“But they rose to the challenge.”The Trump administration is rolling back the deadline for a key rule on fair housing made into law under President Barack Obama—a change with potentially broad consequences for racial segregation.But the review was ultimately narrow. HUD is revising the onerous reporting requirements and codified language of the 2015 regulation. The new rule also considers the supply and quality of affordable housing in a jurisdiction.The current regulation defines AFFH as “taking meaningful actions that, taken together, address significant disparities in housing needs and in access to opportunity, replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns, transforming racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity, and fostering and maintaining compliance with civil rights and fair housing laws.”Under the 2015 AFFH rule, as a condition of receiving certain HUD funds, state and local governments and public housing agencies (PHAs) must work to identify barriers to fair housing choice, ensure that their practices and policies do not promote racial segregation, and complete costly, administratively burdensome Assessment of Fair Housing plans.NAHBNow is the official blog of the National Association of Home Builders and your one-stop source for home building industry news, product information and educational resources.Key elements of HUD’s proposed new AFFH rule:HUD proposes changing the definition of AFFH to “advancing fair housing choice within the program participant’s control or influence.” “The city would agree that it did feel like a compressed timeline to put together their full Assessment of Fair Housing in a short time,” Reyes says. Fair housing advocates see it differently: They worry that the Trump administration is abandoning a direly needed correction that is already underway.“The optimistic side of me says that maybe there are public agencies that are committed to advancing fair housing,” Reyes says. Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing: Proposed Rule Fails to Address Discrimination and Segregation. Now, it’s being postponed. In the Equal Rights Center’s home community of Washington, DC, residential segregation is readily apparent. The approach to affirmatively furthering fair housing carried out by HUD program participants prior to this rule, which involved an analysis of impediments to fair housing choice and a certification that the program participant will affirmatively further fair housing, has … HUD Proposes New ‘Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing’ Rule Filed in Codes and Regulations , Multifamily by NAHB Now on January 10, 2020 • 0 Comments HUD announced a new proposed Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule this week that represents a significant departure from the Obama-era final rule released in 2015. HUD’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing policy required communities to confront racial inequities in housing. Comments on the proposal are due 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register.Enter your email address to receive notifications of new posts by email.The proposal also substantially revises the definition of AFFH.The new AFFH rule is intended to relieve the heavy administrative burdens on program participants. The 2015 AFFH rule marked a significant, positive step toward this objective of clarifying and expanding housing justice — and it must be reinstated as opposed to the newly-proposed AFFH rule.
By Nick Adjami March 10, 2020. This illustrates that HUD’s obligation to affirmatively further fair housing is very much still relevant and necessary today. HUD analyzed all the required Assessments of Fair Housing submitted by communities over the last year, finding that one-third of the submissions were returned for more information. “The more realistic part of me says that public agencies around the country have many, many competing demands on their time.”This means that HUD postponed a rule governing hundreds of city and county governments based on a problem encountered by about 17 of them—a problem that all of them ultimately resolved. These include patterns of segregation, racially concentrated areas of poverty, disparities in access to better opportunity, and disproportionate needs in housing.Except, for now, these ongoing self-assessments may be suspended altogether, which could mean a return to the status quo before the more-stringent AFFH requirement: Without a deadline that could cost them federal funding, many communities may fail to follow through on their commitments. Connecting decision makers to a dynamic network of information, people and ideas, Bloomberg quickly and accurately delivers business and financial information, news and insight around the world.The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development says that the extension simply gives communities more time to address a ruling that some have struggled to follow.