The Trump Administration Puts Fair Housing In Danger. But Local Advocates Are Still Scoring Wins

Root Causes of Housing and Racial Injustice

The root causes of housing injustice in the United States are as deep as the immemorial history of a city such as New Orleans. That history includes colonizers displacing Indigenous communities and land ownership pathways reserved for white people. 

As far as homeownership, a driver of wealth for many in this country, explains Morris, is an opportunity that hasn’t been equitably distributed. “The way we let white people build wealth with it and we don't want people of color, particularly Black and Brown people to build wealth… that's the fundamental inequity.”

Ryan Curren, director of housing, land and development at Race Forward, says it’s fairly recent that land and property ownership opened for other groups. Early 20th century zoning laws helped sequester white wealth. Laws were explicit as to who could live where. ”And when that was outlawed,” he explains “they [federal and local government] used proxies for race, [and] used different economic barriers.” That includes only permitting large single family homes in certain neighborhoods.  

Curren and others at Race Forward have created a brief on the long history of housing injustice in this country. Along with zoning and subsidizing white wealth, the brief cites other forms of discrimination, including creating infrastructure programs, such as highways and flagship parks that were designed to attract wealthy white residents all while steamrolling neighborhoods of color and displacing residents. 

New Threats Under 2.0

Earlier this year, HUD Secretary Scott Turner proposed a rule to end the use of the disparate impact standard, a tool that helps renters and homeowners fight policies that appear race-neutral on the surface but are harmful to vulnerable and protected classes. Public comment for the proposal ended in February and the proposal is pending.

Since Trump took office, nearly 70 percent of fair housing attorney staff have been cut, according to a whistleblower report by lawyers at HUD. Those cuts include firings, resignations and reassignments. The document states that  only six lawyers are dedicated to fair housing across the entire country, which hampers the agency’s ability to thoroughly investigate discrimination.

Paul Osadebe was one of the signatories of the report and is a former trial attorney in the Office of Fair Housing within HUD. The office is responsible for enforcing fair housing, which includes prosecuting cases and doling out federal funds for housing during disaster relief. Towards the end of his tenure at the agency Osadebe worked on Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA, cases which offers housing protections for survivors who live in federally subsidized housing. VAWA housing protection includes being able to request an emergency transfer, the ability to remove an abuser from a lease and safeguards around evictions.  “We are supposed to be making sure that the housing market is operating in a fair way,” he says about his work at HUD. “That every single person in the country actually has real, meaningful access to housing.” 

Shortly after Osadebe and others filed the complaint he  was told to return his laptop, escorted out of the building and placed on administrative leave. “My cases were just left in limbo,” he said. “The people that I was helping were left in limbo, and my co workers were left in limbo.”

Block and Build

Along with severely cutting HUD staff and weakening housing protections, the Trump Administration is also investigating cities, alleging reverse racism that limits housing access for white residents. He’s investigating the cities of Minneapolis and Boston, where he alleges white residents are being redlined. 

“What the HUD is doing is a scare tactic,” says Armani White, co-founder of the housing nonprofit Reclaim Roxbury. “They're in this letter calling out first time homebuyer programs for people who have been historically discriminated against,” says White. “And the way to solve historical discrimination is to focus on repairing the harm.”

Regardless of these threats, housing organizers from big cities to rural areas are still fighting for wins and are creating models for cities across the country. “Folks are blocking these federal attacks at the same time [and] continuing to build local models of just housing,” said Curren. ‘Blocking’ is stopping the narrative of race blind housing policies in its track. ‘Building’ includes working with local community members and elected officials to create power for renters and homeowners. ‘Block and build’ is a model to not cede ground to federal attacks that make housing justice a far reach, Curren explains. 

In 2022, Jaime Kinder was elected the first woman and Black mayor of Meadville, Pennsylvania. A majority of the town’s nearly 13,000 people are renters. Housing stock there includes apartments, mobile homes and old houses. For Kinder, housing justice means access to safe housing. By December of that year, the city passed an ordinance to inspect rental units every two years. Other efforts in Meadville include renting cooperatives by nonprofits, where renters earn credits for maintaining the upkeep of a home and have the option to cash out after five years.

Kinder’s office has worked with mobile home park dwellers to form rental unions. She sees this kind of local work as a beacon in fighting threats from the federal government. 

“Yes, funding is being cut,” said Kinder, “but there's still the ability to create opportunity and housing choice through our communities, if we are willing to work together and we understand that community is the only way to combat this national politics is everything.”

For Morris, of HousingNOLA, along with local partners and community members and politicians, it’s also dismantling stereotypes of who affordable housing is for. HousingNOLA is a community-led housing process created to address the needs of the city. “America has a fundamental problem with how it thinks about affordable housing,[and] about how it thinks about housing—period,” she points out.

Environmental catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina and a global health crisis such as Covid has put renters and homeowners in default. Costs to retrofit homes and lost wages in moments like this can make affordable housing unattainable. After Katrina, nearly three-quarters of homeowners in New Orleans reported damage to their homes. But even prior to the hurricane, housing inequity plagued the city.

“New Orleans is a really good example of America's contradictions when it comes to these issues,” Morris says. “Katrina showed everybody that what we had built was incredibly unstable. That what we were doing wasn't as solid as folks deserve.”

In 2024, New Orleanians voted to set aside two percent of the operating budget every year to a housing trust fund. To gain continued wins like this, Morris says organizers across the country should be “helping people stand in their power to demand better, to demand an impact that is achievable and rooted in real, concrete metrics.”

Unlike other economic indicators such as numbers from the stock market that crawl across TV screens, Morris says housing is a tangible benchmark of affordability in a person's life. “I love housing [advocacy] so much because in many ways, it's pretty binary,” Morris says. “Do you have a house that you can afford or not? 

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