WASHINGTON — The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), joined by 95 other fair housing, consumer advocacy, and civil rights organizations and a former HUD official, filed a comment today urging HUD to withdraw its proposed rule removing disparate impact protections from its Title VI regulations. Those protections help ensure equal opportunity and freedom from unnecessary barriers in HUD federal financial assistance.
The coalition argues that HUD’s legal reasoning is unjustified, and that the rule will further incentivize states and municipalities to steer critical disaster relief funds away from hardest-hit underserved communities and favor wealthier zip codes. These protections are vital to ensuring that federal dollars reach all communities fairly across programs administered by states, local governments, and public housing authorities.
“In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, HUD found that Texas directed disaster recovery funds away from Black and Latino neighborhoods in Houston, even as those communities faced significant damage. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides an important safeguard against this kind of discrimination in federally funded programs,” said Nikitra Bailey, NFHA Executive Vice President. “Now HUD is attempting to roll back common-sense protections that ensure no community is left behind when disaster strikes.”
This is HUD’s second attack on disparate impact protections in the same rulemaking. The agency earlier proposed scrapping its Fair Housing Act disparate impact regulations and leaving the question to the courts, a proposal NFHA opposed in formal comments. Now HUD wants to drop its decades-old Title VI requirement that recipients of HUD funding set aside policies that are unfair and unnecessary that are based on race, even when they are not overt. It stops federally funded programs from shutting out communities through policies that serve no legitimate purpose.
HUD’s proposed changes will no longer require jurisdictions and public housing authorities to select the fairest choice possible when allocating resources, but it will instead leave communities subject to unlawful discrimination in federally funded programs based on race, color, or national origin.