The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has, for a second time, cancelled the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, originally launched by the Obama administration and revived under Biden.
Shuttering AFFH returns decision-making on zoning and home building back to local governments. The shift will require state and local governments, as well as public agencies receiving federal HUD funds, to go back to the baseline of certifying that it has “affirmatively furthered fair housing” in accordance with the Fair Housing Act (FHA). The FHA prohibits discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, sex, religion, national origin, familial status, or disability.
AFFH required HUD agency recipients to file reports on 92 different topics around housing disparities within their market. Other requirements that were thought beyond HUD’s mission of affordable housing included assessing environmental health hazards and assuring outcomes of policies and practices.
“The Biden-era AFFH rule was, in effect, a ‘zoning tax,’ which fueled an increase in the cost and a decrease in the supply of affordable housing due to restrictions on local land,” HUD stated.
As Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) wrote when AFFH was first issued, “(AFFH) is designed to give unelected, anonymous bureaucrats in Washington the power to pick and choose who your new next-door neighbor will be. If they don’t believe your neighborhood is ‘diverse’ enough, they will seize control of local zoning decisions—choosing what should be built, where, and who should pay for it—in order to make your neighborhood look more like they want it to.”
It gives the federal government “a lever to re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood—imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education,” wrote Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy Center of AFFH.
Localities will “no longer be required to complete onerous paperwork and drain their budgets to comply with the extreme and restrictive demands made up by the federal government,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said.
