NIMBY suburbanites, rejoice: President Donald Trump has your back.
The Trump administration just took a big step toward gutting a noble Obama-era initiative, one that required cities and towns across the country to submit plans for tackling racial segregation and inequality in housing.
The “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” initiative required cities and suburbs to, among other things, examine and revamp their zoning codes. These rules, which control local development, have too often been used and abused by predominantly white suburbs in the Boston area and in cities around the country.
Leafy bedroom communities have through restrictive zoning blocked construction of affordable apartments and more modestly priced homes that would – it is presumed – attract a wider and more diverse array of renters and buyers.
Of course, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, led by none other than Ben Carson, says it simply extended to 2020 a deadline for communities to comply with “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”
Housing activists have correctly blasted the move as a step towards killing the new rule altogether.
Scott Van Voorhis
Some cities have already filed plans under the new rules – Boston was slated to submit its plan this past fall. Of course, already doing its fair share and then some when it comes to encouraging the construction of new housing; the Hub is also a majority minority city. It’s the mostly white suburbs where this latest retrograde move by the Trump Administration and its transparently racist leader will have the most detrimental impact. That especially goes for the suburbs around Boston.
“Massachusetts metro areas remain among the most segregated of the nation’s 100 largest metros,” a 2014 state housing report noted, a conclusion that certainly still holds today, four years later.
Inequality Not Just Racial
Why are our towns so white? It all goes back to the zoning rules that govern what gets built and what doesn’t.
Most Boston area suburbs have large-lot zoning, meaning the only type of new housing that can be built without a long, drawn out approval process are large, expensive, single-family homes on lots of 1, 2 or even 3 acres. Developers who propose building new apartments in Boston suburbs, even when they are mostly market rate with a modest number of subsidized affordable rentals, invariably face fierce opposition.
Whether that opposition is overtly racist or not is another question. That said, too often the objections are couched in language that imply racism, such as grumbling by NIMBY foes that new apartments will draw people from the city on welfare or become a magnet for drug users and dealers.
But it’s the very lack of a wider array of more affordable housing options in the suburbs that works to block out diversity – not just racial, but also economic. Blue-collar families are shut out of many of Boston’s suburbs, and in the cases of the more expensive communities, so are middle-class families.
“While the forces that contribute to spatial segregation by race and ethnicity are complex and varied, a number of studies have concluded that low-density-only zoning that reduces the number of rental units also limits the number of black/African American and Hispanic/Latino residents,” notes that 2014 report from the Massachusetts Department of Housing and Community Development.
All Hope is Not Lost
The Obama administration’s “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” initiative wasn’t going to change the world overnight. Even so, it was the first big push to get at the root causes of segregation in decades.
The overdue federal effort provided a badly needed nudge to cities and suburbs alike to look at the role restrictive zoning rules play in not just blocking construction, but also in blocking diversity. At the very least, it helped put pressure on communities large and small to open their doors to new apartments and homes – bringing down rents and prices for everyone.
Even with the Trump administration’s decision to delay the rules into oblivion, it’s not a completely lost cause. HUD under Obama provided extensive guidance for communities to examine their local housing markets and explore ways to open them up to a wider array of buyers and renters.
If HUD wants to be useless, so be it. But Beacon Hill could certainly step into the void and require communities across the state to file fair housing plans along the lines of the endangered Obama administration initiative.
Failing that, enlightened local leaders and citizens should take the ball and run with it, drafting their own fair housing assessments and plans.
If nothing else, it’s another way to thumb our noses at our nation’s racist-in-chief.
