Fair Housing Council of Oregon director Allan Lazo breaks down the AFFH and the dangers associated with removing requirements that promoted racial and economic integration
Last month, President Donald Trump took a moment to type out two character-limited blows to housing advocates across the country.
“I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood,” he wrote in one tweet. He continued in another: “Your housing prices will go up based on the market, and crime will go down. I have rescinded the Obama-Biden AFFH Rule. Enjoy!”
In his usual casually explosive style, Trump was referring to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson’s revocation just days earlier of a rule commonly referred to as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, or the AFFH rule.
Long promised, the Trump administration had finally succeeded in doing away with the Obama-era policy that had, for the first time, offered towns, municipalities and other housing jurisdictions a framework for keeping the promise of furthering fair housing included in the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Part of the rule was the Assessment of Fair Housing Tool, a resource for jurisdictions and Public Housing Agencies to examine factors contributing to racial segregation, poverty disparities and lack of access to economic opportunity.
With the AFFH rule now revoked, jurisdictions across the country are now less accountable for trying to undo the devastating effects of decades of racial discrimination in housing.
HUD’s replacement plan does away with assessments focused on race and ethnicity, instead focusing on increasing the housing supply. Housing advocates across the country decried the loss of Obama’s AFFH rule as a major step back in addressing segregation and racial discrimination in housing.
And, Trump’s appeal to “people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream” couched the decision in racist, dog-whistle terms.
Allan Lazo, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of Oregon since 2016, spoke to Street Roots about what Trump’s tweets and the policy behind it mean for housing in Oregon.
Ann-Derrick Gaillot: How do you explain the AFFH rule that HUD just revoked?
Allan Lazo: Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing is an obligation of jurisdictions to proactively address racial segregation in our communities. What it really means is looking at how we create more inclusive communities in the neighborhoods and cities we are living in.
The rule that came out under the Obama administration (in 2015) was the first promulgation of rules that provided some direction for jurisdictions as to what might constitute affirmatively furthering fair housing or what processes might help them specifically address the elements of racial segregation in communities. So it was really about process with that rule. The Obama administration had actually changed the elements of the reporting process that were intended to address those issues.
Gaillot: Ben Carson initially suspended the AFFH rule in 2018. Did that suspension have any effect in Oregon?
Lazo: Under the Obama administration, what that rule did was put in place more accountability around an examination of racial segregation and concentrations of poverty, especially around race and ethnicity. Carson really just (took away) the requirements for jurisdictions to do this assessment.
What you had were jurisdictions across the state and across the country that had been working on this process in 2015 and 2016 who then stopped and were no longer required to make these evaluations around the impact of racial segregation in their communities. It didn’t mean they couldn’t. It just meant they weren’t required to.
As you would imagine, there were some communities that said great, if we don’t have to do that, then we’re not going to. And there were some communities that said, regardless of what the requirement is, we think this is an important concept and we will continue to analyze the impacts of those dynamics in our community.
It was a wide range of responses. Part of what the Trump administration was saying is it’s not up to (the federal government) to tell you what’s best for your local community. But what we know is that you get exactly the response that happened, a wide-ranging response, if you do not put in place some kind of requirements or regulations that help us get to the goals that are set out in something like the Fair Housing Act and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. That’s why those federal rules are important. It gives us a consistent opportunity to reach those goals of federal legislation.
What’s come out now in the proposed replacement rule really is a major shift in concept about those requirements. That’s what’s dangerous about it and the narrative that’s being developed around it. It’s not just saying, well, you don’t have to do this. This is a narrative that says creating inclusive communities actually lowers property values and that by removing those requirements, we’re helping to protect you folks out in the suburbs.
There’s no evidence that that’s true. In fact, there are studies that show the opposite — that different types of housing can create opportunities in different neighborhoods and does not increase negative aspects like decrease in property values.
It’s a very troubling narrative that’s existed for a long time. It’s even more troubling when it’s manifested in federal rules and regulations.
It was one thing for them to proceed along a line of thinking that basically said, “The way we solve the fair-housing issue is just to build more housing.” It doesn’t matter if you build more housing; what matters is who gets the opportunity to live in that housing and where that housing is located. You can build as much housing as you want. That happened in the 1930s with the Federal Housing Administration. It was who had access to that housing that was important, that gave rise to the need for civil rights protections and housing.
This new HUD rule doesn’t provide any protection as to opportunity for people to live where they choose. What the Trump administration said, in fact, is, if I think that you might lower my property values, then we ought to put in place systems that don’t allow you to come into my neighborhood.
That’s really the danger here.
Q&A: The Fair Housing Act: Its impact and its hurdles
Gaillot: What sort of impact do you see the new HUD rule having in Oregon?
Lazo: We have lots of folks and lots of jurisdictions that are committed to the underlying concepts of inclusive communities. So that’s the upside.
The impact of terminating the rule is if there were areas that weren’t inclined to assess fair housing and the effects of racial discrimination, it gives them the opportunity continue along a path that segregates communities and does not address racial integration.
There’s nothing in the marketplace necessarily to drive (building) housing that’s intended for folks who are lower income in (more racially exclusive) areas — or to make investment in areas that might have either less access to opportunity or might have increased percentages of communities of color, where there hasn’t been investment made in the past.
Part of affirmatively furthering fair housing is looking at how access to opportunities is distributed based on housing. So much of that, from a fair-housing perspective, is what’s really important. One thing that I say is, “It’s not about the roof over your head; it’s about the access to opportunity outside your front door.”
It’s not just about housing people. Under fair housing, it’s who gets access to opportunity based on where you live. An easy and extreme example is school districts. Where you live literally determines what school you get to go to. And so what we see reflected in opportunity and education is reflection of the housing system that’s been created.
Affirmatively furthering fair housing can help all of those pieces. And, we also talk right now about both the COVID-19 pandemic and the racial justice pandemic. Both of those are also directly linked to how housing opportunity has been denied to some communities. It’s an incredibly important racial justice issue that is under attack at the moment.
Gaillot: What’s one thing people who are concerned with fair housing and this rule change can do?
Lazo: The big piece is folks educating themselves on what this actually means. What’s underlying this narrative (that affordable housing is threatening), where’s it coming from, and what does it actually mean?
I wouldn’t hold this up as a fair-housing issue, but the news in Lake Oswego the last couple of days is certainly concerning to me. The neighbor who had a support Black Lives Matter-type of sign up in their window and the neighbor who anonymously sent them a letter that said we hope you would take this down because we think it will reduce property values.
There’s no intentional discrimination there potentially, but if we actually pushed for creating communities that welcomed everyone, that were inclusive, that had all different types of people, and all different types of housing types that met the needs of all different types of people, would we actually have interactions like that?
If we had created communities that were more inclusive, more welcoming, more diverse, would we have interactions like the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, the killing of George Floyd, all of these folks?
Folks need to understand what the hard part is. So many of us that are privileged and housed and homeowners, rightfully, are troubled by things like the loss of our property values or protecting our property right down to who’s parking in front of my house, on my street. But the extended impact is what we see happening on the streets today. So we’ve got to find a way to make those things (inclusivity and property protection) not mutually exclusive.
We can have rights to our property. We can have increased property values without excluding people. One of the things that happens in a community that’s very white is we don’t examine our day-to-day interactions, and they absolutely matter.
It’s not just the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that there’s a knee on George Floyd’s neck that kills him. It’s the involuntary economic displacement of the Black community out of North and Northeast Portland.
I actually just rode up there this week on my bike to take some photos for a presentation and noted the number of Black Lives Matter signs in windows in the condos. I’m curious as to whether or not folks there who have those signs know the history of that area, of redlining and urban renewal, and the fact that for much of that history, it sure didn’t seem like Black lives mattered. How would we change that today? Because we have that opportunity.
The Black community that was there is displaced in lots of parts of our community now that we ought to be paying attention to. And a lot of those places are not areas of opportunity. So how are we working to remedy that today? That’s really what people can do is ask those kinds of questions.
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