I’ve written about the “massive government overreach” of President Obama’s new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) regulation. I’ve also previewed the insidiously controlling consequences of HUD’s information-gathering for AFFH. Yet there’s no better way to get a feel for just how intrusive and inappropriate AFFH is than by having a look at its “Fair Housing Assessment Tool,” the questionnaire that every locality receiving HUD money is going to have to fill out.


The final version of the Assessment Tool has not yet been released. HUD has just published a streamlined second version for public comment. But I find the initial version more revealing. The two versions don’t differ much in the information actually sought. The first version is a bit more tedious for a local bureaucrat to fill out, but more instructive about what sort of information HUD is actually after.

Try reading a few pages worth of the initial version and you’ll see what over-the-top social engineering looks like. Before you begin, here are a few tips on decoding the language.

Notice how often local bureaucrats are forced to compare demographic trends in their jurisdiction with the demography of their metropolitan region as a whole. This is a technique for effectively annexing a suburb to it larger metropolitan region. Advertisement The acronym R/ECAP stands for “Racially or Ethnically Concentrated Areas of Poverty.” Advertisement LEP means people with “Limited English Proficiency.” To see what a “dot density map” of area racial and ethnic residential patterns looks like, go here to page 6.

Arizona Congressman Paul Gosar has introduced a stand-alone bill, H.R. 1995, that would rescind both AFFH and the Fair Housing Assessment Tool. Consider contacting your representatives in Congress and calling on them to support that bill. While you’re at it, you might want to encourage Congress to hold hearings on AFFH. For more on the current state of play on AFFH in Congress and what you can do, see “How You Can Stop Obamazone”

Stanley Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He can be reached at comments.kurtz@nationalreview.com