New York City is not waiting for the White House to enforce fair housing

LATE into his second term, US President Barack Obama introduced a new regulation, known as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule, to try to give teeth to a half-century’s worth of mostly failed efforts to uproot housing segregation. Ten years later, that rule has produced little in the way of tangible results – with perhaps one exception.

Named for a provision in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the AFFH rule required cities, states and counties to conduct fair housing assessments to ensure that they were using federal housing dollars in ways that did not exacerbate patterns of racial segregation. 

But few jurisdictions had even digested the 2015 rule by the time President Donald Trump arrived in the White House and undid his predecessor’s work. Housing Secretary Ben Carson proposed a new rule with a focus on promoting construction before the president scrapped the rule altogether – an effort to persuade voters that then-candidate Joe Biden wanted to “abolish the suburbs”.

As the federal government careened from one standard to another, New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development stuck to the path.

Under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio, the city pressed forward in 2020 with a comprehensive review of obstacles to fair housing in the city, in keeping with the Obama-era protocols – despite the Trump administration’s reset.

Now, New York Mayor Eric Adams is taking up the baton. On Wednesday (Mar 1), the city released a report on its progress towards achieving its fair housing goals, in keeping with a rule that, technically, no longer exists. 

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Officials noted that New York made a lot of ground: The city has completed or advanced more than three-quarters of its 81 bullet-point agenda items, on issues that include apartment rehabilitation, neighbourhood re-zoning, and down-payment assistance.

“It’s a thread that continues,” says Adolfo Carrion Jr, commissioner of New York’s Housing Preservation and Development department.

Indeed, authorities in New York are happy to broadcast that the city was the first in the nation to release a fair housing plan, in 2020, to comply with the (cancelled) federal rule. The Adams administration has recommitted New York to these fair housing guidelines, while housing officials under President Joe Biden work to enshrine a new policy. 

While New York’s campaign might look quixotic, this process has sharpened the city’s efforts to fight bias, said Carrion. On Wednesday, for example, the city announced a US$3 million plan to combat discrimination against tenants who use housing vouchers, one of the leading concerns unearthed by the city’s fair housing review. 

The stay-the-course approach, regardless of federal-level policy fluctuations, could serve as a continuity model for other cities, counties and states looking to undo segregation.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration introduced a new AFFH rule in January, one that will require jurisdictions that accept federal housing dollars to draw up and submit “equity plans” to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development every five years. 

Federal housing officials say that the rule was designed to address some of the problems that local leaders had with the 2015 rule. The new proposal is not so different from the earlier standard that it will require New York to substantially revise its fair housing framework, however.

If anything, several aspects of the new policy – lighter data reporting requirements, for example – will make it easier for smaller cities to catch up with the work that New York is doing.

New York’s housing report is a preview of what other leaders and their constituents might expect from their own equity plans. Compiling information from nearly 36 agencies, the report tracks the city’s work towards six goals – combating discrimination, facilitating equitable development, preserving affordable housing, enhancing rental assistance, creating better options for people with disabilities, and addressing concentrated poverty – which are further subdivided into concrete strategies. 

Some of the action items involve soft targets for outreach and education, while others offer hard numbers. The status for most of the actions listed under the six goals is “in progress”.

This report ought to dispel fears about fair housing enforcement: The city’s proto-equity plan falls well short of past conservative claims about social engineering, banning single-family homes or abolishing the suburbs. 

At the same time, the report will do little to assuage the Adams administration’s fiercest progressive critics. To say that comprehensive renovations and reforms for the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA’s) beleaguered portfolio of public housing are “in progress” glosses over the totality of the city’s challenges.

Yet, the finer bullet points do provide a more granular view of local initiatives. To drill into the public housing figures, New York aims to renovate some 62,000 public housing units through the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) programme, a federal initiative for public-private partnerships; so far, NYCHA has closed on deals for 7,800 units. 

That is useful info for RAD critics and boosters alike. By posting these equity plans publicly, the Biden administration aims to make accountability a local concern.

Of course, Biden’s rule could run aground the same way Obama’s did. The new AFFH rule is likely to take effect later this year, which means that larger localities and public housing agencies may be filing their equity plans as soon as 2025. 

Some will not come into view until 2028. A future Republican president could scrap or revise the rule and cancel these equity plans before they ever come due.

So for the cities and counties that do want to stick with fair-housing enforcement, New York’s reporting could be a model in two ways: How to approach an equity plan, and how to stick with it even if the rule is cancelled.

“We’ve continued to work on these important goals of dismantling these barriers to opportunity and fairness in the housing market,” Carrion says. “We as a city decided to continue with this work as a priority. And now, we’re very glad that the Biden administration has resuscitated this rule.” BLOOMBERG