructure to health and safety — to more than 1,200 “entitlement communities.” Those included all major metropolitan cities, cities with populations of 50,000 or greater, and urban counties with populations of 200,000 or greater (excluding entitlement city populations.  

In order for their equity plans to be approved by HUD’s funding gatekeepers, local governments had to be mindful of the Biden administration HUD’s broader “equity action plan,” which called upon them to address such wide-ranging goals as “environmental justice,” “climate resilience,” as well as “to better serve lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual (LGBTQIA+) youth experiencing homelessness and housing instability.” 

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In demonstrating how they would take steps to “affirmatively” prevent housing discrimination, communities were called upon, in plans that could run to hundreds of pages, not simply to demonstrate their capacity to ensure individuals did not face housing discrimination, but to identify “barriers to fair housing” that could include everything from school district lines to local zoning. 

This becomes clear from HUD “denial letters,” to local goverments informing them they’d failed to pass AFFH muster. One Georgia county reported, for instance, that it was seeking more affordable housing to help low-income households get better jobs. That wasn’t good enough for HUD, which wrote that the county had been “unclear as to how it intends to use this goal to address issues of segregation and racial/ethnic concentrations of poverty.” Nor had the county dealt with “the location of proficient schools.” 

HUD was the source of a Biden administration effort to take over local zoning to promote DEI nationwide. FILE: The Robert C. Weaver Federal Building, located at 451 Seventh Street, S.W., Washington, D.C. (Photo by Carol M. Highsmith /Buyenlarge /Getty Images)

The idea of adding affordable housing — if defined as denser, privately built housing — to a range of communities is not inherently misguided. Indeed, communities where two-acre zoning is the norm risk zoning out their own children and the workforce they need for local businesses and governments.  

Modest changes in zoning — what Edward Pinto and Tobias Peters call “light-touch density” — can go a long way toward such ends. But that’s different than subsidized, low-income housing — inexpensive to rent but costly to construct (one tax-credit-funded “affordable unit” in California costs an estimated $708,000 to build).  

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More broadly, AFFH has been predicated on misguided premises. So-called “high opportunity neighborhoods” are not redoubts of privilege and discrimination but, rather, the products of the commitment and civic efforts of residents. The life choices — marriage, work, savings — that lead families to well-functioning communities are ends in themselves.  

Simply relocating poor households to more affluent communities shortcuts that process — and offers no guarantee that those households will fare better in the long run. A HUD directive to alter the demographics and zoning of communities across the country won’t do so either. 

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