HUD secretary defends repeal of fair housing rule

In a strongly worded op-ed, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner defended the recent repeal of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule.

Turner argued in The Gazette, an Iowa-based newspaper, that AFFH represented a federal overreach into local housing decisions and hurt the very communities it claimed to help.

“As Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, I serve the American people by ensuring rural, tribal, and urban communities have access to quality, safe, and affordable housing,” Turner wrote. “Achieving this mission oftentimes means stopping big government from meddling in the lives of everyday Americans.”

The AFFH rule — originally enacted in 2015 by the Obama administration and reinstated under President Joe Biden in 2021 — required local governments to analyze housing patterns for racial and economic disparities and submit corrective plans to HUD.

But Turner said the rule “effectively turned HUD into a national zoning board.” He called it “one of the greatest top-down intrusions on local decisionmaking ever undertaken by Washington.”

Turner credited President Donald Trump for terminating the policy during in 2020 during his first term, saying he ended “a liberal quest to socially reengineer neighborhoods at the expense of the American suburban dream.”

The secretary argued that the regulatory burdens imposed by AFFH were excessive and counterproductive.

“To comply with the mandate’s requirements, localities had to complete a nearly 100-question grading tool and undertake complicated demographic analyses of their residents and housing stock,” he wrote.

“Moreover, this data had to be analyzed in relation to not just the community itself, but to the greater region as a whole — with a mandate to address the mere existence of any sort of imbalance, racial or otherwise, even without any showing of actual discrimination. Unsurprisingly, these reports proved nearly impossible to complete.”

Turner cited Philadelphia as an example, noting that it submitted a report totaling more than 800 pages, two-thirds of which were rejected by HUD for revision.

He also pointed to the case of Dubuque, Iowa, which he said was unfairly targeted by HUD.

“The Obama administration accused Dubuque of discrimination for merely prioritizing its own citizens’ public housing needs over those of the people of Chicago, Illinois, many of whom were coming to this smaller Iowa city for Section 8 vouchers,” Turner wrote.

“Despite Dubuque being nearly 200 miles away from Chicago and in a completely different state, Obama’s HUD lumped it together with the Windy City and declared it must promote ‘fair housing’ in the new regional bloc that crossed the Iowa-Illinois border.”

Turner added that the move does not mean an end to fair housing enforcement.

“Of course, housing discrimination remains illegal under federal law, and will continue to be illegal after AFFH is repealed because the Fair Housing Act remains in place,” he said.

A coalition of more than 100 consumer, housing and civil rights advocates previously submitted a letter to Turner opposing HUD’s 2025 Interim Final Rule that changes the scope of the AFFH rule.

“Imagine a society in which every child and every person can live in a neighborhood with ample affordable and accessible housing, fresh air, clean water, good public transportation, living wage jobs, quality healthcare, healthy foods, and affordable credit. That is what affirmatively furthering fair housing means,” said Nikitra Bailey, executive vice president of the National Fair Housing Alliance.