Trump Kills an Intrusive Housing Rule, Again

This past week, Scott Turner, President Trump’s new secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), announced that HUD would be terminating the notoriously intrusive Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. By attaching strings to billions of dollars in community development block grants from HUD, AFFH gives the feds the ability to control zoning regulations and many other aspects of local government.

AFFH severely undermines our federalist system, not only by expanding central control but by turning suburban municipalities into helpless satellites of neighboring urban centers. Over and above engineering residential patterns by race, ethnicity, English proficiency, country of origin, and more, AFFH is designed to urbanize suburbs — forcing dense development to cluster around public transit hubs with the goal of coercing suburbanites out of their cars.

Supposedly, AFFH carries out provisions of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. In reality, the rule is classic regulatory activism. It reads contemporary policy goals back into a law that mandated no such thing. AFFH, for example, slyly imposes a principle of “economic integration” on the suburbs, although nowhere does U.S. law recognize or demand economic integration.

In sum, AFFH is a systematic attack on America’s suburbs, an attempt to undercut their economic and political independence, urbanize them, and ultimately to absorb them into their greater metropolitan regions as if they never existed to begin with. The rule was the brainchild and longtime dream of President Obama’s Alinskyite community organizing mentors, who hated the suburbs, dismissed them as products of racism and greed, and blamed them for urban decay. AFFH is federal overreach on stilts, very arguably the most radical policy initiative of Obama’s presidency. Truly, the rule was designed to fundamentally transform the United States of America.

Thanks to President Trump, AFFH failed to do so. Trump, in fact, has uprooted AFFH twice. He killed off the Obama version in 2020, while running for reelection. Now Trump has moved to terminate the only very slightly revised Biden version of AFFH.

So far, almost no one has noticed. A handful of articles covered last week’s announcement, but for the most part Trump’s move to kill AFFH was lost in the fire hose of novel policy developments coming out of the opening days of Trump’s second term.

One lesson taught by the death of AFFH is the limits of stealth incrementalism. Saul Alinksy, the godfather of community organizing, is famous for staging dramatic protests — tying up bank lines with customers changing $100 bills for pennies, or dumping garbage at a city official’s office to get better garbage collection. Yet Alinsky’s real innovation was stealth incrementalism. Alinksy downplayed his socialist ideology and pushed only slowly and incrementally for discrete policy changes.

This was Obama’s way. As I showed in Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, my 2012 book on Obama’s housing policy, Obama carefully kept his anti-suburban policies under the radar throughout his first term. That book predicted that something like AFFH would be introduced in Obama’s second term, and so it was. But even after Obama won reelection and fully implemented his radical housing policies, he continued to downplay them to the greatest extent possible.

Obama’s HUD posted the initial text of AFFH in 2013 and didn’t finalize the rule until July 2015, very nearly the end of Obama’s second term. Even then, at no point did Obama call attention to the rule, much less articulate or justify the larger policy goals behind it. Obama could have bragged about his bold reform and used it to build his coalition. He didn’t, because, in truth, AFFH was an attack on his own suburban supporters, not to mention an attack on fundamental ideals of American freedom and federalism.

By delaying AFFH until he’d secured reelection, and by pushing its finalization to the end of his second term, Obama was handing Hillary Clinton the politically difficult job of actually enforcing the rule. Enforcement would mean the end of stealth. Once suburbs and small cities realized that the millions in HUD grants to which they’d become accustomed were hostage to the elimination of single-family zoning and the adoption of hyper-dense “transit-oriented development,” a major national debate would have ensued.

We never got that debate. Hillary lost to Trump. Trump then eliminated AFFH and ran, at least in part, on the issue in 2020. Yet the media did everything in its power to obscure the stakes, and the topic never caught on. Only systematic enforcement could turn AFFH into a front-burner issue.

Biden then reinstituted the rule, but only in “interim” form. Like Obama, Biden treated the issue as too hot to handle. He could easily have finalized AFFH and begun enforcing it well before the 2024 election. Yet that was too politically dangerous. Biden strung out the “interim” rule till the end of his term, hoping, like Obama, to put it fully in place only after reelection. Arguably, Biden’s HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge resigned in frustration at his refusal to finalize the rule. Then Trump won again, killing the rule for a second time.

It’s been 16 years since Obama began his stealthy implementation of the anti-suburban policies that would be enshrined in AFFH in his second term. In all that time, the rule has barely ever been enforced. What you might call the precursor controversies in Westchester County, N.Y., and Dubuque, Iowa — where Obama gave what would later become AFFH a kind of test run — were political fiascoes. Westchester County flipped from Democrat to Republican control, and Dubuque’s Democratic paper supported AFFH’s critics when I exposed the controversy here at NRO. If anything, Westchester and Dubuque only helped scare Obama and Biden into further stealth and delay.

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. Obama and Biden ended up fooling only themselves with their stealth incrementalism on AFFH. In the end, major changes of the American system require consensus and open debate. Fooling people only some of the time is a bust if fundamental transformation is your game.

Will AFFH return with the next Democratic administration? Quite possibly. The rule has now become the premier goal of leftist housing activists tied to the Democratic Party. AFFH is a classic example of Democrats imprisoned by the radicalism of “the groups” — although in this case “the groups” were set up to hope for the moon by Obama himself.

Yet if AFFH returns, it will still be a political hot potato, delayed until a Democratic president’s reelection and driven underground for as long as possible in the hopes that no one will notice. Or maybe by then the Democrats will have been forced to moderate and surrender their transformative dreams. Maybe this radicalized product of racial and ethnic bean counting — with a healthy dose of class-based income redistribution mixed in — will be dropped once and for all by a more sensible Democratic Party. Or not.

Either way, the second death of AFFH at the hands of President Trump is a sign of the times. This ambitious synthesis of socialism and identity politics is a perfect symbol of the Democrats’ political and policy overreach. Whether and to what degree Democrats attempt to resurrect AFFH will tell us a lot about the direction of the party. For now, however, Trump’s second funeral for AFFH — perhaps especially because it’s barely been noticed or commented upon — embodies the end of the Obama era and the apotheosis of the age of Trump.