Trump's shameful rejection of fair housing

ADC issued the following statement upon the Trump administration’s promulgation of a new (anti-) affiimatively furthering fair housing rule:

It was the Anti-Discrimination Center’s 2006 lawsuit against Westchester County that brought the concept of “affirmatively furthering fair housing” back from the dead; we have been looking at this issue closely since that time.

The Trump administration’s new rule represents a move to a regulatory regime that tells localities that their exclusionary zoning - zoning that precludes the construction of affordable housing - will go unchallenged.  It will mean that the national scourge of residential segregation will continue unabated.

Affirmatively furthering fair housing is the path to open up to all Americans those communities (suburban or urban) that feature good schools, safe streets, quality medical care, and well-tended parks and recreational facilities.  President Trump, like bigots who have come before him, sees that as a threat, as opposed to the opportunity it is.

It is well to remember that the social engineering involved here was the deliberate, decades-long policy of excluding African Americans from suburban neighborhoods.  Remedying that wrong is what basic justice requires.

In truth, there has never been a sustained commitment to affirmatively furthering in any presidential administration - that needs to change.

As for the Trump administration’s denigrating of the Westchester case, it was, in fact, a case so strong that the presiding federal judge ruled as a matter of law that Westchester’s representations that it had and would affirmatively further fair housing were “false or fraudulent.”