Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing – overreach or “meh”?

Last updated on: June 19, 2015 at 7:05 am by Jane the Actuary

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing – overreach or “meh”? 2015-06-19T07:05:15-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Here’s an article in the WSJ that was being shared on twitter the other day: “Obama Wants to Pick the Clintons’ Neighbors; The administration is forcing low-income housing into wealthy enclaves, whether or not anyone wants it”

The key points:

For the past six years, HUD has been hounding Westchester about building more low-income housing in places like Chappaqua. Federal officials have vowed to “hold people’s feet to the fire” and make an example of the county. “We’re clearly messaging other jurisdictions across the country that there has been a significant change in the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and we’re going to ask them to pursue similar goals as well,” said a deputy secretary at HUD in 2009. . . .

Last week HUD announced that it was moving forward with new regulations that essentially will force about 1,250 communities nationwide to construct cheap housing units in wealthy, predominantly white neighborhoods and then actively recruit poor minorities to move in. Local governments that don’t play ball will jeopardize federal grant money. What happened in Westchester is a taste of what may be coming to upscale parts of Houston, Dallas, Marin County, Calif., and other places that aren’t racially and economically diverse enough for this White House.

It sounds like an extreme overreach, a federal interference with the way local governments, well, govern themselves. But digging a little further, not so much.

Here’s the HUD site with the proposed rule, and here are the details: HUD does not claim authority over local housing and zoning policy nationwide, but imposes these requirements on “states and local jurisdictions that receive direct Community Development Block Grant(CDBG) funding.” And HUD’s concerns are more about the zoning restrictions that mean that local governments actively push housing costs higher.

So: is Westchester County receiving CDBG funding? Yes.

Is Westchester County violating the terms of that grant money? In fact, this is a longstanding issue, see here for a full discussion of the issue.

What is my own community doing? The difference is stark:

Westchester County’s list of grants or potential grants includes, yes, housing and food programs, but also such items as sidewalk installations, playground replacement, and comments that various projects were rejected because they wouldn’t meet the requirement to primarily benefit low-income people.

My own town? Here’s their “annual action plan” which is unmistakably different — everything is clearly focused on low-income folk (though a big chunk is the senior center, which was long ago OK’ed with HUD).

Now, why this is done at the town level in our case, and at the County level in Westchester I don’t know, but I’m guessing that it’s simply the nature of how local government is structured here vs. there.

So: no, so far as I can tell, HUD is not micromanaging towns. They’re just insisting that if you want federal money, you’d better abide by the terms of the grants.

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