Citing ‘Equity,’ Biden Revives a Pernicious Housing Proposal from the Obama Administration

T he Democratic Party’s obsession with race — and the view that African Americans have made little or no social or economic progress since the 1960s — is about to reach into any local government that receives any federal assistance. That means some 1,250 jurisdictions that receive community-development funds, along with the nation’s more than 3,000 public-housing authorities. The means of intrusion will be the Biden Department of Housing and Urban Development’s decision to reinstitute the program known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), started in the Obama years but withdrawn by the Trump administration.

Its goal: to require all recipients of HUD funds to develop elaborate “equity plans” aimed at a version of “fair housing,” not about nondiscrimination but focused on moving low-income households to higher-income places. It’s based on the dubious idea that the move to places with “more resources” will inevitably lead to upward mobility.

The breadth of the “equity plans” with which HUD will burden local officials is breathtaking, touching on almost any aspect of local government.

The proposed regulations — released Thursday and now subject to a 60-day comment period — call for communities to “adopt different types of strategies that will meaningfully increase fair housing choice in their communities, including by choosing from an array of place-based strategies (e.g., the preservation of existing affordable housing or increased investments in community assets) and mobility strategies (e.g., improved housing counseling, assessing how school assignments are made, or building affordable housing in well-resourced areas).” In other words, HUD is going to assess almost everything that local governments do in the name of “fair housing.”

It believes itself empowered to do so under a radical interpretation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 — one focused on ensuring that every community has a socio-economic mix rather than its facial goal: making sure that no household is denied housing it can afford to rent or buy. For HUD, it’s as if we are still stuck in 1968, with the proposed rule even referencing that year’s Kerner Commission report and its view that we are two nations, one white, one black.

Writes HUD as justification for its proposed rules:

The need for change remains urgent; many of the problems the Kerner Commission Report identified are still with us today. . . . In particular, the Nation remains highly segregated by race, communities continue to have vastly different access to critical resources because of historic disinvestment in communities of color, there is still a large wealth gap between people of color and White persons, and the lack of choice for many about where to live persists. . . . In addition, continued disinvestment not only in housing, but in community assets in areas that are not well-resourced perpetuates this residential and income segregation.

Here are some reality checks for HUD. In a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor have found that “the most standard segregation measure shows that American cities are now more integrated than they’ve been since 1910. Segregation rose dramatically with black migration to cities in the mid-twentieth century. On average, this rise has been entirely erased by integration since the 1960s.” They go on to note that “all-white neighborhoods are effectively extinct. African-American residents can be found in 199 out of every 200 neighborhoods nationwide.” The change, they add, is mainly the result of exactly what HUD thinks has not happened: “the rise of black suburbanization.” Ghetto neighborhoods, they add, “house a dwindling population of black residents.” Among those neighborhoods, it should be added, are hundreds of predominantly black public-housing projects, where residents by definition cannot own property.

Dubious, too, is the idea that lower-income households will necessarily benefit by moves to higher-income areas. This is the gospel according to another Harvard economist, Raj Chetty, who has used small population samples to conclude that “moves to opportunity” will improve life chances. The impracticality of doing this on a large scale aside, real life can tell a different story. In a jaw-dropping article buried in its Sunday real-estate section, the New York Times last week reported on a community that would seem to have fulfilled all HUD’s goals: a mix of races in an affluent, “well-resourced community.” Yet it seems that Shaker Heights, Ohio (53 percent white, 37 percent black) — which has famously worked to achieve racial integration since the 1960s — is actually losing higher-income black residents. The reason: They are concerned about the attitudes of lower-income persons of color.

“There’s a group of African Americans that have achieved and have it together. And then there’s the group that’s still caught in not having achieved,” said Kim Harris, founder of Shaker African American Moms Support. “And I come from the mind-set: Separate yourselves at all costs from the ones who might still be struggling.”

Black parents quoted in the Times article expressed concern about exactly the sort of special attention to racial disparity that obsesses HUD. Shaker Heights public-school initiatives to de-emphasize honors classes to ensure classroom racial integration drew the ire of black parents. A black faculty member from Case Western Reserve University told the Times that she took her son out of public school “after he was often stereotyped by administrators, who presumed that because he was Black, he needed extra help.”

In other words, the entire predicate of HUD’s idea of fair housing is highly questionable. Instead, making the right life decisions to be able to afford to move to a higher-income jurisdiction are the preconditions for success. Simply being moved there — a reward no thanks to effort — is not the same thing. And African Americans themselves agree.

None of this is likely to halt HUD’s demand for thousands of “equity plans” without effects other than negative ones, including diversion of the time and effort of local officials. (Notes the proposed rulemaking: “HUD acknowledges that implementation of the AFFH mandate will not and cannot occur without burden for program participants.”) HUD would better focus on its original mission: making lower-income neighborhoods better. Although it never figured out how do that either.

AFFH is just the sort of expansive rulemaking that should be challenged in court by a state attorney general or local mayor. Or overturned by Congress through the Congressional Review Act. It should not go unchallenged.