Affirmative Action Raps At The Door Of American Homes

THE BLUEPRINT

In a July 16, 2013 speech before the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), The US Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Shaun Donovan sketched the rule’s intent. He claimed blacks were being denied “the benefits of full citizenship” by being denied access to the “strongest neighborhoods.” Specifically, they were under-represented as home-owners and renters in the suburbs. In conjunction with the Census Bureau, HUD was “providing data for every neighborhood in the nation, detailing what access African American families, and other members of protected classes, have to…community assets.” 

HUD “enforcement techniques” included strengthening two anti-discrimination laws: the Fair Housing Act; and, the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. It became illegal for housing or home credit policies to produce results in which minorities received disproportionately less housing or fewer home loans than whites. For example, every credit record would be mapped for its racial balance. It wouldn’t matter if the issuer’s policies were color-blind in content and implementation. If the results were racially disproportionate, then a civil rights violation had occurred. The “diversity mapping” of neighborhoods would identify similar imbalances in housing.

The ‘remedies’ being proposed include requiring communities that receive federal funds to “affirmatively further fair housing” for minorities. Specifically, suburban landlords would be “encouraged” to accept Section 8 housing vouchers. These are vouchers given by the federal government to private landlords in order to subsidize the rent of low-income tenants. Section 8 housing is not new to suburbs. But former HUD policies aimed at preventing exclusion of protected classes; the new ones demand active inclusion of protected classes. At some point – and, perhaps, immediately – the inclusion is likely to be forced.

HUD is currently hammering out the final details of a set of rules it proposed in 2013. The 33-page proposal is entitled “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.” It provides HUD with the means to alter the population distribution of cities it deems to be segregated. Diversity mapping breaks city neighborhoods into four races – white, black, Hispanic and Asian. Under HUD’s proposal, an area with a nonwhite population of 50 percent or more would be classified as “segregated.”

Among the first cities to be targeted would be Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Memphis, Indianapolis and Cincinnati. If they wished to access federal funding, such cities would need programs aimed at detecting disparities, for example, in “the employment numbers for African-American and white households.” Then they would need to change codes and regulations to encourage non-discrimination and to otherwise promote the migration of “minorities” into segregated areas.

In a St. Louis American article (Jan. 15, 2014), black commentator Adolphus Pruitt explained, “The Obama administration is serious about addressing this issue. The administration is currently withholding Hurricane Sandy disaster relief funding for Westchester County, NY. HUD has also refused to renew housing grants totaling $17 million to Westchester County, after determining that zoning in seven of the county’s municipalities was exclusionary. The county was advised to sue those cities and towns to end restrictive practices, such as limiting the size, type, height and density of buildings.”

THE ACTUAL IMPACT

HUD’s stated purpose is to open the American dream up to minorities. The opposite will occur. The social engineering of communities will only perpetuate “protected minorities” as an underclass which relies upon government privilege and tax-funding to ‘succeed’. Entitlement programs, like welfare, cement people into a cycle of dependency rather than launch them into self-sufficiency.

A notorious example, is minimum wage laws. When an employer is forced to pay more per employee, the least skilled and experienced work applicants are priced out the market. They can no longer take an entry level position by accepting a slightly lower wage than a competing applicant; they can no longer work their way up the economic ladder. In a National Review article (Jan. 15, 2013) entitled “Liberalism versus Blacks,” the black economist Thomas Sowell observed “Liberals try to show their concern for the poor by raising the minimum wage. Yet they show no interest in hard evidence that minimum-wage laws create disastrous levels of unemployment among young blacks in this country.” 

Social engineering and entitlements harm blacks and other minorities. This is true whether the policies are introduced by Democrats or Republicans, whether they are applied with good intentions or bad ones. The policies act to establish blacks as a class apart, which is forever isolated from the American mainstream. And from the American dream.  

Unfortunately, as an executive agency, HUD is answerable only to the President. Little stands in the way of rubber-stamping the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. HUD’s proposed policies will only ferment racial tensions where none need exist. Tax-subsidized racial quotas will damage neighborhoods in the same manner it has damaged the quality of higher education. All races will lose. They will point accusing fingers at each other rather than at the real villain: government.