Trump’s HUD secretary cuts a key fair housing rule; advocates warn of deeper segregation

Scott Turner has announced the rescinding of the Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule from the Obama and Biden eras to “cut red tape.” Affordable housing experts and advocates say it will harm Black communities and vulnerable minorities the most.
Scott Turner, secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, has announced he is terminating the Affirmative Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule in an effort to cut “costly red tape.”
AFFH, which was originally introduced by the Obama administration, required any state receiving federal funding to demonstrate they were taking steps to truly implement fair housing and eliminate discrimination, by answering a series of questions and assembling planning reports that showed concrete action.  
The rule was rescinded once Trump first took office in 2016, and was brought back by President Joe Biden in 2021– but now, it’s gone again.
“Local and state governments understand the needs of their communities much better than bureaucrats in Washington D.C. Terminating this rule restores trust in local communities and property owners while protecting America’s suburbs and neighborhood integrity,” said Secretary Turner in a statement announcing the repeal. 
Turner is the only Black cabinet-level official in the Trump administration. A former NFL player-turned-politician, Turner previously served as Trump’s executive director of the White House Opportunity and Revitalization Council.
But while Turner is declaring the repeal of AFFH as a victory for local governments, affordable housing advocates and experts say it will open the doors for local jurisdictions to keep certain groups out of their neighborhoods – particularly, Black people.
“When you remove these sort of affirmative protections and actions, you see a resurgence of segregation,” says Erin Boggs, executive director of the Open Communities Alliance in Connecticut. “You’ll probably see continued and maybe deepened disinvestment [in] communities of color.”
Homeownership has traditionally been seen as a path to wealth-building in America. But historic practices like redlining, restrictive covenants, and denying mortgages and loans to African Americans have limited the opportunities to build wealth for many in the community.
This has had a demonstrated trickle-down effect on everything from access to quality schooling to limiting job prospects.
The language of “local control” was often employed in the 1960s and ’70s civil rights era by school segregationists who argued they knew best about how schools should run, as part of their resistance to desegregation efforts.
Secretary Turner has argued that AFFH’s requirement to make local governments show they are affirmatively taking steps to make housing fair is “complete onerous paperwork and drain their budgets to comply with the extreme and restrictive demands.”
Boggs says the “onerous paperwork” was actually good planning. He told theGrio, “It compelled municipalities and other jurisdictions to do sound planning that not only would be good for the entire region or municipality, but would not leave behind particular people of color. Boggs continued, “But other groups who are also protected by the Fair Housing Act like people with disabilities.”
Turner has replaced AFFH with an interim rule, where localities have to only certify that they’ve “affirmatively furthered fair housing” and that will “be deemed sufficient.”
The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) has decried the change as nothing more than a gutting of the 1968 Fair Housing Act, put in place by President Lyndon Johnson.
“President Trump has shown once again his strong desire to eviscerate our nation’s fair housing protections by rejecting the letter and spirit of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing mandate,” said Lisa Rice, the president and CEO of NFHA, in a statement.
“If implemented, the Administration’s proposed Interim Rule will take the “fair housing” out of the 1968 Civil Rights Act’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing mandate. The President and Secretary Scott Turner have proposed a new rule that significantly waters down the legal requirement making this important fair housing provision a toothless tiger.”
Boggs said there were already creative ways that local communities kept Black people and other groups from buying homes without explicitly calling it racism. These included restrictive zoning laws that only allowed for single-family homes to be built, the rejection of mixed-income housing or denser buildings where apartments could exist, and racial steering by real estate agents that directed Black families away from buying certain homes.
Now localities do not have to prove they are taking action to stop these practices — they can merely promise they mean well.
Boggs, who has produced a fair housing model in Connecticut meant to combat these issues, emphasizes that the suppression of affordable housing, which is meant to keep certain groups of people out of neighborhoods, is in fact hurting all Americans and residents – as evidenced by what she’s seen locally.
“We are the most housing-constrained state in the country,” Boggs told theGrio. “We have incredibly high housing costs. We have incredibly low vacancy rates and it is having an impact not only on groups that have traditionally been covered by the Fair Housing Act, but it is also having an impact on single parents and seniors who are trying to downsize and people who are making more of a moderate income.”
Boggs said the housing crisis is also affecting employers, telling theGrio, “We have about 72,000 unfilled jobs in the state of Connecticut. A lot of that is because people who might fill those jobs cannot find a place to live in the state.”
In addition to there being a nationwide housing shortage, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), housing prices rose 4.3% from 2023-2024. The National Low-Income Housing Coalition also reports that 70% of low-income households are spending more than half of their income on rent. Even renters who work full-time earning minimum wage statistically can’t afford a two-bedroom home in any state in the U.S.
With these obstacles to affordable housing, and the new rollback of AFFH, affordable housing advocates may have to focus their efforts on state-level legislation and advocacy.
“There are all kinds of things states can do…Several states have also already passed their own affirmatively furthering fair housing legislation, which is something that could happen in any state across the country,” Boggs told theGrio.
The National Fair Housing Alliance says it will continue to call out the withdrawal of AFFH and resist Secretary Turner’s proposed replacement rule.
“It moves us further away from what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders envisioned when they championed the Fair Housing Act — a nation where everyone can live in a safe, secure home in a healthy, well-resourced, vibrant community free from discrimination,” said Rice of NFHA.
“The National Fair Housing Alliance and our members will vigorously oppose this proposed rule and fight to ensure a future where housing discrimination will have no place in America.”
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