Fair Housing Faces an Uncertain Fate
The young year of 2017 has so far offered such a blizzard of political craziness that some less-spectacular developments have gone relatively unnoticed. One such story: The current machinations in Congress to undercut—yet again—a common-sense regulation to promote racial integration.
On January 11, GOP senator Mike Lee from Utah and former presidential candidate Marco Rubio introduced a bill called the “Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017.” The legislation seeks to nullify the 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which gives concrete guidance to entities receiving federal funds on how to proactively dismantle historical patterns of housing segregation—a requirement of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. A similarly titled bill on the House side, spearheaded by Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona, goes further: It asks to scrap the accompanying mapping tools that helps local communities identify patterns of racial segregation. Via Bill H.R. 482: