HUD's "Affirmative Further Fair Housing" Rule in Five Minutes.

Clarification: Westchester V Hud was settled in the 2nd Circuit Court of Appesls in NY. The Final Decision quoted Chief Justice John Roberts. This short video describes the effects on local communities if they accept HUD money for fair housing or urban development under their new rule, Affirmatively Furthering fair Housing. AFFH, as a term has existed for many years, the ruling went into efect July, 2015.

AFFH Has No Basis in the Fair Housing Act

AFFH Has No Basis in the Fair Housing Act

By Stanley Kurtz — May 17, 2016

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) of 1968 was a great achievement, rightly prohibiting discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. President Obama claims that his wildly overreaching Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation, finalized almost fifty years later in July of 2015, is simply fulfilling the purposes of the original Fair Housing Act. That is nonsense. It’s also a classic case of left-leaning politicians achieving their ends by reading radically new meanings into well-established laws.

This week the Senate will go on record for the first time on an amendment to a THUD (Transportation and Housing and Urban Development) appropriations bill defunding AFFH. Since the House has twice passed such an amendment and is likely to do so again, the Senate vote has turned into a major showdown over Obama’s radically transformative new housing regulation.

If the Senate passes Sen. Mike Lee’s amendment defunding AFFH, President Obama will have to either accept the end of AFFH or veto the THUD bill. He will also have to decide whether to do something he has deliberately and successfully avoided for years: publicly defend his radical and sure-to-be-unpopular housing agenda.[Editor's Note 7/23/2016: Sen. Mike Lee's bill did not make it to the Vote and toothless legislation was voted on instead. Republicans and Democrats suck.]

To prevent all this, defenders of AFFH are aggressively taking the line that defunding Obama’s revolutionary new rule, which federalizes the core functions of local government and turns suburbs, towns, and even mid-sized cities into helpless satellites of nearby megacities, is nothing but a bit of new guidance showing localities how to fulfill their existing obligations under the Fair Housing Act of 1968. This is simply wrong.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 says nothing whatever about withholding HUD grants from localities unless they nullify classic suburban zoning patterns to build high-density low-income housing. FHA is strictly about preventing overt discrimination in housing transactions. The Obama administration and its activist allies have sought to read new meanings into a few brief phrases in FHA requiring HUD to administer its programs in such a way as to “affirmatively further” the purposes of the act. Yet it’s perfectly clear that this was simply an instruction to HUD to aggressively monitor its programs to make sure that no overt discrimination was taking place.

But don’t take my work for it. Consider this account of the Fair Housing Act by Charles M. Lamb, author of a 2005 book on federal housing policy. Lamb was a fair housing specialist with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and has taught constitutional law and civil liberties at the University of Buffalo, SUNY. More importantly, Lamb is an enthusiastic advocate of precisely the kind of housing policy favored by President Obama. In his book, however, based on extensive archival study of the intentions behind the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Lamb makes it clear that a housing policy of the kind now favored by President Obama would have to move well beyond the intentions of the FHA itself. Here is Lamb on what he calls the “weakness” of the original FHA:

“…nothing in the Fair Housing Act expressly requires the federal government to encourage suburban racial integration through the use of subsidized housing. Nor does the Fair Housing Act forbid economic discrimination of any kind or require government to promote suburban economic integration in any way. The act certainly prohibits various forms of discrimination based on race and provides that the secretary of HUD shall affirmatively promote the goal of fair housing. Still, the Secretary’s stated duties do not include promoting suburban racial or economic integration by linking HUD funding to a requirement that low-income suburban housing also be built.” (p. 47)

Again, Lamb strongly favors aggressive attempts to control suburban housing of exactly the type now adopted by President Obama. Yet Lamb is honest enough to admit that FHA in no way authorizes such policies. I wonder if Lamb would have been so honest had he written in the wake of Obama’s attempt to radically reinterpret the plain meaning of the FHA.

Lamb also makes a point that turns out to be essential to understanding the overreach of Obama’s AFFH. The Fair Housing Act does nothing whatever to promote “economic integration.” And as Lamb also notes, “No federal court has ever declared that the Fair Housing Act requires economic integration in housing.” Yet AFFH is precisely an attempt to create a de facto legal requirement for economic integration under the cover of the FHA.

Public commenters on the first draft of AFFH recognized this. They challenged AFFH on the ground that poverty is not a “protected class” under the Fair Housing Act. Here is how HUD replied to that challenge in the finalized AFFH regulation:

“ The focus and purpose of the AFH [Assessment of Fair Housing required under AFFH] is to identify, and to begin to overcome, the causes and contributing factors that deny or impede housing choice and access to opportunity based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, and disability. In addition, a large body of research has consistently found that the problems associated with segregation are greatly exacerbated when combined with concentrated poverty. That is the legal basis and context for the examination of RCAPs/ECAPs [Racially and Ethnically Concentrated Areas of Poverty].”

This is an extraordinarily weak argument. First, it implicitly concedes that economic integration is not in fact mandated by FHA, but needs instead to be attached to the legally protected classes by academic studies showing that poverty is an aggravating factor in housing issues. But by that reasoning, Congress’s refusal to mandate a radical new policy of government-imposed economic integration becomes meaningless. By the reasoning adopted in AFFH, any law could be indefinitely extended to suit the tastes of scholars and bureaucrats, rather than democratically elected legislators.

The spurious claim by AFFH that the federal government is now legally obligated to impose economic integration on every locality in America leads to nonsensical results. In a 2015 Rasmussen poll, 83 percent of respondents said it was not the government’s job to diversify neighborhoods by income level, while only 8 percent said that this was an appropriate task for government. Yet now, the Obama administration has promulgated a rule that effectively adds the radical new principle of government-imposed economic integration to law, when nothing of the sort appeared in the original FHA, and the public to this day overwhelmingly opposes the idea. AFFH effectively nullifies the very idea of legislative democracy.

Advocates who falsely read a policy of racial and ethnic quotas and forced economic integration back into FHA also like to quote FHA co-sponsor Sen. Walter Mondale, who said that the reach of the proposed law was to replace “ghettos by truly integrated and balanced living patterns.”

This proves nothing. Public debate over the original FHA was driven above all by the bill’s main advocate, President Lyndon Johnson. And Johnson continually made clear his belief that it was overt housing discrimination that had bottled up America’s minorities in sub-standard housing. Johnson wanted “integrated and balanced living patterns” too, but his point was that the right way to get there was by banning discrimination. Lamb’s study makes it clear that, “Johnson’s entire effort focused on nondiscrimination in urban housing,” and was not at all about pressing suburbs to take high-density low-income housing (even though Lamb himself strongly favors imposing such policies on suburbia).

In short, the claim that President Obama’s AFFH does nothing more than elaborate on obligations already implicit in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 is false. On the contrary, AFFH is an attempt to radically reinterpret FHA by creating a basis for de facto federal control of suburban zoning and planning, and a mandate for economic integration that exists nowhere in the original Fair Housing Act. AFFH is federal overreach on steroids, and deserves to be repealed and repudiated, not only on policy grounds but out of basic respect for the democratic process. Our constitutional system depends on the integrity of our laws. Once executive regulations effectively usurp the legislative power, Congress itself is rendered powerless, and our constitutional republic is lost.

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com.

Editor's Note: The Marin County Board of Supervisors APPROVED of the new AFFH rules and will now be carrying out its directives.  Expect that the communities with the least political power will accept the brunt of this new directive.  Communities  in the unincorporated areas of Marin such as Marin City, TamAlmonte, Strawberry, Kentfield, Marinwood/Lucas Valley and others are especially vulnerable.

The Myth of White Privilege and the Hypocrisy of the Left.

Is "reparations" for past wrongs, just and morally defensible?  Dinesh D'Souza takes on the argument.

Editor's note: We welcome respectful comments on this video.  

A Major HUD Social Engineering rule "AFFH" may be overturned. This is HUGE.

Fair Housing Faces an Uncertain Fate

Two bills have already proposed doing away with a new HUD rule, following a long tradition of opposing proactive desegregation.

TANVI MISRA
@Tanvim


Senator Marco Rubio with incoming HUD secretary Dr. Ben Carson at Carson's confirmation hearing. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)


The young year of 2017 has so far offered such a blizzard of political craziness that some less-spectacular developments have gone relatively unnoticed. One such story: The current machinations in Congress to undercut—yet again—a common-sense regulation to promote racial integration.

On January 11, GOP senator Mike Lee from Utah and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio introduced a bill called the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017.” The legislation seeks to nullify the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which gives concrete guidance to entities receiving federal funds on how to proactively dismantle historical patterns of housing segregation—a requirement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. A similarly titled bill on the House side, spearheaded by Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, goes further: It asks to scrap the accompanying mapping tools that helps local communities identify patterns of racial segregation. Via Bill H.R. 482:


Notwithstanding any other provision of law, no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.

That this rule and the accompanying tool will be rescinded is a very likely possibility under this administration, especially given that Ben Carson, incoming secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, subscribes to the age-old maxim that regulating against housing discrimination amounts to “social engineering.”

But that would be a disservice—not just to poor communities of color that are cut off from accessing the many benefits of living in high-opportunity neighborhoods, but for city residents as a whole.

The fraught history of furthering fair housing

In 2012, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones traced the history of the Fair Housing Act all the way back to George Romney—Mitt’s father—who headed HUD during the Nixon administration. The law basically did two things: First, it prohibited discrimination in housing policy and practice, and second, it asked that federal agencies “affirmatively further” fair housing. In other words, it asked the government to take an intentional approach toward racial integration. Romney took that role seriously, Hannah-Jones writes:


Romney ordered HUD officials to reject applications for water, sewer and highway projects from cities and states where local policies fostered segregated housing.

He dubbed his initiative "Open Communities" and did not clear it with the White House. As word spread that HUD was turning down grants, Nixon's supporters in the South and in white Northern suburbs took their complaints directly to the president.

Romney’s initiative, which by no means addressed every local government that violated the FHA, was soon reeled in by Nixon. His administration essentially brushed the “affirmatively furthering” part of the FHA mandate under the carpet, with long-lasting repercussions. For decades, HUD—under both Democratic and Republican administrations—hardly enforced the provision.

What municipalities receiving federal funds had to do was analyze the barriers to fair housing in their jurisdictions, and suggest plans to overcome them. A 2010 Government Accountability Office report found that neither the grant recipients nor HUD did a very good job of this. “There wasn't a lot of understanding by communities about what it meant to affirmatively further fair housing, and there wasn't a lot of oversight by HUD to make sure that they were,” says Diane Yentel, president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition, an organization that promotes housing access.

Enter the AFFH rule, which Barack Obama’s HUD floated in 2013. In 2015, shortly after the Supreme Court ruled that housing policies that inadvertently hurt minorities were just as bad as those that explicitly discriminated, HUD went ahead and formalized the AFFH rule. Emily Badger explained how the rule worked at the time in The Washington Post :


The new rules, a top demand of civil-rights groups, will require cities and towns all over the country to scrutinize their housing patterns for racial bias and to publicly report, every three to five years, the results. Communities will also have to set goals, which will be tracked over time, for how they will further reduce segregation.

In other words, the rule laid out a way for local communities to execute what the FHA had required them to back in 1968. It also provided them with the demographic and housing data to clearly visualize the housing trends in their neighborhoods. For example, local stakeholders can use this map of Milwaukee, Wisconsin to see that most subsidized housing is located in segregated neighborhoods, and plan accordingly:(HUD)

The rule is to phased in over multiple years. In 2016, only 13 jurisdictions had to comply with it, according to the NLIHC experts. That is a very small proportion of the 5,000 or so total program participants that will eventually be folded in—if the rule manages to remain on the books.

‘Obama’s war on the suburbs’

The arguments against the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing today are the same as they were in Romney’s time and in the decades after: that it is a form of social engineering.

According to Rep. Gosar, who introduced one of the current legislations against it, the AFFH is a product of “Obama’s war on the suburbs,”—“a way of punishing neighborhoods that don’t fall in line with his liberal agenda of federally mandated demographics.” Sen. Rubio, who supported the Senate bill, declined to be interviewed. But his office provided CityLab with this statement:


Top-down, one-size-fits-all regulations by Washington bureaucrats won’t help make affordable housing more accessible to those who need it. The best way to reduce the cost of housing and increase access is to enable state and local authorities to make decisions that are best suited to the needs of their communities and residents.

Housing experts say that’s a fundamental misinterpretation. First of all, the rule is “agnostic,” says Solomon Greene, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, who previously worked at HUD. It empowers local governments to use data, involve the community, and improve access to housing and opportunity in all neighborhoods the way they see fit. That could mean preserving affordable housing in gentrifying area, or investing in infrastructure in distressed area, or providing more vouchers, depending on the context. “The HUD rule reflects the broader diversity beliefs in the housing field that there’s no clear answer as to what is the best use of a federal dollar,” Greene says. “It is the opposite of a one-size-fits-all model, which is how it's been rebranded.”

What detractors take issue with, it appears then, is not this particular AFFH rule, but the legislation it honors: the Fair Housing Act. Attempts to build affordable housing in predominantly white neighborhoods has always been met with coded racial backlash, by both liberals and conservatives. The straw man argument against the AFFH is just the meta-version of that.

Indeed, arguments against school busing programs and those against furthering fair housing both share an implicit assumption: that racial segregation is merely an expression of innate human preferences. That’s simply inaccurate. Intentional policies at every level of government are largely responsible for funneling black and brown people into certain neighborhoods—and still are. Any choice in the matter was usually not theirs.

The failure to purposefully reverse the effect of government-sponsored racial sorting is evident in Ferguson, Flint, and Milwaukee. And, now, if the AFFH rule is rescinded, that tradition will continue.


Editor's Note: Good Riddance AFFH. This obnoxious rule presumes communities are "racist" based on racial composition, not actual racial exclusion. It is social engineering on steroids and serves to marginalize EVERY community who does not conform to the social engineers "ideal" community. The biggest victims of this policy are the very minority communities it supposedly sets out to serve by uprooting neighborhoods and social institutions that have sustained them. While diversity enriches us, it should be voluntary and organic. In our increasingly urbane, international culture, such ham handed attempts to social engineer us are not necessary and counter productive

HUD attacks Westchester County. Wake Up call. Will Trump force low income housing in Marin?

This video is from 2013  while under the Obama Administration HUD policies. Will Trump carry forth the same AFFH policy (Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing) which forces communities to build low income housing exclusively for minorities in areas of high concentration of white residents.  It presumes that racism exists anytime the demographic makeup of a neighborhood does not reflect the ideal racial mix.

Marinwood-Lucas Valley in particular is the target for the Marin County Supervisors since they control unincorporated Marin County development policies with three out of five votes.    Since we only can vote for one supervisor for our district, the supervisors are immune from negative consequences of their votes.

HUD Gives Poor More Rent Money to Live in “Higher Opportunity” Areas With “Lower Poverty”

HUD Gives Poor More Rent Money to Live in “Higher Opportunity” Areas With “Lower Poverty”

NOVEMBER 21, 2016

To help “very low-income families” live in better neighborhoods, the Obama administration has issued a sweeping order requiring the government to pay more for their housing so they can move to areas of higher opportunity and lower poverty. The final rule was announced in the federal register this month by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the agency that annually spends tens of billions on rent for the poor.

A chunk of the money, an estimated $18 billion according to the Congressional Budget Office, goes to a program called Housing Choice Voucher (HCV), which is funded by HUD and administered by local public housing agencies. It allows recipients to choose housing in the private market and pays a set amount based on fair market rent for a metropolitan area. Under the new rule, which goes into effect in January, fair market rents will now be calculated by ZIP code so Uncle Sam will pay a lot more for people to live in nicer areas. Here’s an excerpt of the new regulation: “This final rule establishes a more effective means for HCV tenants to move into areas of higher opportunity and lower poverty by providing the tenants with a subsidy adequate to make such areas accessible and, consequently, help reduce the number of voucher families that reside in areas of high poverty concentration.”

HUD Secretary Julián Castro said in an announcement that the goal is to “offer these voucher-holding families more opportunities to move into higher opportunity neighborhoods with better housing, better schools and higher paying jobs.” The agency decided to spend more money to house the poor after a group of Ivy League social scientists published a study on the effects of moving families away from neighborhoods with deeply concentrated poverty to low-poverty environments. They found that children who moved to low-poverty neighborhoods before the age of 13 did better as adults, had significantly higher earnings and a greater likelihood of attending college. To keep with one of the agency’s key missions of “fostering opportunities for economic mobility,” American taxpayers will foot the bill for the higher rent in more upscale neighborhoods.

To justify the added expense HUD is playing the race card, asserting that the current method of doling out vouchers “has not proven effective in addressing the problem of concentrated poverty and economic and racial segregation in neighborhoods.” The agency fully expects that when the new system kicks in it will be “more effective in helping families move to areas of higher opportunity and lower poverty.” To some this may sound like social engineering and yet another Obama administration example of spreading the wealth around. For instance, the “better jobs” argument is a huge red herring, particularly in the area surrounding the capitol, which will be deeply impacted by the new rule. For example, the highest new fair market rent areas in the District of Columbia are in the northwest while the lowest are in the southeast. Commuting to downtown is actually easier from the southeast because of its proximity, metro rail coverage and bus routes. Also, the highest rent allowances in the area are in places like Fairfax—again, far less accessible to employment centers than anywhere in the District.

The new regulation will have a significant impact on the composition of targeted neighborhoods. As an example: In 2016, the fair market rent for the entire D.C. metropolitan area for a two-bedroom apartment was $1,623. Under the new rule, voucher amounts in the D.C. area will range up to $2,420 a month for a two-bedroom apartment in northwest D.C and parts of Fairfax and Arlington counties. Among the areas that will implement the new system are the nation’s largest cities, including Chicago, Dallas, Atlanta, Philadelphia and San Antonio. HUD claims that its current system artificially inflates rents in some higher poverty neighborhoods rather than incentivize voucher holders to move to higher opportunity neighborhoods.

This is an agency that’s been embroiled in a multitude of serious scandals—under both Democrat and Republican administrations—over the years and Judicial Watch has reported on many of them, including the discovery that $200 million had been wasted at local public housing agencies run by people with “troubled backgrounds” in high-ranking positions. Agency leadership has also been rocky over the years. George W. Bush’s HUD secretary, Alphonso Jackson, was forced to resign in the midst of a federal investigation involving cronyism. Bill Clinton’s HUD secretary, Henry Cisneros, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about payments to a mistress. Ronald Reagan’s HUD secretary, Samuel Pierce, was involved in an influence-peddling scandal that saw 16 people, including some of his top aides at the agency, convicted.

Did Marinwood get off the Target List for HUD (What about Marin Supervisors?)

Dick Spotswood: Trump’s election could take Marin off HUD’s target list

Dick Spotswood, seen on Tuesday, Jan. 05, 2016, in San Rafael, Calif. (Frankie Frost/Marin Independent Journal) 

POSTED: 11/15/16, 4:03 PM PST | UPDATED: 9 HRS AGO

8 COMMENTS

Donald Trump’s upset presidential victory coupled with a Republican majority Congress will have significant Marin implications.

A major change will come with the expected shake-up of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. Marin has been under intense pressure from HUD, not only to develop more affordable housing, but to “affirmatively further fair housing.”

That’s HUD 2015 rule utilizing quotas by ZIP code to guarantee that sufficient affordable housing is provided in each city, town and village for “underserved” African-American and non-white Hispanic households.

HUD’s first test case was New York City’s prosperous suburb, Westchester County. That’s where HUD pursued litigation linked to a compact similar to the compliance agreement Marin’s Board of Supervisors signed under pressure with HUD in 2011. HUD’s goal was to bring the reluctant county into compliance with strict federal diversity guidelines.

Westchester is said to be New York’s Marin and Marin was widely expected to be HUD’s second test case in 2017.

Westchester was a reliably blue county until HUD pushed hard. The upshot was a voter revolt that elected a Republican county executive, Rob Astorino. The county’s elected combined mayor and chief executive, Astorino is a bantam-weight street fighter who consistently fought a rear guard action against the determined federal agency.

With Trump’s victory, the housing activist concept of “affirmatively furthering fair housing” is likely one of the new administration’s first casualties. Trump is expected to gut HUD’s headcount. That’s a strategy Republican administrations use to dispose of career bureaucrats perceived as being in their opponents’ ideological camp.

New York-area rumors are that Astorino, in other matters a moderate suburban Republican, is on Trump’s short list to be HUD secretary. Trump, who owns a golf course in Westchester, knows Astorino. The county’s top honcho supported Trump, despite the usual reservations.

With federal pressure likely trailing off in coming months, Marin’s commitment to provide a more diverse community will be tested. Many Marinites opposing HUD’s strong-arm tactics pleaded that the county was willing and able to move diversity forward on its own initiative.

Diversity is an overdue goal that can be achieved without blockbuster developments, but only if the political will is strong enough.

While local control is far superior to Uncle Sam calling the shots, the challenge now is for Marin to keep its promise absent threats of federal intervention. See Full Article HERE

Editor's Note:  Marinwood has been the target for the Board of Supervisor for massive HUD affordable housing projects for decades.  Susan Adams silently lobbied her fellow supervisors and the Association of Bay Area Governments to make Marinwood a "priority development area" which would mean massive subsidies for low income housing developers.  She beamed with pride in her skill at political manipulation of the local community to make Marinwood Plaza a shining example. Bridge Housing was lured with massive subsidies.  When her plans finally were revealed to the community,  she denied any knowledge.  One deception lead to another and finally led to her political defeat in 2014.  The affordable housing lobby only is profitable (and hugely so) when it has access to massive government subsidies.  This is very likely to change under a Trump administration.   Sensible development that takes community infrastructure, traffic and need for new schools will be welcomed.  Massive crony development that places great tax burden on our community will not have an easy path to development.   

AFFH. admission of stealth caught on video

AFFH: Admission of Stealth Caught on Video

 by STANLEY KURTZ June 15, 2015 9:40 AM 

How has the Obama administration’s radically transformative Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation—released in preliminary form nearly two years ago—largely escaped public scrutiny until now? AFFH will dramatically undercut the independence of local governments, will mean significant population transfers across metropolitan areas, and will force densified development on suburbs and cities alike. Last week, by passing an amendment authored by Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar, House Republicans moved to starve the Department of Housing and Urban Development of the funds required to enforce the rule. Also, last week at a congressional hearing, HUD Secretary Julian Castro, widely touted as Hillary Clinton’s most likely vice-presidential running mate, was sharply questioned about AFFH by Utah Congresswoman Mia Love. If all that’s not news, what is? Yet the mainstream media has been missing in action on this issue since the preliminary version of AFFH was promulgated in July of 2013. Why? The answer is that President Obama understands how politically explosive AFFH is, and is at pains to enact it as quietly as possible. Meanwhile, a thoroughly biased and compliant press plays along. My 2012 book on Obama’s anti-suburban policies, Spreading the Wealth, highlighted several admissions of stealth by advocates and scholars sympathetic to the Obama administration. But that was three years ago, and a year before the initial draft of AFFH was released. So it’s helpful now to find a video confession by a sympathetic observer of the Obama administration’s policies to the effect that, when it comes to AFFH, stealth is the order of the day. 

The video in question is of a June 1, 2015 Brookings Institution event, “Place Opportunity and Social Mobility: What Now for Policy?” Brookings, by the way, is ground zero for the Obama administration’s anti-suburban “regionalist” policies. Brookings specialists help stock Obama’s HUD with pro-regionalist bureaucrats; and Brookings fellows help to build stealthily regionalist policies into Obama administration initiatives. Obama’s only serious public foray into urban-suburban issues during his first term came in an important 2009 Brookings Institution address that received virtually no press coverage. The June 1, 2015 Brookings event on “Place and Opportunity” was streamed on video by 30 officials at HUD and 9 officials from the Seattle Housing Authority, a national center of regionalist policies. The section of the video of particular interest comes in the form of a comment by event host, Brookings Fellow Richard Reeves, on remarks by panelist Margery Austin Turner. Turner, senior vice president for Program, Planning, and Management at the Urban Institute, is also a former deputy assistant secretary for research at HUD, and so (as Reeves points out) was addressing many of her former HUD colleagues online. What we’re seeing on video, then, is not an isolated opinion, but evidence of the state of mind of the core advocates and officials who shape the Obama administration’s housing policies. The key exchange comes between 1:21:08 and 1:23:59 on the video. In response to a question from Reeves about what “getting serious” about housing policy would mean, Turner cites AFFH, arguing that the rule could bring “incredibly important” changes to America. Slyly, she acknowledges that AFFH isn’t so much enforcing the original legal obligation to “affirmatively further fair housing,” as it is changing our understanding of what that obligation means. (In other words, AFFH is stretching a directive to prevent discrimination into a mandate for social engineering.) Turner then says that it would take decades for AFFH to fully transform society along the lines she desires. (I’d add that the rule won’t take nearly that long to gut local government in America.) What’s interesting is that when Turner finishes her discussion of AFFH by saying that the rule “sounds very obscure, but I think it could be hugely important,” Reeves breaks in and says: “Perhaps it’s important to keep [the AFFH rule] sounding obscure in order to get it through.” (In other words, to get the AFFH rule enacted before public opposition and congressional Republicans can block it, we’ve got to keep its existence and importance quiet.) At this point, the audience laughs sympathetically. Then Reeves adds: “Sometimes obscurity is the best political strategy, particularly in this area.” You don’t often see a direct admission by AFFH advocates that they are trying to fly under the political and media radar, but here it is—and at a Brookings event that Reeves himself emphasizes was being streamed by bureaucrats at HUD. Reeves clearly has no worries that his call for stealth might stir outrage from the 30 Obama administration officials listening in. Another revealing section of the video comes between 42:30 and 48:24 when we hear from Emily Badger, a staff writer at The Washington Post. Not only is Badger an enthusiastic advocate of precisely the sort of policies represented by AFFH, but she’s clearly aware of how politically awkward the topic is. So why won’t the mainstream press fairly report—or indeed report at all—on the sweeping ambitions of AFFH? If Badger is any indication, the press has refused to do its job because it is thoroughly on the side of AFFH’s advocates, and is complicit in their plans to keep this issue out of the public eye. Why wasn’t Reeves ashamed to call for keeping AFFH quiet, in front of a reporter for The Washington Post? And why didn’t Badger write a story, say, about the stealthy ways of AFFH supporters? Obviously, it’s because Badger is herself an advocate of AFFH, and holds that interest above her obligations as a reporter. It’s also notable that Margery Turner begins her remarks on AFFH by revealing that “any week now” HUD will promulgate the rule in its final form. (Remember, the panel was held on June 1, 2015.) This is consistent with the last week’s report in The Hill that AFFH is “due out this month.” Turner is an insider, so her prediction carries weight. A release toward the end of June, in the hopes that the July 4 holiday and summer vacation will dampen public attention, seems likely. (Or will the unexpected wave of publicity among conservatives over the past week frighten the Obama administration into yet another delay?) In any case, the lesson here is clear. Don’t take silence on the part of the media or the administration as an indication of how significant AFFH is. As Turner herself says, despite its apparent obscurity, AFFH is “incredibly important.” And when the mainstream press finally gets around to reporting on AFFH, treat them not as fair-minded observers, but as the advocates-in-reporters-clothing they are. Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com.Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/419766/affh-admission-stealth-caught-video-stanley-kurtz

Mark Levin: HUD mandates 'affordable housing' in affluent Baltimore suburbs.

How HUD is attempting to take over Westchester County

Astorino Explains HUD Takeover in Westchester

ASTORINO TOWN HALL--Rob Astorino explains how the federal government is attempting to take over housing in Westchester County.--Greenlawn, New York. July 13, 2014

Sara Pratt, Legal Bulldog on Enforcing AFFH (Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing) across America

If you really want to understand the mind of a legal bulldog that will be suing cities and towns across America, listen to former HUD enforcement official, Sara Pratt. She spoke at the Marin Fair Housing Conference in April 2016 but the videotape of her presentation was not published. Here is a speech she gave around the same time at recent housing conference in Tennessee discussing strategies to force AFFH everywhere. 

How Obama Stole Dubuque (Lesson for Marin about AFFH and things to come)

How Obama Stole Dubuque

By Stanley Kurtz — January 13, 2016

What state is Dubuque in? If you answered Chicago, you are correct. Chicago’s no state, you say? Don’t be so 18th century — so “constitutional.” Dubuque is in Chicago, which is now a kind of state. Or to put it differently, the Obama administration is in the process of replacing our entire system of government — made up of nested local, state, and national, levels — with a regional framework. In Obama’s new dispensation, suburbs, small towns, and modest-sized cities like Dubuque will be turned into subordinate satellites of regional mega-cities like Chicago, regardless of which state these local governments are formally a part of.

Welcome to the world of “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH), President Obama’s transformative new regulation. How will AFFH work? The city of Dubuque gives us one of our best and most frightening previews yet. I hope the presidential candidates are watching, because Obama’s new AFFH regulation and the Dubuque fiasco ought to be an issue in this year’s Iowa caucuses. I also hope American citizens pay attention to the travesty in Dubuque, because it’s not too late to save your hometown from Dubuque’s fate. (I’ll tell you how to do this below.)

An account of Dubuque as a forerunner of a post-AFFH world comes to us courtesy of a stunning report by Deborah Thornton, a policy analyst for Iowa’s Public Interest Institute. The report tells the story of how Dubuque was pressured to cede large swathes of its governing authority to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which has forced the city to direct its limited low-income “Section 8” housing resources, not to its own needy citizens, but to voucher-holders from Chicago.

Unlike the more familiar forerunner of AFFH, Westchester County, Dubuque is not an upper-middle-class suburb but a small and economically struggling city. At $44,600, median income in Dubuque is well below the state median of $51,843. Like other nearby Mississippi river towns with aging populations, Dubuque is hard-pressed to provide good jobs and decent housing for the low-income people already there: poor families with children, retired elderly, and disabled adults. The city’s priority is to revive its economy by keeping its young people from moving away, and by attracting new residents who are willing and able to start businesses. Like any city, Dubuque’s first obligation is to see to the needs of the citizens who already live there, vote, and pay taxes. Or so it was in pre-AFFH America.

Our story begins about eight years ago. Just as Dubuque was reeling from the effects of the 2008 recession and dealing with an uptick in its own low-income housing needs, the city was hit with a wave of “Section 8” low-income housing voucher applicants from Chicago. A few years earlier, Chicago had systematically demolished its most drug- and crime-ridden high-rise public housing facilities, using grants from HUD. Yet through its own mismanagement, Chicago had failed to properly replace its now depleted low-income housing stock, leaving many Chicago residents looking to use their Section 8 vouchers elsewhere.

With many more Section 8 applicants than it could house, Dubuque instituted a low-income housing point system granting preference to Dubuque residents, county residents, state residents, and out-of-state residents, in that order. Although HUD’s rules ostensibly allow localities to craft their own housing priorities, Dubuque’s point system was deemed unacceptable by HUD. The feds undertook a review of Dubuque’s housing policy that effectively treated the city as part of greater Chicago.

This, of course, is ridiculous. Dubuque is 200 miles and a four-to-five hour drive away from Chicago, even without traffic. And of course the two cities are in different states. But by effectively treating Dubuque and Chicago as part of the same “region,” HUD was able to declare Dubuque’s low-income housing point system discriminatory. Since the vast majority of Section 8 applicants from Chicago were African-Americans, Dubuque’s preferences for citizens of its own city, county, and state were deemed racist. HUD insisted that Dubuque would have to admit housing applicants in conformity with the demographics of the larger (HUD-defined) region. Somehow Dubuque had become a satellite of Chicago.

Having previously accepted HUD funding through the Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) program, as well as HUD’s Community Development Block Grant program, Dubuque was formally obligated to “affirmatively further fair housing” in whatever way HUD defined that obligation. Refusal to submit to HUD’s dictates would have led to the withdrawal of federal funding, a lawsuit for supposed discrimination, or both. The cowed elected officials of Dubuque accordingly signed a “voluntary” (in truth, forced) consent agreement that effectively ceded control of the city’s housing policy to HUD for at least five years.

Under HUD’s detailed oversight, Dubuque must now actively recruit Section 8 voucher holders from the Chicago area. In fact, as of January 2015, the percentage of African-American voucher users in Dubuque was larger than the percentage of African-Americans living in Chicago. The problem is that very few of these new public housing residents have ever lived or paid taxes in Dubuque, or even Iowa. The feds have essentially commandeered Dubuque to solve Chicago’s public housing shortage. HUD’s diktat also imposes a huge administrative burden on Dubuque, with monthly, quarterly, annual, and five-year plans to be filed and followed up on. (Yes, a “five-year plan.”) Having “voluntarily” consented to a federal takeover, Dubuque is now obligated to follow HUD’s every command for at least five years.

Thornton rightly notes that Dubuque is a template for the coming implementation of AFFH. The rule will make it easy for HUD to effectively annex other Iowa river-towns—like Clinton, Davenport, and Burlington—to greater Chicago, although those cities are no closer to Chicago than Dubuque. The same pattern will play out nationally under AFFH, Thornton warns.
In a post-AFFH world, every region of the United States will be compelled “to meet nationally determined standards for the management and makeup of every aspect” of local life, says Thornton. AFFH will also force local communities into regional consortia directed by what Thornton calls “unelected governing boards who do not represent the voters.” Those electorally unaccountable regional commissions, she continues, “will set targets for the desired percentage of ‘types’ of people to live in each area of the region.” Cities and businesses, “buried under mounds of paperwork,” will have no choice but to submit.

How can a housing rule control every aspect of local life? It’s far easier than you might imagine. AFFH redefines “fair housing” to include proximity to transportation, jobs, and schools. This will effectively extend the power that HUD now exercises over Dubuque’s housing policy to nearly every other aspect of local development and planning. Under AFFH, once a town takes HUD money, it effectively loses control not only over housing but schools, zoning, transportation, the environment, and business location.  As Thornton concludes, “If you take their money, you play by their rules.”

Dubuque shows that, over time, Obama’s AFFH rule could spell the end of local government in America. Thornton rightly warns against the regional consortia provided for in AFFH.  Once HUD pressures a municipality into such a regional governing entity, local control is lost. But the Dubuque case strikes me as an even scarier precedent than Thornton implies. A city may not even have to formally join a regional consortium to lose its capacity for self-government.

After all, HUD didn’t need to force Dubuque to formally join a regional consortium in order to turn it into a satellite of Chicago. All the feds had to do was classify Dubuque as part of greater Chicago, then judge the city’s housing demographics as out-of-balance with reference to the racial and ethnic make-up of the region as a whole. At that point, a trumped-up charge of racism and threats to withdraw funding or file a lawsuit “logically” followed. Without joining anything, Dubuque is for all practical purposes now part of Chicago, essentially because HUD has declared it so.

AFFH makes this trick particularly easy to pull off because the rule instructs all localities in receipt of federal grants to analyze their housing practices with reference to “regional data” provided by HUD.  By forcing every town, small city, or suburb that takes HUD money to evaluate the “fairness” of its demographic mix with reference to the demographics of the nearest mega-city, HUD can effectively institute regional government in America by fiat. If the ethnic mix of your town is substantially different than the ethnic mix of a city even 200 miles, a five-hour drive, and another state away, you will have to recruit that city’s dominant ethnicities to populate your low-income housing, so long as HUD declares you to be in that “region.” As Iowa is to Chicago, so may New Hampshire soon be to Boston. Are you listening presidential candidates?
In its story on the announcement of AFFH, The New York Times quoted Secretary Julian Castro downplaying HUD’s intended enforcement efforts. Castro portrays the cutoff of federal funds as a last resort that he barely intends to use, if at all. Dubuque makes a mockery of Castro’s claim, unless you credit the absurd pretense that the Dubuque’s compliance agreement was in fact voluntary, rather than the response of a financially-strapped town to threats of federal defunding and/or lawsuits—threats levied on the basis of a thoroughly contrived “regionalist” premise. When it comes to housing, Secretary Castro is now forcibly controlling virtually every move Dubuque makes.

Come to think of it, Dubuque may not be in the state of Chicago after all. What state is Dubuque really in? If you answered H.U.D., you are correct.

If you don’t want your hometown to become the next Dubuque, there’s something you can do to prevent it right now. Organize your neighbors and force your local government to stop taking HUD money. (For more on how to do this, go here.)

— Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com

Editor's Note: Go to the original article in the WSJ and read the reader comments.  Dubuque is a mess.

Unfair “Fair Housing”

In this episode of the 10 Blocks podcast, City Journal editor Brian Anderson and Howard Husock discuss the Obama administration’s efforts to locate affordable-housing units in Westchester County, NY and changes to HUD’s mission nationwide.

Audio Transcript

Brian Anderson: Affordable housing policies become a divisive issue in New York's Westchester County, just as it has in other municipalities across the country.  The Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development has pushed Westchester to finance hundreds of subsidized housing units and market them to poor minorities.  While the goal of deconcentrating poverty has merit, is the way the Feds are going about it going to do more harm than good?  Joining me to discuss what's going on in Westchester and how it could affect other communities is Howard Husock, Vice President for Research and Publications at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.  His article from City Journal Spring issue is entitled "Unfair 'Fair Housing.'"  Howard, thank you for joining.

Howard Husock: Good to be with you, Brian.

Brian Anderson: Your piece opens up in Chappaqua, the wealthy Westchester town where Bill and Hillary Clinton have a home.  Describe for listeners exactly what's happening there with regard to this affordable housing policy battle.

Howard Husock: Chappaqua is a village in the County of Westchester, which is a relatively affluent, but not uniformly affluent, county in New York State, just north of New York City.  And the Department of Housing and Urban Development is pushing, as you put it, Westchester, because of a lawsuit, to locate subsidized housing, low-income housing, in affluent parts of the county.  And you don't get a lot more affluent than Chappaqua.  It's leafy, it's tony, its semi-rural.  And the idea that HUD has is that these sorts of places would be good homes for poorer people who would benefit from the good schools and good public facilities in a place like Chappaqua.  And Chappaqua is just one front, a front line of this happening all over Westchester County, and the idea is to build a complex near the train station there that would include some low-income housing.  HUD's idea is this ought to be a norm across the country.  As HUD would put it, that no child should have his fate decided by virtue of the zip code in which he lives, so it's a small example of a larger philosophical movement, if you will.

Brian Anderson: And behind that philosophical movement is this idea of deconcentrating poverty.  What's your view of that and perhaps you could explain a little bit what that means.

Howard Husock: Deconcentrating poverty, I think, is an idea that has sprung up from the failure of public housing, and the idea that public housing failed because it was a concentration of poverty where all sorts of bad things happened and couldn't be controlled.  And so if the poor were dispersed among better off people who would be role models and would allow the poor to benefit from better schools and public accommodations, parks, recreation programs, that this deconcentration would benefit both the wealthy and the poor, I guess you would say.  It's an extraordinary change, however, from the original mission—and one has to wonder whether the officials at HUD in Washington even take this on board—it's an extraordinary change from the original mission of HUD, which was to improve urban neighborhoods.  In effect HUD is now giving up on the idea that poor neighborhoods can be good neighborhoods and we have to spread out the poor, and by this they certainly largely mean the minority poor, because that's to whom there's going to be a special outreach, at least in Westchester County, rather than taking the steps necessary to make sure that poor neighborhoods can be okay places to live.  So this deconcentration movement is a big change and should be appreciated as such.

Brian Anderson: How much of this, though, is also about the fact that places like Chappaqua don't have large minority populations?  In other words, is part of the policy aimed at making these tony suburbs more diverse?

Howard Husock: I think there's no doubt that there's a sense that there's something unjust about what you might call the American de facto system of housing, that there are poor neighborhoods, rich neighborhoods, and neighborhoods in between, but there are certainly enclaves of the quite wealthy where there are very low numbers of minorities, although in Westchester County the numbers of minorities in some of the most famous, wealthy places there—Chappaqua, Scarsdale—are in proportion to the number of very well-off minorities, there just aren't that many well-off minorities.  In other words, there's not really evidence that if a black potential homebuyer wants to buy in Chappaqua that he or she could expect to be turned away on the basis of race.  In fact there's no expectation of that.  But, there is something about that picture that rubs HUD, I think, and the Obama administration, the wrong way.

Brian Anderson: How have the black residents of towns in Westchester, like Chappaqua, the ones already living there, reacted to the idea that there will be these subsidized units being constructed?

Howard Husock: Well, I think, Brian, we have to put that in the content of how one becomes upwardly mobile in America.  And I like to think of housing as a kind of a ladder of neighborhoods and one goes from poorer, to better off, to slightly even better off, and maybe beyond that by making a series of good life decisions.  That could include being employed, it could include being married, it could include saving one's money and deferring certain gratifications.  And anybody, black or white, who makes the effort and takes the steps necessary to buy a home, to save the money and make the life decisions necessary to buy that home, is quite protective of what one has achieved, and proud of it.  And so when this Westchester decision was originally reported on by The New York Times, there was a flood of postings by African-American, self-identified African-American residents in the county, I should say, from—not from Chappaqua itself, but from some other places, who said, well, wait a minute.  I did what I had to do to get here and now others are going to be, in effect, given the same thing that I had to work very hard to achieve for myself.  And so what they are saying is their achievement is, in effect, being devalued by the government.  And I think they are quite concerned, especially minority residents, that there will be a potential for tension amongst residents because classically, in the sociological literature, Americans get along on the basis of their economic and educational commonalities.  If you have minority residents who share educational backgrounds and socioeconomic status with their neighbors, the chances of everybody getting along well are quite high.  If you introduce much poorer residents, there's the chance for tension, and I think that's what those minority residents are quite concerned about.

Brian Anderson: You say in the piece that you'd like to see policymakers encourage upward mobility rather than trying to deconcentrate poverty by forcing people to live in certain neighborhoods.  What do you mean by that and how should policymakers go about improving chances for mobility?

Howard Husock: Well, I think we have to circle back to at least the goal, perhaps not some of the means that were chosen historically that HUD originally had and, repeating myself, to make poor neighborhoods good neighborhoods.  But what do I meant by that?  That means that, first of all, you need public safety in poor neighborhoods, so that those who work hard, play by the rules, save money, don't have to worry about robbery and home invasions and the other things that in addition to terrorizing people deplete their wealth, makes it harder for them to get ahead.  We are also saying that there are ways to improve public education which has to be at the bedrock of marking poor neighborhoods good neighborhoods and encouraging upward mobility.  And we're seeing charter schools and poor neighborhoods can work very well.  It's a sort of divisiveness in policy circles right now, which is quite unfortunate.  It doesn't have to be only charter schools.  We need schools that work well and we need good—public good, as the economists say.  That means the parks have to be good, the streets have to be clean.  Just because you have a low-income neighborhood doesn't mean it has to be a bad neighborhood.  It can be the launching point for upward mobility.  And let me just speak for a moment about what's practical.  Right now we spend about $19 billion dollars on housing vouchers that allow low-income residents, like those who would be moving into these subsidized units in Westchester, in all likelihood, 2.4 million, roughly, households get these vouchers.  Well, there's about 45 million Americans living in poverty.  We can't, as a practical matter, conceive of giving all those people housing vouchers.  In fact there's a new book calledEviction, which urges that as a policy.  It seems impractical in our current fiscal climate in Washington, and I think ill advised as well, for some of the reasons that I've been mentioning.  But therefore, if our goal is to help as many of the poor advance as possible, we have to return to the idea of giving people the ways, means, incentives to advance on their own.

Brian Anderson: The final question.  Here we are at the end of the Obama years, and this is related to what you just said, I think.  What is the current state of public housing and the public housing debate in America?

Howard Husock: Well, public housing—people think of public housing as physical public housing projects.  They've not been growing.  In fact their ranks have been diminished by being torn down.  And housing vouchers have been increasing in number.

Brian Anderson: And the housing vouchers are now a great portion of public housing?  Or...

Howard Husock: Yes.  There are more receiving housing vouchers.  In fact we spend more on housing vouchers than we spend on traditional cash public assistance.  It's become a really large safety net program, if you will.  The public housing, itself—physical public housing continues to be in declining physical condition.  So, for instance, here in New York there are 178,000 public housing units and an estimated $18 billion dollars in capital repairs that need to be done.  In fact, the U.S. Attorney's office is on the verge of suing the city because of the poor conditions of public housing.  These are tremendous ironies, just tremendous ironies.  Public housing was meant to replace slums, and it's become our most persistent slum.  That said, in terms of your question, I think there's very little focus on this.  And we see long-term poverty among single parents and their children concentrated in public housing.  Median stay in New York public housing is almost 17 years.  Median housing voucher stay is almost nine years.  So we see long-term poverty being supported, in effect, by the Public Housing and Housing Subsidy Program.  And you know, frankly, if you're on a housing subsidy, it doesn't even pay you to earn more.  You pay 30% of your income in rent and the more your income goes up the more rent you pay.  So we've got a dependency trap going, and I wish there were more attention being paid to it.

Brian Anderson: If you enjoyed today's discussion, check out Howard Husock's latest essay, "Unfair 'Fair Housing.'"  It's on our website, www.City-Journal.org, and it's in our latest issue.  Additionally, we'd love to hear your thoughts on today's episode.  Tweet your comments and questions to @CityJournal with the hashtag #10Blocks.  You can also make suggestions for other City Journal editors and other topics you'd like to hear from in future podcasts.  Thanks for listening and thanks, Howard, for joining us.

Howard Husock: Thank you, Brian.

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