REGULATORY GOBBLEDYGOOK: Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Flails for Following Farther than Fret
Published On: August 3, 2020 Posted by: Jeremy Peterson
Interesting news from the Department of Housing and Urban Development as Ben Carson announces that the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rules dictated in 2015 will no longer apply to those receiving HUD grants. The announcement came as I was with Sally who was selling me sea shells by the sea shore.
So what was this tongue twisting HUD rule to begin with? For starters, it forced cities like Ogden to identify patterns in government programs and market dynamics that produced a specific barrier to minority populations in procuring affordable housing. As Chair of the Citizens Advisory Committee overseeing the HUD community development grant to Ogden City, our group was presented with a lot of information to sift through by city staff. Our conclusion was that Ogden’s programs and market dynamics were not producing any barriers that were unfairly applied to any one group of people.
In fact, some of the data used to determine “negatively impacted” neighborhoods has been changing for the better in Ogden. This improvement produced a strain on city staff who were under pressure from the AFFH rule to find something wrong and to fix. Happily, this make-work/make-regulation policy is going the way of the wood chucks who would chuck wood.
