In the wake of the US Supreme Court’s majority decision upholding the disparate impacts portions of the Fair Housing Act (Paul Votto and I will be leading a webinar on this topic on Monday, July 13), HUD issued a major rule on July 8 to affirmatively further fair housing.
The centerpiece of the new rule is to end segregation and promote integrated communities, requiring cities and towns to report on their efforts every few years.
HUD Secretary Julian Castro, in remarks reported by the Washington Post, said, “This is the most serious effort that HUD has ever undertaken [to reduce segregation]. I believe it is historic.”
Civil rights advocates have long wanted a systemic approach to identify patterns of segregation, and a policy for its elimination. In fact, as a staff member of HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in Boston, Mass. during the mid-1980’s, I and others developed and maintained a tracking system on the issue of racial discrimination, using data contained on HUD-50058 and 50059 forms for this purpose.
HUD states that it has devised a process that will make segregation much more difficult to conceal. Time will tell. My only personal experience with something similar was when I was involved in community-based meetings during the time I served in the administration of Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis. The federal Office of Revenue Sharing, which provided federal funds to cities and towns before it was abolished by President Ronald Reagan, issued Section 504 rules requiring cities and towns to make their official buildings accessible to persons with disabilities. This was years before the Americans with Disabilities Act. We actually had town officials say on the record that they didn’t have to comply with the regulation because there were no persons with disabilities in their town. I’d like to say I made that up but, sadly, I didn’t.