Ben Carson is aiming to get local governments to allow more housing construction, attempting to address a local-level problem — the housing crisis afflicting many parts of the country — using federal levers of power.
The Housing and Urban Development secretary took the first step Monday toward overhauling a 2015 Obama administration fair housing rule to redirect it away from economic integration and toward easing restrictive zoning and land use policies.
Where the Obama administration sought to use federal carrots and sticks to get localities to pursue integration, Carson wants to do the same to induce them to reduce building restrictions, on the logic that cheaper housing everywhere will benefit the disadvantaged groups the rule was meant to help.
The country faces a widespread and worsening shortage of housing, with half of all renters now paying more than 30 percent of their income on housing, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. The problem is particularly severe in cities with highly restrictive land use regulations, such as the San Francisco Bay Area and Boston.
The Obama version of the rule, which Carson had already mostly undone, would have addressed the problems facing low-income families and minorities and other protected groups partly by incentivizing cities and counties to build subsidized housing in wealthier areas, and also through other changes, such as improving public services in poorer or segregated areas. Ultimately, localities that don’t go along risk losing some HUD funding, such as block grants.
Under the old version of the rule, reducing exclusionary zoning barriers was just one of many ways for cities to comply. Carson, in contrast, wants it to be the main focus, to encourage development across entire jurisdictions, not just in affluent areas, a HUD official explained. In fact, Carson would also encourage building more in distressed areas, which would lower prices but could appear to worsen segregation.
The shift toward cutting back land use restrictions won applause from the apartment industry.
“Instead of making them a consideration, this new version of AFFH makes addressing these traditional barriers to development activity and expansion of opportunity the priority,” said Kimble Ratliff, vice president of government affairs at the National Multifamily Housing Council.
And conservatives also welcomed Carson’s move, although some remained wary of HUD influencing local zoning decisions by holding out funding.
When the Obama administration rolled out the original rule in 2015, conservative critics had condemned it on the grounds that it was an unwarranted intrusion of the federal government into local affairs.
Rep. Paul Gosar, an Arizona Republican who has opposed the rule, welcomed Carson’s actions this week but said that he would still work to pass legislation to undo the regulation altogether.
Gosar said that HUD was making “slow progression,” but added that “we’re not going to stop … until we see this thing fully removed.”
The 2015 rule, known as Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, was meant to enforce a provision of the 1968 Fair Housing Act that mandated that HUD programs “affirmatively further” fair housing. Gosar and others have already been successful in adding language to government funding bills to temporarily halt enforcement, but could seek a permanent revision in the underlying law.
Howard Husock, a scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute, called Carson’s approach “a less bad idea” than the Obama version. Pushing localities to reduce building restrictions, he said, is less intrusive than prodding them to build subsidized housing in wealthier areas.
Carson’s effort to alter the rule is still in its first stage, which involves collecting input from the public. Specifically, HUD has asked for comments on how to increase housing supply and also to increase local control. It’s too early to tell how Carson might try to reconcile those objectives.
In fact, the two goals are irreconcilable, argued Laura Clark, executive director of the group YIMBY Action that advocates for greater housing construction in the Bay Area.
Clark said that the federal government, rather than protecting local control of zoning and land use, should limit cities’ ability to restrict new construction, threatening to take away more forms of federal funds if necessary.
“We should just make it illegal in the same way that we make segregated lunch counters illegal,” Clark said of exclusionary zoning.
Emily Hamilton, a researcher at the Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, also said that HUD should focus on lessening the burdens of local land use regulations.
“Empowering low-income people, who are disproportionately racial minorities, to live in high-opportunity locations requires policies that reflect their interests and needs,” Hamilton said. “Achieving this goal requires a reduction in local control.”
Meanwhile, fair housing advocates that backed the original rule appeared skeptical that the intent of the 1968 law would be respected.
National Fair Housing Alliance, in a statement, noted that HUD has “a track record of more than 40 years of failing to properly ensure compliance with its affirmatively furthering fair housing mandate.”
