Trump ends radically intrusive "Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing" rule

Accomplishes in less than two months what it took him three-and-half years to do last time

The Trump administration has announced that it will eliminate the notorious Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. That’s the device by which the federal government attaches strings to billions of dollars in community development block grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, thereby enabling the feds to control zoning regulations and many other aspects of local government.

Through that control, liberal bureaucrats engineer residential patterns to conform with their vision of diversity, equity and inclusion. In the process, they urbanize suburbs by forcing dense development to cluster around public transit hubs with the goal of coercing suburbanites out of their cars.

Stanley Kurtz reports on the demise of the AFFH rule and explains why it’s such good news.

AFFH is a systematic attack on America’s suburbs, an attempt to undercut their economic and political independence, urbanize them, and ultimately to absorb them into their greater metropolitan regions as if they never existed to begin with. The rule was the brainchild and longtime dream of President Obama’s Alinskyite community organizing mentors, who hated the suburbs, dismissed them as products of racism and greed, and blamed them for urban decay.

AFFH is federal overreach on stilts, very arguably the most radical policy initiative of Obama’s presidency. Truly, the rule was designed to fundamentally transform the United States of America.

It was Stanley, by the way, who first blew the whistle on what came to be known as AFFH in his 2012 book Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities. Since then, I have written repeatedly about the subject.

Donald Trump ended AFFH in 2020. However, Joe Biden promptly reinstated it in only slightly modified form.

It’s noteworthy that it took Trump until the last year of his first administration to pull the plug on AFFH. This time around, it took him less than two months.

That’s another sign that Trump means business this time around. In the case of AFFH, it’s good business.