Trump Administration terminates Affirmatively Fair Housing Act

United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Ben Carson has finalized a plan to dismantle the Obama-era Affirmatively Fair Housing (AFH) regulation that sought to rectify entrenched racial and economic segregation in American suburbs. The AFH ruling was crafted during the administration of Barack Obama as part of an effort to more effectively enforce the 1968 Fair Housing Act legislation. The AFH rule required suburbs to plan for addressing segregation at risk of losing key HUD funding and was meant to support wider desegregation efforts. The latest directive, long in the making, relieves municipalities of their duty to address patterns of segregation within their boundaries and is being effectively replaced with a new directive titled Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice, a rule that grants municipalities much more leeway in meeting softened AFH guidelines. The shift represents the latest aspect of a life-long effort by President Donald Trump to...