Two years ago, the Obama administration started using data to push communities to obey the part of the Fair Housing Act that says that if a community gets federal affordable housing money, it has to “affirmatively further” fair housing. Can you guess where this is going? Right. Republicans don’t like that, so they are working to roll it back.
According to Republicans, telling communities that if they want federal money, they have to tackle racial disparities:
… is essentially the federal involvement meddling in local zoning issues. Some, including Trump’s pick for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), Ben Carson, go further and call this “social engineering.” Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) said this was President Obama forcing "his utopian ideology on American communities."
So Gosar, along with Republican Sens. Mike Lee and Marco Rubio, introduced a bill, dubbed the Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017, that would roll back President Obama’s legacy on fair housing. Then it bars any similar rules from being created in the future.
Not only that, the bill as currently written would make sure “no Federal funds may be used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.” It’s a mandate for ignorance. The good news is, Lee and Gosar’s offices say they might narrow the language so that it doesn’t prevent all data collection on everything. The bad news is their central intent: to ensure that the federal government doesn’t try to address racial disparities in housing.
This is worse than “if we close our eyes, maybe it will go away.” This is “we should close our eyes so that it doesn’t go away.”