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.
Continue reading “”