Has HUD fulfilled its obligations?

Westchester Case

For all of HUD’s initial bravado about holding Westchester’s “feet to the fire,” HUD has been uncooperative, ineffective, and unwilling to try - directly or through the Monitor - to pursue the crucial principles of the Consent Decree.

  • in more than 14 months, HUD has not made a single application to the Court to enforce the Consent Decree.

  • HUD hasn’t even yet rejected the appalling “analysis of impediments to fair housing choice,” submitted by Westchester this summer, the inadequacies of which were quickly summarized by ADC.

  • Pursuant to the terms of the Consent Decree, the Monitor serves at the pleasure of HUD, yet HUD hasn’t even pressured the Monitor to vindicate the most crucial elements of the Consent Decree: the need to prepare for and use its legal authority to cause new housing development on the census blocks with the lowest concentrations of African-Americans and Latinos.

  • HUD has resolutely not cooperated with ADC.


It matters not that HUD has been talking about (and will presumably unveil soon) “enhanced” regulations relating to the obligations to affirmatively further fair housing.  HUD’s fecklessness in allowing the Westchester Consent Decree to be violated means that jurisdictions around the country understand that the regulations will be for show, not for insisting on real change.