HUD is ending the war on America’s towns

As Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), I serve the American people by ensuring rural, tribal, and urban communities have access to quality, safe, and affordable housing. Achieving this mission oftentimes means stopping big government from meddling in the lives of everyday Americans.

The first step in ensuring the government works for the people — as it was designed — is cutting red tape and heavy-handed overreach through regulatory reform. At the top of the long list of burdensome regulations is the Obama-Biden-era “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” (AFFH) rule.

Government programs and rules often do the opposite of what their names advertise, and this case proves it — AFFH hurts fair housing instead of promoting it.

This mandate effectively turned HUD into a national zoning board, amounting to one of the greatest top-down intrusions on local decision-making ever undertaken by Washington. That stopped thanks to President Donald Trump’s leadership. I terminated AFFH, ending a liberal quest to socially reengineer neighborhoods at the expense of the American suburban dream.

In brief, AFFH established a standardized national assessment process, requiring local jurisdictions to analyze their housing occupancy by race, class, and more, and submit their findings to bureaucrats in Washington. Sure, that sounds good in theory, but things went wrong when Washington, D.C. picked winners and losers. After conducting required analysis, localities then had to identify factors that could cause any disparities in home ownership and offer plans to address these factors in the future — all subject to federal approval.

As you can imagine, these assessments were extremely cumbersome and time-consuming. To comply with the mandate’s requirements, localities had to complete a nearly 100-question grading tool and undertake complicated demographic analyses of their residents and housing stock. Moreover, this data had to be analyzed in relation to not just the community itself, but to the greater region as a whole — with a mandate to address the mere existence of any sort of imbalance, racial or otherwise, even without any showing of actual discrimination.

Unsurprisingly, these reports proved nearly impossible to complete. For instance, the city of Philadelphia once submitted a single report that totaled over 800 pages, two-thirds of which were rejected and sent back for revision. Even under the Obama administration, HUD denied 63% of all report submissions.

Rather than reducing barriers to safe and affordable housing, this extensive regulatory requirement contributed to the rising costs of housing and reduced our nation’s affordable housing supply. Today, regulatory costs account for almost a quarter of the price of a single-family home, and about 40% of a multifamily home — pushing the American dream of home ownership out of reach for hardworking individuals and families.

AFFH also refused to recognize that no two communities are exactly alike and there is no “one size fits all” answer in housing policy. By grouping big, urban cities together with small, rural towns, AFFH failed to account for the different characteristics, industries, and needs of the individual communities HUD serves — and it was America’s communities that paid the price, particularly American suburbia. HUD essentially had the power to alter school district lines, transportation hubs, and even require the construction of multifamily housing in the middle of single-family suburbs, despite local preferences.

Consider the case of the City of Dubuque. The Obama administration accused Dubuque of discrimination for merely prioritizing its own citizens’ public housing needs over those of the people of Chicago, Illinois, many of whom were coming to this smaller Iowa city for Section 8 vouchers. Despite Dubuque being nearly 200 miles away from Chicago and in a completely different state, Obama’s HUD lumped it together with the Windy City and declared it must promote “fair housing” in the new regional bloc that crossed the Iowa-Illinois border.

Dubuque was free to refuse this absurdity, of course — if it didn’t mind waving goodbye to federal funding and facing a potential costly lawsuit. With these twin threats hanging over its head, Dubuque agreed to give HUD power over its local housing decisions and accept more Section 8 applicants from its new “neighbor.”

Thankfully, in 2020, President Donald Trump terminated AFFH because, in the words of then-Secretary Dr. Ben Carson, it had proved “costly, complicated, and ineffective.” Nonetheless, the Biden administration restored the main provisions of the rule in 2021, and those provisions have remained in place. But not any longer. Democrats will say this rule helped to ensure fairness, but there is nothing fair about federal bureaucrats elbowing their way into local decisions about housing.

Under the Trump administration, Washington bureaucrats will no longer have any business dictating a local community’s needs. Those decisions are best left to the leaders on the ground, who know their communities best.

Of course, housing discrimination remains illegal under federal law, and will continue to be illegal after AFFH is repealed because the Fair Housing Act remains in place. But AFFH’s complicated framework far exceeds the scope of the Fair Housing Act itself, and its unworkable approach has burdened American communities and inserted the federal government into local affairs for far too long.

By striking down this intrusive regulatory overreach, HUD is helping deliver on President Donald Trump’s Day One Executive Order to reduce housing costs and make life affordable again for Americans all across the nation.

Scott Turner serves as the 19th Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.