Watch Out Suburbs! “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule,” (AFFH) is Coming!

President Obama and a famous Castro brother are uniting to subjugate American suburbs with the unlawful “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule,” (AFFH) and no one in the mainstream media seems to care.

“In significant measure, the rule amounts to a de facto regional annexation of America’s suburbs,” National Review’s Kurtz writes. Here’s how, he says:

AFFH obligates any local jurisdiction that receives HUD funding to conduct a detailed analysis of its housing occupancy by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, and class (among other categories). Grantees must identify factors (such as zoning laws, public-housing admissions criteria, and “lack of regional collaboration”) that account for any imbalance in living patterns. Localities must also list “community assets” (such as quality schools, transportation hubs, parks, and jobs) and explain any disparities in access to such assets by race, ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, class, and more. Localities must then develop a plan to remedy these imbalances, subject to approval by HUD.

Through the AFFH rule, HUD will use the power of the purse like a sledge hammer to bludgeon suburbs into submission. As Kurtz explains:

By obligating all localities receiving HUD funding to compare their demographics to the region as a whole, AFFH effectively nullifies municipal boundaries. Even with no allegation or evidence of intentional discrimination, the mere existence of a demographic imbalance in the region as a whole must be remedied by a given suburb. Suburbs will literally be forced to import population from elsewhere, at their own expense and in violation of their own laws. In effect, suburbs will have been annexed by a city-dominated region, their laws suspended and their tax money transferred to erstwhile non-residents. And to make sure the new high-density housing developments are close to “community assets” such as schools, transportation, parks, and jobs, bedroom suburbs will be forced to develop mini-downtowns. In effect, they will become more like the cities their residents chose to leave in the first place.

The most compelling criticism of the proposed rule came in a a letter dated September 17, 2013 and signed by three members of the U.S Commission on Civil Rights, Abigail Thernstrom, Vice Chair, Peter Kirsanow, Commissioner, and Todd Gaziano, Commissioner, who destroyed the disparate impact theory when they wrote:

The underlying flaw in this proposed rule lies in its repeated use of the term “segregation” to describe housing patterns in which members of racial or ethnic groups are concentrated in particular areas. Legal segregation has been dead for over forty years. Geographic clustering of racial and ethnic groups is not in and of itself an invidious phenomenon. Referring to contemporary housing patterns as “segregation” trivializes the horror of legal segregation that existed in the United States for over half a century. . .

The Fair Housing Act Does Not Authorize the Use of Disparate Impact Theory

We realize that HUD recently promulgated a rule enshrining disparate impact theory in its regulations. Nevertheless, we must reiterate here what we have previously stated elsewhere: disparate impact claims are not cognizable under the Fair Housing Act.

As a result of this regrettable arrogation of power, the entire proposed rule is built upon sand. Rather than focusing on incidents of disparate treatment against members of protected classes, the proposed rule transforms people with middle-income levels or below into a protected class based simply on disparate impact. We certainly oppose disparate treatment in housing because of membership in a protected class. However, the proposed rule’s focus on disparate impact and the almost complete absence of a discussion of disparate treatment suggests that people are being discriminated against on the basis of their pocketbooks. Or, as we used to call it, “living within your means.” To argue that housing discrimination is pervasive because members of a protected class are less likely to be able to afford housing that is the size they want or in a more genteel area is bizarre.

The new AFFH rule is an unlawful regulation because, as Thernstrom, Gaziano, and Kirsanow confirm, “The Fair Housing Act does not authorize the use of disparate impact theory.”

That five members of the Supreme Court decided to import the disparate impact theory into the Fair Housing Act in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc., as Justice Thomas noted in his dissent, does not make it any less so.

As a consequence, elected state and local leaders are well within their rights to tell the Department of Housing and Urban Development to “take this regulation and shove it.”

[link to www.breitbart.com]