Ben Carson, appointed by perhaps the most notoriously racist of all housing developers to be secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is rolling back the Obama administration's efforts to halt and reverse "decades of racial, ethnic and income segregation in federally subsidized housing and development projects." The New York Times conducted interviews with 20 current and former HUD officials and reviewed internal emails to report on Carson's efforts to dismantle the fair housing goals of his department.

The most public manifestation of this effort is Carson's decision to "strike the words 'inclusive' and 'free from discrimination' from HUD's mission statement," the Times notes. But it goes far beyond simple rhetoric.

In an email in November, a top HUD official relayed the news that the head of the Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity division, Anna Maria Farías, had ordered a hold on about a half-dozen fair housing investigations given the highest priority under Mr. Carson’s most recent predecessor, Julián Castro. The freeze would be in effect "until further notice," the official wrote. […] HUD had opened a case in late 2016 in response to a ProPublica article that said Facebook gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls "ethnic affinities" from seeing their ads when their social media habits identified them as black, Hispanic or Asian-American. But even before Ms. Farías was appointed, Mr. Carson’s aides ordered fair housing division officials to cancel a planned negotiating session with Facebook executives, leaving HUD to take Facebook at its word that the company’s “policies prohibit using our targeting options to discriminate.” Then, after taking office, Ms. Farías sent a one-page letter to Facebook ordering, without explanation, the termination of a preliminary investigation into the company’s advertising practices.

Farías has not begun any investigations since she got the job. Some of the investigations that have been shuttered, besides Facebook, are an ordinance in Hesperia, California that prevents the siting of group homes for parolees and former offenders in some of the city's neighborhoods and the lack of accessibility for the disabled in new units built by two huge developers in both Ohio and New York. President Obama's fair housing assistant secretary, Gustavo Velasquez, says "this administration is stopping the enforcement of civil rights and fair housing laws at the worst possible time. […] It's not just the lack of an agenda, which is what I thought we were dealing with for the first year or so, but an attempt to reverse all the advances we made through regulations and enforcement actions."

This is the other side of the housing coin from what the Trump administration is doing with lending. Under acting director Mick Mulvaney, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has essentially been stripped of its power to enforce fair lending practices. The Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity in the CFPB has been moved under the direct supervision of Mulvaney, losing its responsibility for enforcement and oversight of lenders.

So people of color and the disabled and the LGBT community and former offenders and just about all vulnerable communities will be shut out of fair housing. Wall Street, builders, developers, and landlords will have free rein to keep them out. Just like Donald Trump used to do.