Biden HUD moves to require ‘equity plans’ from localities under fair housing rule
Joseph Lawler
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The Biden administration is moving to require state and local governments to submit “equity plans” to the federal government to avoid falling afoul of fair housing rules.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development submitted a proposed rule Thursday that would mandate local governments submit plans and reports relating to civil rights concerns or else risk losing access to federal subsidies.
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“This proposed rule is a major step towards fulfilling the law’s full promise and advancing our legal, ethical, and moral charge to provide equitable access to opportunity for all,” said HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge.
The new requirements, part of a rule known as “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing,” are justified as following through on a provision of the 1968 Fair Housing Act that required localities “affirmatively further” fair housing as a response to historical segregation.
A version of the rule had originally been implemented under the Obama administration and then repealed by former President Donald Trump, who had sought to portray it as part of a war on suburbs during his 2020 reelection campaign. Trump’s attack on the rule overrode earlier efforts by his secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson, to reform the rule to incentivize localities to loosen zoning restrictions to boost housing supply, rather than to discourage segregation.
The Biden administration had partially restored the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule in June last year but had withheld the part of the rule related to compliance. Thursday’s update follows through on that aspect of the measure.
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What is new is that the process for compliance, which in the Obama version of the rule was criticized as overly burdensome for local governments, will involve local governments submitting an equity plan.
Housing authorities would have to submit, every five years, equity plans that include an “analysis of fair housing issues confronting their communities, goals, and strategies to remedy those issues in concrete ways, and a description of community engagement.” Those analyses would then have to be written into their planning documents.