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Trump’s Fair Housing Restoration

 

By The Editorial Board

 

The Wall Street Journal

July 26, 2020

 

The Trump Administration on Thursday rolled back an Obama regulation that federalized local zoning and land-use policies. This deserves more explanation than it’s getting because critics are distorting what it means.

 

The 1968 Fair Housing Act requires recipients of federal block grants to certify that they “affirmatively further fair housing.” In 1996 the Clinton Administration issued 170 pages of guidance interpreting those four words, and lawsuits proliferated.

 

Westchester County’s saga is illustrative. Minorities make up about half of the New York City suburb’s residents, but whites constitute a larger share of affluent enclaves like Chappaqua (home to Bill and Hillary Clinton) than middle-income neighborhoods like Yonkers. Liberal groups filed a lawsuit alleging these disparities violated the Fair Housing Act.

Westchester agreed in a 2009 consent decree with the Obama Administration to spend $50 million on 750 subsidized housing units in mostly white enclaves. The Obama Housing and Urban Development Department then moved the goal posts, demanding the county redo its zoning. Westchester fought back and was vindicated in 2017 when the Trump Administration accepted its housing plan.

Separately, the Obama Administration in 2015 replaced the Clinton guidance with its own new fair-housing rule that applied its Westchester paint-by-numbers mandates nationwide. This one required local governments to identify racial disparities in “access to public transportation, quality schools and jobs . . . [and] environmental health hazards” and “programs, policies, or funding mechanisms that affect disparities.”

The rule essentially required counties to change land-use and zoning to evenly distribute minorities across neighborhoods. Yet federal law prohibits HUD from conditioning funds on “the adoption, continuation, or discontinuation by a jurisdiction of any public policy, regulation, or law.” The rule also contravened a Supreme Court earlier that year that affirmed the Fair Housing Act “is not an instrument to force housing authorities to reorder their priorities” or “decree a particular vision of urban development.”

The Trump Administration has now reversed this lawless Obama rule. The media are denouncing the deregulation as racist, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi called it “a betrayal of our nation’s founding values of equality and opportunity for all” and “shameful abdication of our government’s responsibility to end discriminatory housing practices.”

So are Mrs. Pelosi and gentry liberals also racist because they choose to live in upper-crust enclaves? Of course not. People buy homes based on affordability, neighborhood safety, and public school quality, among other things. Restrictive zoning increases housing prices, but progressive cities like San Francisco and Seattle are the worst offenders.

A better way to increase income mobility for minorities is to expand school choice so a child’s success in life isn’t determined by the ZIP Code where he grows up. This would also reduce the substantial housing price premium in better school districts. Alas, Democrats would rather reorganize neighborhoods than reform schools.