MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

Department of Housing and Urban Development is moving backwards on desegregation. (Photo: Tim Evanson)

MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT

At BuzzFlash and Truthout we never shy away from criticizing powerful corporate and political forces. Support this work by making a tax-deductible donation now.

In a groundbreaking 2017 book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Economic Policy Institute researcher Richard Rothstein details how government laws and policies enabled the housing segregation of the United States. In the preface to his book, Rothstein writes:

Until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live. Today's racial segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices...but of unhidden public policy that specifically segregated every metropolitan area in the United States. The policy was so systematic and forceful that its effects endure to the present time.

Rothstein argues that the pattern of segregated housing in the United States is de jure (by law), and it is in violation of the Constitution.

Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson obviously does not believe in the conclusions of Rothstein's painstaking research. According to a May 7 Washington Post article, Carson "has long criticized federal efforts to desegregate American neighborhoods as 'failed socialist experiments.'" That is a pretty sweeping renunciation of fair housing goals that should be advanced by the governmental agency, HUD, most able to assist in achieving them.

The Post article reports that Carson is rescinding an Obama administration HUD regulation requiring compliance with desegregation objectives:

The 2015 rule required more than 1,200 communities receiving billions of federal housing dollars to draft plans to desegregate their communities -- or risk losing federal funds.

After nearly 50 years of inaction, the rule was seen as a belated effort by HUD to enforce the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which compelled communities to use federal dollars to end segregation in residential neighborhoods.

The 2015 rule, developed over a six-year period, required every community receiving HUD funding to assess local segregation patterns, diagnose the barriers to fair housing and develop a plan to correct them. Most communities were supposed to submit their plans to HUD every five years, beginning in 2016. Communities without HUD-approved plans would no longer receive federal housing dollars.

The Obama-era rule constituted one small step toward reversing the de jure racial housing injustice that Rothstein describes as decades in the making.

Tuesday morning, fair housing advocates filed a lawsuit against HUD and Ben Carson seeking enforcement of the rule as promulgated in 2015.

According to an NPR article,

Without that rule, the plaintiffs say, billions of dollars in federal housing funds will be dispensed without any civil rights oversight.

HUD also made the change "without prior notice or opportunity to comment," according to the lawsuit. The plaintiffs include the National Fair Housing Alliance [NFHA] and two state groups, Texas Appleseed and the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service....

"Each day HUD holds up requiring jurisdictions to fully comply with the law is another day that millions of people are being denied fair housing opportunities," said Lisa Rice, NFHA's president and CEO. "HUD's action is a clear example of 'justice delayed, justice denied.' "

In its court filing, the plaintiffs charged that communities would benefit financially from doing little, if anything, to alter to the segregated housing status quo. The lawsuit charged that HUD "has permitted ... grantees -- mostly local and state government entities -- to collectively accept billions of dollars in federal housing funds annually without requiring them to take meaningful steps to address racial segregation and other fair housing problems that have long plagued their communities."

Government, having contributed greatly to segregation, was, in the case of HUD, doing little to remedy the situation. The plaintiffs noted that prior to the 2015 rule:

Before it promulgated the AFFH Rule, HUD engaged in little enforcement of this important provision of the Fair Housing Act, permitting its grantees to virtually ignore it. Even after a number of federal courts articulated the breadth of HUD’s obligations under the AFFH statutory provision, HUD required jurisdictions only to certify that, every few years, they analyzed barriers to fair housing in their communities, made gestures in the direction of solving them, and memorialized this analysis in their own files (never reviewed by HUD). As both HUD and the Government Accountability Office found, putting local jurisdictions on the honor system was ineffective.

The revoking of the 2015 rule is one of a series of Carson actions that appear to blame poor people of color with limited means for their housing and employment conditions. As I noted in an April 26 commentary, Carson has proposed raising the rents on public housing residents. He appears to be conducting a war on the poor by claiming he is actually helping those in need of macro-remedies pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Carson meshes well with the Trump administration's steps to rein in initiatives to address racial injustice. On May 8, Politico ran a story that reported:

President Barack Obama tried to expand the way racial discrimination is measured and addressed, holding corporations and governments accountable for even unintended bias in a bid to reverse persistent racial inequality.

Now the Trump administration is rolling those efforts back....

The actions add up to an effort to stop using government to change patterns that promote poverty and housing segregation, such as more expensive lending for people who live in predominately minority neighborhoods. And advocates who spent the Obama years pushing for the more expansive use of anti-discrimination laws — even taking the issue to the Supreme Court — are aghast.

Indeed, Politico quoted Solomon Greene, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, who said, “Public policy actually created many of these disparities, and we need affirmative policies to unwind them.”

That is an assessment Richard Rothstein would agree with.