I know I’m probably yelling into an echo chamber here, but for my followers who aren’t all-housing-all-the-time:

Let’s talk about this racist dogwhistle from Tr*mp and what it really means.

History lesson.

American suburbs were engineered in the mid-20th century by law and financial policy to be a place for white Americans to do two things:

1) Own homes —> build wealth —> build faith in American capitalism

2) Live far from Black, Chinese, Japanese, Jewish people

We spent taxpayer dollars building highways and infrastructure for white Americans. We made cars cheap, and then made public transit expensive. We made single family home loans low-interest so it was really easy for white people to get a mortgage. No down payments for veterans.

At first, it was formally illegal for Black Americans to buy a house with the privileges white Americans had, in the places white Americans lived.

We spent our taxpayer dollars supporting white suburbs and promising them prosperity, and then banned anyone else from living there.

Before the war and before we really had the American suburb typology, cities had explicitly racial zoning to enforce segregation. “This is a restricted white zone” was written into city planning laws to separate white neighborhoods from racially mixed neighborhoods.

When the Supreme Court shot that down in 1917, white Americans just found ways to achieve the same goal of racial segregation in the suburbs:

1) Homeowners associations mandated white owners sign private contracts, collectively agreeing to never sell to a non-white person.

Since the Supreme Court ruling only banned the government from administering racial segregation, private contracts were a semi-legal workaround.

2) Meanwhile, the federal government withheld mortgage lending in non-white areas, with a special focus on excluding Black people. They claimed “risk modeling” “showed” racial integration dropped property values, and that’s why we couldn’t back mortgages in integrated areas.

This was a lie. It was yet another backdoor way to give white Americans a leg-up and a government handout, while excluding racial minorities from the financial benefits of homeownership and mid-century American prosperity.

Even worse, this type of segregation made it easier and more straightforward for federal & state governments to funnel generous tax dollars to white areas (better schools, highways, parks, libraries!)... and divest tax dollars away from majority-minority communities.

There were a lot of other atrocious things wrapped up in this history.

Realtors wouldn’t sell homes to Black and minority families who wanted, and could by equal standards afford, a home.

When Black and minority families did get mortgages, their interest rates were far higher.

Tax assessors would simultaneously claim Black & minority residents reduced property values, but also “appraise” homes that were identical to white families’ homes at far higher value, so these families would be squeezed for paying double or triple the property taxes.

Black and minority homeowners who dared to move into an all- or mostly-white neighborhood were terrorized by their neighbors and local police, their children terrorized by teachers and classmates.

In 1968, after decades of activism, demonstrations, organizing, reporting, and riots, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act.

Among other things, the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing.

For about forty-five years, the Fair Housing Act did a lot of good and was periodically strengthened, but there were also glaring loopholes.

America maintained massive racial disparities that tied back to housing, and for all the good the Fair Housing Act did, this persisted.

Now, fast forward

When Obama’s @HUDgov was led by @JulianCastro, one of the extraordinary things they did was build on the Fair Housing Act by adopting regulations around an old provision called “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.”

This provision essentially tackled the issue of disparity, and created a framework to answer things like:

Why are we still seeing massive racial disparities in housing?

Are government actions contributing to these disparities, even absent specific discriminatory intent?

Could proactive government actions reverse these disparities, “affirmatively furthering” the original promise of the Fair Housing Act?

How can we hold ourselves accountable to outcomes (disparate impact) rather than just explicit discrimination?

This Obama-era rule, often called AFFH, made it far easier and more straightforward to take a fair housing case to court and win.

Before Obama’s AFFH rule, you had to prove that an action was in violation because it was adopted with clear discriminatory intent.

After Obama’s AFFH rule, you had to prove that there was a connection between an action and disparate impact between protected classes.

Essentially, it made us accountable to outcomes in fair housing, regardless of if you “didn’t mean any harm.”

The intent doesn’t actually matter.

The impact does.

When Tr*mp was elected, fair housing advocates around the country (rightfully) freaked out that he and Ben Carson would repeal this rule, taking us back to the old “well you have to PROVE they KNEW what they were doing was racist” standard in court.

For example, after the 2016 election, California quickly introduced a bill to copy-paste the Obama AFFH rule into state law, predicting that the Federal Administration would try to repeal it.

It was important that we could enforce AFFH in California if it wasn’t federal law.

(It passed, thanks to the legal and policy teams from Public Advocates, Western Center in Law & Poverty, and the National Housing Law Project.) https://twitter.com/anniefryman/status/1215355089222651904

Now, back to Tr*mp’s tweet.

Let’s be clear: he repealed this rule in 2018.

His recent, newfound fearmongering is a blatantly political tactic to scare mostly white, and discreetly racist, suburban homeowners before the 2020 general election.

These tactics are old and stale, appealing to a dark, disgusting strain of white American mid-century consciousness that still haunts this country.

It associates suburbs & homeownership with segregation, violence, white supremacy, and priority treatment from the government.