For the past few months, yet another legislative pillar of the country’s civil rights era, the Fair Housing Act, has been in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. First, in the autumn, the administration unveiled plans to make it harder for tenants, mortgage recipients and community organizations to sue banks and other financial institutions for using algorithms that end up having discriminatory impacts on the basis of race, religion, national origin and other protected categories. Then, a few weeks ago, HUD unveiled additional rule-rewrites diluting the obligation of cities to both develop public infrastructure in poor neighborhoods of color and also to build affordable housing across a range of locales rather than concentrating it all in a handful of places.
While the administration is trying to pitch these as simply administrative tweaks, in fact they have the potential to gut the force of the country’s fair housing rules — much as the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision rolling back parts of the Voting Rights Act ended up largely gutting protections that had been in place for more than half a century.