Westchester County, NY will lose $7.4 million in FY11 Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), HOME, and Emergency Solutions Grant (ESG) funds unless it addresses two components of a 2009 court settlement regarding affirmatively furthering fair housing by April 25, 2013, according to a March 25, 2013 letter from HUD.
Westchester County must describe a plan to promote legislation that prohibits discrimination based on a tenant’s source of income, such as a voucher. Shortly after the court settlement, the county executive vetoed a source of income ordinance. In May 2012, the U.S. District Court agreed with the HUD-appointed settlement monitor that the county executive should request the county legislature to reintroduce the 2009 legislation. No substantive action has been taken to date.
Westchester County must also submit a satisfactory plan to overcome exclusionary zoning within its municipalities. That plan must identify local practices that have exclusionary impacts or that fail to take into account regional fair housing needs. The plan must also make clear to localities the consequences, including legal action, of failing to change exclusionary zoning policies. Although the county provided a zoning analysis on February 29, 2012, the U.S. District Attorney characterized it as “wholly inadequate” because “the Zoning Submission failed to identify any strategy for overcoming exclusionary zoning practices, and lacked facts and analysis that would adequately support its conclusion that exclusionary zoning did not exist anywhere in Westchester County” (see Memo, 7/27/12).
The Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York (ADC) sued the county in 2006 under the False Claims Act, asserting that the county’s certification to HUD that it was affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) was false. On February 24, 2009, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York ruled in ADC’s favor, finding that Westchester had “utterly failed” to meet its annual AFFH certification. Then, on April 28, 2009 HUD rejected the accuracy of the county’s AFFH certification, leading to the rare disapproval of the county’s 2009 Consolidated Plan.
While acknowledging that HUD’s threatened reallocation of FY11 funds is an appropriate exercise of its authority, ADC complains that “HUD just won’t act on the fundamental principle that obligations arising from a court order that haven’t been fulfilled need to be vindicated by going back to court and seeking to hold the non-complying party in contempt.”
Mirza Orriols, the acting HUD regional administrator for New York and New Jersey, seemed to downplay the threatened reallocation. In an article in ProPublica, Orriols suggests that the warning about the funding was not the result of HUD being "fed up" with the county's lack of compliance. Instead, HUD was concerned that the funds would revert to the U.S. Treasury if not spent by the end of September, so HUD needs time to reallocate them to other New York jurisdictions. (Nikole Hannah-Jones of ProPublica is the 2013 winner of the NLIHC’s Media Award.)
HUD’s March 25 letter is attached.
ADC’s Westchester webpage is at http://bit.ly/MrjFke.
The ProPublica article is at http://bit.ly/175pQ9d.