Obama-era fair housing rules need rework: HUD Secretary Ben Carson

The Trump administration is making progress in rolling back Obama-era housing rules that were intended to combat racial segregation, according to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson.

“The real problem is a lack of affordable housing,” he said during an interview with FOX Business’ Stuart Varney on Friday. “Why is there a lack of affordable housing? Because we have all of these restrictive zoning regulations based on our archaic thinking.”

Carson noted the July 2015 regulation, known as the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, required local governments receiving federal funding to identify and address any potential barriers to housing, like racial segregation.

The Obama administration used the regulation to update the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination in housing based on race, religion, national origin or sex.

“The previous administration had taken those few sentences and multiplied them into hundreds of pages of onerous regulations,” Carson said. “And many housing authorities were calling and saying, ‘This is way too complex. It’s not working.’”

HUD said in a statement that it will accept public comments on any proposed changes to the rule in order to “offer more helpful guidance” to the communities affected by the law.

“We can’t do much of it with the stroke of our pen,” he said. “We can do a whole lot of it by requiring that those things be done by those who are receiving funding.”

Critics of the rollback, however, warn that it could lead to an increase in segregation in many communities across the country.

Sarah Platt, a civil rights attorney and an Obama official who oversaw the enforcement of this rule, slammed the decision in an interview with NBC News.

“You’re going back to communities willfully blinding themselves to patterns of segregation,” Pratt said. “Without this rule, communities will not do the work to eliminate discrimination and segregation.”