Memo to Members

NLIHC Joins National Fair Housing Alliance Comment Letter on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Interim Final Rule

May 19, 2025

NLIHC joined a comment letter, led by the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) to the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner, in opposition to 2025 Affirmatively Fair Housing Interim Final Rule (AFFH IFR) and reinstate the 2021 AFFH IFR. The comment letter, submitted on May 2, is supported by 136 organizations from 35 states, including many of NLIHC’s State and Tribal partners. The Trump Administration’s 2025 AFFH Interim Final Rule took effect on April 2, 2025. The letter made two central arguments: 1) People in America are already experiencing a fair and affordable housing crisis and 2) HUD’s 2025 AFFH IFR will only make matters worse.  

The “Fair Housing Act of 1968” established fair housing as the national policy of the United States and enacted two promises: ensuring the right of all people to access housing free of discrimination, and the creation of thriving, inclusive communities for all. HUD’s 2025 AFFH IFR falls short in two critical ways:  

  1. The IFR’s definitions gut the Fair Housing Act’s promise of creating thriving, inclusive communities. 
  2. The IFR fails to provide localities with a meaningful framework to develop thriving, inclusive communities.  

NFHA highlights that the United States has a deep history of racially discriminatory housing, banking, and other policies that have systematically disadvantaged people of color, such as redlining under the New Deal’s Federal Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), which promoted a system that included race as a fundamental factor in determining the value of a neighborhood in order to gain access to credit. The letter states: “Outside of majority-white neighborhoods, well-resourced schools with expanded learning opportunities are less common, unemployment and poverty are higher, health is worse (as the coronavirus pandemic made plain), and access to financial institutions remains inadequate.” These inequities are exacerbated by today’s housing crisis, with the number of cost-burdened renter households reaching record levels. 

Consistent with the current administration’s anti-civil rights framework, HUD and the administration are taking actions that will decrease housing opportunities and increase homelessness. Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing means ensuring that every person and child can live in a neighborhood with ample affordable and accessible housing, fresh air, clean water, public transportation, living wage jobs, quality health care, healthy foods, and affordable credit. HUD’s 2025 AFFH IFR acknowledges the Fair Housing Act’s first purpose regarding nondiscrimination, but guts the second purpose regarding creating healthy, thriving, and inclusive communities. The comment letter criticizes the 2025 AFFH IFR for omitting crucial language from the 2021 rule, such as commitments to: 

  • Overcoming patterns of segregation; 
  • Fostering inclusive communities; 
  • Addressing significant disparities in housing needs and in access to opportunity;
  • Replacing segregated living patterns with truly integrated and balanced living patterns; and
  • Transforming racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity. 

Under the new rule, jurisdictions are no longer required to engage in meaningful fair housing planning. They are not expected to review local data on segregation or disparities, seek community input, set actionable goals, or document progress—undermining HUD’s duty to enforce the Fair Housing Act. In response, the letter signers urge local governments to continue effective AFFH planning—despite HUD's retreat from its legal responsibilities—and reaffirms its call for HUD to rescind the 2025 AFFH IFR and reinstate the 2021 version, which aligns with the Fair Housing Act’s full intent: to ensure access to safe, inclusive, and equitable communities for all.  

Read the comment letter here.

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