The Trump administration ended an Obama-era fair housing rule Thursday that was meant to fight housing discrimination, the Hill reports.
What We Know:
- The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) said it was replacing the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, put in place by Obama in 2015, with what the Trump administration called the Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice. “After reviewing thousands of comments on the proposed changes to the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation, we found it to be unworkable and ultimately a waste of time for localities to comply with, too often resulting in funds being steered away from communities that need them most,” HUD Secretary Ben Carson said.
- The Trump rule gives local officials more control over what qualifies as fair housing. The guidelines now say that a development must be “affordable, safe, decent, free of unlawful discrimination, and accessible under civil rights laws” to be considered fair housing, according to HUD. Two years ago the Trump administration scrapped the Obama requirement for localities to create plans to address housing discrimination in order to receive federal funding.
- Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) the ranking member of the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs found the decision to be disgraceful. “It’s a dark day for the country when the President boasts about maintaining housing segregation, and the agency charged with carrying out the Fair Housing Act becomes a tool to help him do it.”
- The move comes as President Trump has been warning about Biden housing policies when speaking to suburban women. At a White House event in early July, Trump said a Biden presidency would “totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1286372175117791236
- Trump is looking to gain support from suburban voters, particularly women, who make up an important voting demographic in his hopes to stay in the White House. He won 49% of their vote compared to Hillary Clinton’s 45% in the 2016 election, but the voting bloc sided with Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms.
The latest ABC/Washington Post poll showed Biden with 52% support from suburbanites to Trump’s 43%.
