A fair housing rule that was enacted during the Obama administration, then rescinded in the first Trump administration, then restored in the Biden administration, has been rescinded again by the second Trump administration.
Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner announced the latest termination of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, citing the administration’s belief that the rule does not align with its regulation-cutting regimen.
“By terminating the AFFH rule, 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,” said Turner in a statement. “This action also returns decisions on zoning, home building, transportation, and more to local leaders. As HUD returns to the original understanding and enforcement of the law without onerous compliance requirements, we can better serve rural, urban and tribal communities that need access to fair and affordable housing.”
“We are aware of communities that have been neglected or negatively impacted due to the demands of recent AFFH rules,” Turner added. “Returning to the law as written will advance market-driven development and allow American neighborhoods to flourish.”
The AFFH rule debuted in 2015 and required cities and towns to publicly report data analyses of potential bias in their communities every three to five years in order to receive HUD funding. Under the rule, housing occupancy bias would be measured by race, disability, familial status, economic status, English proficiency, and other categories.
The first Trump administration terminated the AFFH rule in 2020 by claiming it “proved to be costly, complicated, and ineffective.” Acting HUD Secretary Matthew Ammon said the 2021 reversal of the Trump decision through a Biden Executive Order was “a vital step toward redressing the federal government’s legacy of housing discrimination and securing equal access to housing opportunity for all.”
In announcing the rule’s termination, HUD noted its decision was a red tape cutting measure because the AFFH rule “mandated the completion of complex jurisdictional and regional analysis, submission of a 92-question grading tool, and an analysis of impediments.”
So, now, discrimination is considered too woke?
Just to idiots.
Good decision. In this day and age, if you can afford the house, every single person in the process, REALTOR, Lender, Appraiser, Inspector, Title Company, and even Government sponsored downpayment assistance programs, WANTS you to have it. We don’t care what color your skin is; we are all working toward the same goal. And, if one lender says no, try another!!!
“REALTOR, Lender, Appraiser, Inspector, Title Companies” are not grantees of the programs regulated by this rule. You just told us without telling us that you don’t understand the rule or what is meant by “housing occupancy bias” and you probably never tried to sell or lease a home in an “exclusive” community for a biracial or LGBTQ+ family.
I see a lot of people in hear have never heard of “redlining”. The federal government has a history of restricting access to FHA and other loan products in largely minority communities. This law was intended to counteract the negative effects this had on people of color being able to buys a home in their community. Removing this law will open the door to this discriminatory practice again. It has nothing to do with whether a person could afford the home and everything to do with the race
This is another attempt to restore racism into the housing market. PERIOD!
I understood you perfectly fine. When our son bought his first car he was nervous about financing – as we were walking in I told him everyone in that dealership is hoping you are able to get the loan & will do everything they can to help you. It’s the same in our business, the whole line is working to help the buyer get the keys.
Fed Up’s comment is spot on; the important is IF you can afford it, home ownership is not a right, it is something you work toward, until you get to the point where you can afford to not only purchase a home without “free” grants & other programs, but also afford to maintain your home. I have completed appraisals on homes where the owner had no “skin” in the game, only to let the home deteriorate in a short time because they said they couldn’t afford to fix this or that.
I am afraid that we will end up in the 2007-2008 housing crisis again. People purchase a house and default on the mortgage.
Time will tell!!!
I can not imagine a realtor today who would deny a willing, able, and ready customer from buying anything they want! We work very hard for every successful transaction. Putting more red tape in the way only makes things worse. Well intended maybe, but completely unnecessary.
It’s not about Realtors.
So we’re sliding backwards to the good old days when discrimination was okay…society is not made better by keeping the other guy down. I would think that we are better than that…..
Amen!
This is a tremendous step forward to allowing individuals the opportunity not to be burdened with excessive oversight, which ultimately impeded home ownership and housing development.
In answer to Susan Olsen, this change does not condone discrimination. It is obviously still illegal to discriminate based on race, creed, color, sex, religion, etc.. Real estate brokers, mortgage brokers, surveyors, home inspectors, attorneys, etc. are all licensed by their respective state regulatory bodies, almost all of which are ultra-strict on all facets of practice, especially discrimination.
HUD has a LOT more work to do to get anywhere close to reasonableness in their rules and practices. This change saves unnecessary tax dollars spent and removes some federal government involvement in a transaction (involvement which has added significant expense to every part of every residential transaction for decades and which costs have ballooned in recent years–all those costs are born by consumers and get them virtually nothing, certainly not protection from discrimination).
FYI: HUD actually has rules which explicitly REQUIRE discrimination based on race. When is HUD going to cancel those rules? A good example: There are Obama-era rules that are still in force which make it illegal for landlords to have standard background requirement for everyone. Those rules actually make it illegal to treat everyone the same. The rules require that people of color be allowed exceptions to general rules for criminal convictions. That is, if a landlord sets a rule with their background check company not to accept anyone who has certain types of crimes, they aren’t allowed to enforce that rule against racial minorities. It is nonsense and makes a mess of actually working in the industry when you are specifically barred from treating everyone the same–it actually requires discrimination against others. HUD has a LOT more work to do to get anywhere close to reasonableness in their rules and practices.
I am curious, what taxes and added expenses are you talking about. I would like to know what they are and who was paying them?
An appraisers job is to give an opinion of the fair market value of the subject property at a point in time. Nothing else. You are not qualified to or asked to give an opinion on a buyer’s credit worthiness. Just do your part to the best of your ability without bias against buyer’s.
Some don’t understand that the only thing I (an appraiser) look at is the property. Wether the borrower is qualified or not is not my responsibility
“Under the rule, housing occupancy bias would be measured by race, disability, familial status, economic status, English proficiency, and other categories.” The rule is a data gathering tool used under the guise of protection from discrimination and funneled to politicos to profile potential voters in geographic areas to help gerrymander districts and direct get out the vote efforts. The strategy has been used for decades in many other federal programs called one thing but used for another. Anti-discrimination regs are firmly in place all over the Dept of HUD. The sky is not falling with the demise of this one rule.
You are dead on Beth, thank you!
People are misunderstanding this change, and I say this as one who voted against Trump. This is about red tape requiring reporting , it’s not about ENDING principles of Fair Housing. Those protections are still part of Federal Law. Calm down, everybody.
If you have good credit, a job, and money for down-payment expenses, anyone should be able to buy a house or car. You should not have to be a certain race or type of person to be served. Reverend King wanted every person to have equal opportunity. Equal opportunity for all.
🎯🎯🎯
Government control over the people, ridiculous bureaucracy cloked in divisive class, racial ideology is loved by the Marxists aka today’s dem party aka former biden administration. This cut is a good thing and should be permanent.
I don’t know if the rule was unnecessarily cumbersome or not, nor if the data collected was useful to ferret out and to reduce discrimination. But, I still see discrimination happening, despite many (if not most) agents being fair to all clients without bias.
But, there still are problems with some agents (and some appraisers too).
I had a listing wherein the buyer of a minority, and the name reflected that.
The appraiser for the buyer’s lender gave a home valuation that was beyond absurdly low. I’ve had 3 appraisal courses, but any agent would have seen the problem.
I could tell that the comps he picked were unusually inferior to the Subject Property (my listing) even though there were many excellent comps that were much more similar to The Subject that he could have used instead. And, the adjustments to compensate for the major differences with the inferior comps were not nearly high enough.
When I asked the appraiser about those comps and the adjustments he used, he just rambled into a conversation wherein he revealed his bigoted viewpoints, even commenting why he was leaving the state due the rising minority percentage.
I could not get the appraisal company to review that appraisal, and the buyer lost out on a great home. This was all happening during the early months of covid, so showing and starting all over again was a pain, and the seller needed to beat a 2 year deadline to rebuy to get a 55+ property tax break on the new home. She barely beat that deadline, in part due to the problems of selling and buying during covid.
I’d like to know why appraisers are still allowed to see the name(s) of the buyers. I do NOT think the appraiser should be allowed to know the buyer’s name and not even whether the buyer is single or married. There should be a number assigned to that buyer, and that should be what the appraiser sees, and that would remove any bias that a few appraisers might have. I know a lot of great appraisers, so this is not a blame against an entire industry. But there will always be bias attitudes with some agents and some appraisers.
Bias (bigotry) is different than merely assessing a buyer’s ability afford a home, and whether or not an offer is likely to close. If an appraisal comes in low, and a buyer can’t afford to pay the difference, than a lower income buyer is not a good risk. Although, even a very wealthy buyer might drop out if the appraisal comes in low.
Most people of any race, age, marital status, family status, ethnicity, gender orientation, etc. want to sell their home (or other property) for the MOST money they can get for it, and it is not discrimination to pick the highest and best offer from the best qualified buyer.
How to deal with a lack of affordability for some people and then tying that back to past bigoted impacts on targeted groups can be tricky, more than people might first suspect.
A lot of people are mixed races, mixed ethnicities, and that might include a mix of ancestry tracing back to the oppressor group but also having ancestry that traces back to an abused group.
How that plays out with reparations could result a person paying themselves reparations for past bigotries because their own ancestors were both the oppressors and the oppressed.
There are NO valid excuses for bigotries, either by initiating them or by perpetuating them, or by ignoring the history of bigotries both in the U.S. and the rest of the world.
It is very interesting to watch documentaries about slavery and Native Americans in the U.S. We all know what happened, but we often lack the details that really paint a clearer picture.
Many African groups have long been slave owners and sellers of slaves, within and outside of Africa, long before Europeans arrived to join the horrors of the African slave trade. But Europeans (and later Americans) chose to join and perpetuate the slave trade, and most (but not all) slave owners were white Europeans throughout the American slave era. But there were some Free black people and even SE Native Americans who also owned black slaves. The SE tribes were cornered into owning slaves in a bargain they struck with the early U.S., which was, you adopt our European ways, or leave. Many of those Native Americans (sadly) adopted the Black slave system.
There was a recent lawsuit about the descendants of black slaves whose ancestors were owned by those SE Native American tribes. Many of these slaves were taken by their Native American owners on the Trail of Tears (when Andrew Jackson drove out the SE Native Americans into the Oklahoma Territory, despite them adopting the European’s ways, but, as usual, America signed thousands of treaties that were ignored before the ink dried).
In the modern era, the descendants of those Native American slave owners did not want the descendants of the Black slaves to be granted entry into the tribe. So, the descendants of the Black slaves took the case to court, and, last I read, the Black descendants won the case and are now part of the tribe.
There were some Black slave owners too, and some chose to fight with the Confederacy to retain the slave system. So, if and when America discusses reparations, this will be a good thing because it will reveal the larger and more complex problems of who suffered and when and how. And which people living today come from a “blameless” lineage, a mixed blend of “guilty and innocent” lineage, or a lineage of guilty people only.
In truth, it gets more complicated because even “The Northern Aggressors” (a termed that the Confederates like to use), even those damned Yankees are not entirely innocent.
Watch the documentary “Traces of the Trade” about the Dutch Slave Trading family (De Wolfe) who were the largest slave traders for a few hundred years in the Americas. That family supported Thomas Jefferson in his run for the Presidency IF Jefferson would later allow the De Wolf family to pick the “Port Master” so that they could continue to run slaves through the northern ports, which had been made illegal by the time of Jefferson.
And the north made a lot of money on the slave trade too, despite thinking it a dangerous and even morally wrong economy.
Women in most cultures have suffered bigotries, and women have also perpetrated bigotries, and some women fought to end bigotries, most often fighting those bigotries with like-minded men. Yeah, it gets complicated.
It’s hard to look into the mirror of history, lest you find that your own bigotries (that often paint your own lineage as mostly perfect) reveals the expanded stories of the reality that nearly everyone has ancestors who are guilty, even if it was just that some of our ancestors did not speak out against bigotries when they could.
I know I have guilty ancestors as well as ancestors who were victims of several bigotries.
So…I guess I’ll be paying myself reparations for the harm I suffered, but I can’t afford it due to past bigotries! Ahhhh!
Not knowing the details of this repealed rule makes it hard to assess it, but I do know that there are often way too many rules written, while the main laws are ignored.
I’d rather see far fewer laws, but make the laws that are kept be enforced with a heavy hand. You can insist that people “not be biased”, but that is hard to do because many people will be biased anyway, sometimes even being biased against their own perceived group due to some grudge they hold against their own group. That is a type of bigotry that is really hard to ferret out because it is not expected to occur, but it can and does.
I remember when I first got my license, I got a call from a “minority” buyer, and that person seemed to be testing my resolve to be either bigoted, or not bigoted. It was weird to have this buyer seed the conversation with subtle attacks against her own minority group, often asking if I knew what race, ethnicity, or nationality lived in this or that neighborhood, because she did NOT want to live with “those” people, and asking me for related demographic data for each neighborhood. It was a steady salting of bigoted baiting that day.
It was weird to fend off her questions, in part because I do know people who do not want to live among their own perceived “group”, so I just told her that I could point her to websites that would give information about a wide range of demographic data, but that I would not do that for her, as that is the job of a buyer, if that is a concern of theirs.
Towards the later part of our day together, it dawned on me that she was likely a plant from the realtor association (or a state agency) to test out if I would take the bait and implicate myself in bigoted behaviors.
I’m sure I got a fantastic report, and she was likely supremely disappointed that she did not bag her catch that day. But, I was happy that my industry (or state) was testing out agents to see if they could hold up under pressure in such a subtle set of circumstances, a buyer who did not want to live in a neighborhood peopled by those of her own group.
What she could have fined me for was “split infinitives”, such as displayed here in a few poorly constructed sentences. But the law needs to be changed to allow split infinitives because it better reveals the intended message. I think I’ve found myself a new job for the government.