The Biden administration has its hands full just undoing the damage of the Trump years, but it is doing the work. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is moving to roll back two key Trump-era housing discrimination policies, emphasis on discrimination. To do so, HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge is in the process of reinstating two Obama-era policies that fight discrimination—based on race, disability, and more.
A 2013 rule, gutted by Team Trump in 2019, allowed legal claims against mortgage lenders, developers, and insurers based on statistical evidence of disparate impact—disparate impact meaning that even if policies are not discriminatory on the surface, they harm certain protected groups. Under Trump, HUD made it much more difficult to bring such claims. The Trump-era policy “basically is saying that you have to prove your entire case when you file it. This is unheard of,” the National Fair Housing Alliance’s Lisa Rice said at the time. “This is just another attempt by the Trump administration to take away yet another civil-rights protection.”
The Obama rule, for instance, “allow[ed] people to bring legal action to stop policies that harm them, for example a landlord requiring tenants to work a certain number of hours a week, which on its face may not seem discriminatory but which reduces housing choice for protected groups, in this case people with disabilities who often work part time to accommodate their health needs.”
“This is one of the most important tools that there is to address systemic racism in housing,” civil rights attorney and former HUD fair housing attorney Michelle Aronowitz, who helped develop the Obama disparate impact regulation, told The Washington Post. “You really need to look at the effects of government and corporate policies—not just what is meant or intended, but what the impact is. That’s fundamentally what this doctrine does. You shouldn’t be able to enact or maintain policies that lead to disparate outcomes based on unexamined assumptions or unnecessary conventions.”
A 2015 rule, gutted by Team Trump in 2020, required cities and towns to identify patterns of discrimination and then do something about it. Trump’s move against that requirement was part of his effort to win over white suburban women. “The Suburban Housewives of America must read this article,” he tweeted at the time. “Biden will destroy your neighborhood and your American Dream. I will preserve it, and make it even better!”
Literally promoting discrimination as the American dream. In reality, suburbs are far more racially diverse than Trump imagined, though discrimination remains a serious issue, and one that contributes to long-term patterns of inequality. “So much of wealth inequality has its basis in housing discrimination and the country’s failure to address fair access to housing,” Dennis Parker, executive director of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, said to the Post. “These are issues that really have a long-term intergenerational effect.”
The Office of Management and Budget posted notices Tuesday showing that the two rules are under review. While Fudge and other officials can’t comment on them during that process, she recently said, commemorating the anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, that “the purpose of the law is to bring an end to discrimination in housing and to eliminate the patterns of racial and ethnic segregation and economic disparities that have long existed in our neighborhoods and communities.”