Trump administration to delay enforcing Obama-era housing segregation rule

HUD says it will suspend rule until 2020

NYCHA Marcy Avenue houses, Donald Trump and Ben Carson (Credit Getty Images)
NYCHA Marcy Avenue houses, Donald Trump and Ben Carson (Credit Getty Images)

The Trump administration will delay enforcing an initiative from the Obama administration that required communities to address housing discrimination patterns.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, headed by Ben Carson, said a rule mandating that communities analyze and submit plans to reverse housing segregation to receive billions in federal aid will be suspended until 2020, according to the New York Times. The agency will also stop reviewing plans that cities have already filed, but it is not completely repealing the rule and maintains that communities are still required to advance fair housing policies.

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HUD characterizes the delay as an attempt to help communities that were struggling to comply with the rule and determine how to measure their progress toward fair housing, but advocates have criticized it as a drastic curtailment of one of the first major steps the federal government had taken in decades to deal with race-based housing discrimination.

New York City is scheduled to start community outreach start community outreach for its review later this year. Leila Bozorg, deputy commissioner of neighborhood strategies for the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, told the Times she was “confident in the approach New York City is taking” which “will include working closely with a diverse group of experts, practitioners and advocates and hearing directly from New Yorkers about their housing needs and how where they live impacts their life.” [NYT]Eddie Small