NLIHC submitted a comment letter opposing HUD’s proposed Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule that is, in fact, not a fair housing rule. HUD’s proposal to gut the 2015 AFFH rule represents a complete retreat from efforts to undo historic, government-driven patterns of housing discrimination and segregation. NLIHC wrote that HUD should abandon its ill-conceived proposed “AFFH” rule, reinstate the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, and resume its implementation. By the March 16 close of the comment period, 19,555 comments were registered at regulations.gov.
The proposed rule is not a fair housing rule. It considers housing that might be “affordable” to be the same as housing that is available to people in the Fair Housing Act’s protected classes based on race, color, national origin, sex, familial status, disability, or religion. The proposed rule offers a supply-side ideology that misleadingly assumes that an overall increase in the supply of market-rate housing will trickle down to become “affordable,” without any consideration of a jurisdiction’s policies and practices affecting people in the protected classes or any focus on overcoming historic patterns of housing segregation created by discriminatory federal housing policies in the first place. The proposed rule neither promotes fair housing choice nor ensures that any increase in the housing supply would even be affordable to low-income and extremely low-income households, much less people in the Fair Housing Act’s protected classes who face many obstacles to fair housing choice.
The first section of the letter addresses all of the problems with the proposed rule. The second section challenges HUD’s justifications for gutting the 2015 AFFH rule laid out in the preamble to the proposed rule.
NLIHC’s comment letter is at: https://bit.ly/2Uo1Cpx
More about AFFH is in NLIHC’s 2019 Advocates’ Guide, pages 7-14, 7-21, and 7-26