Oftentimes characterized as the operant extension of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the AFFH Rule is a legislative provision that was signed into law in 2015 by the Obama Administration granting agencies present within the U.S. Federal Government, specifically the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the power, per the description provided by the National Review's Stanley Kurtz: to “re-engineer nearly every American neighborhood - imposing a preferred racial and ethnic composition, densifying housing, transportation, and business development in suburb and city alike, and weakening or casting aside the authority of local governments over core responsibilities, from zoning to transportation to education.” The directive formally obligates any state-level jurisdiction receiving federal funding from HUD to conduct a detailed analysis of its housing occupancy by race, cultural ethnicity, national origin, English proficiency, economic status, social class, etc. In accordance with the mandate, grant recipients, legally termed as grantees, are in turn tasked with the responsibility of identifying several factors (preexistent zoning regulations, public-housing admissions criteria, and the “absence of regional collaboration”) that would otherwise account for, or contribute to an imbalance in living patterns. Localities must also comply with the public release of a comprehensive inventory of “community assets” (quality schools/ educational institutions, mass transit centers, recreational facilities, and opportunities for employment) and account for disparities in accessibility to such amenities on the basis of racial disposition, heritage, immigration status, language, financial standing, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, etc. Any perceived irregularities must then be addressed by that city’s representatives with revisions to prior stated policies being subject to the approval of HUD. Through the AFFH Rule's enactment, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development can strip communities of government funding and monetary grants or subsidies if they fail to adhere to its regulatory tenets. Kurtz proffers the following assertion regarding these restrictions:
“[B]y obligating all localities receiving HUD funding to compare their demographics to the region as a whole, AFFH effectively nullifies municipal boundaries. Even with no allegation or evidence of intentional discrimination, the mere existence of a demographic imbalance in the region as a whole must be remedied by a given suburb. Suburbs will literally be forced to import population from elsewhere, at their own expense and in violation of their own laws. In effect, suburbs will have been annexed by a city-dominated region, their laws suspended and their tax money transferred to erstwhile non-residents. And to make sure the new high-density housing developments are close to ‘community assets’ such as schools, transportation, parks, and jobs, bedroom suburbs will be forced to develop mini-downtowns. In effect, they will become more like the cities their residents chose to leave in the first place.”
CONCLUSION: The AFFH Rule, is, in reality, the statutory application of the Disparate Impact Theory, whereby legally binding stipulations present in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 that retroactively prohibit prospective rental property owners from instituting policies that would otherwise be construed as “discriminatory” to members of a protected class are codified into law.
Examples of Disparate Impact (As illustrated on one of the many paged entries appearing on the National Fair Housing Alliance’s main site)
1) An apartment complex only allows people with full-time jobs. This bars disabled veterans and other people with disabilities who may not be able to work full-time, even though they can afford the apartment. The complex could instead consider all income to assess someone's ability to satisfy rental obligations.
2) A city decides to prohibit all housing that would be affordable to working-class people, and that has the effect of excluding most, or all people of color in that region. If the city cannot produce a valid reason for the institution of said policy, or if a more fair or conducive alternative is available, then the policy would have to be set aside under the disparate impact approach.
3) A lender has a policy of allowing its loan officers to overcharge consumers at the loan officer's discretion. The result is that women are charged higher prices than their male counterparts - even though both possess similar credit profiles. In a case like this, the lender would have to abandon the discretionary pricing policy and take steps to insure that women are not over-charged for lending products and services.
In the interest of social equity, ratification of the AFFH Rule by the Obama Administration effected the taxpayer funded selective partitioning of suburban population centers into multiculturally integrated districts and municipalities where the relocation of “economically disadvantaged, ethnically challenged, or otherwise opportunity impoverished” segments could be coordinated at the federal level. This renewed preoccupation with a bevy of issues pertaining to the subject of civil liberty by a varying degree of political constituencies merely a ploy of convenience being utilized as a means of exploitation with regard to vulnerable sectors of the domestic periphery to engender some semblance of continuity within the electorate and insure the preservation of the status quo. This government sanctioned redistribution of certain cultural demographics in the interest of environmentalist concern also mirroring the engineered supplementation of urban metropolitan areas with compact, densely concentrated boroughs where any semblance of autonomy is systematically purged from the memory of its inhabitants. All of this being orchestrated in advance of AGENDA 2030 (Link 1, Link 2) where SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) grid, technologically compliant cities - where even the most mundane human activities can be scrutinized or called into question - are born into existence.
Julian Castro, the Acting Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Under the Direction of the Obama Administration, Threatening to Take Legal Action Against Landlords and Various State Housing Authorities Who Actively Screen Prospective Tenants for Prior Felony Convictions - Citing Several Stanzas in the Fair Housing Act, as Well as Utilizing the Sociologically Derived “Disparate Impact” Theory of Racism as a Form of Justification, the U.S. Federal Government is Prohibiting Landlords From Excluding Convicted Felons From the Premises of Their Establishments on the Basis of Past Criminal History as the Prohibition of Housing is Identified as a Form of Institutional Discrimination
Life in 2030: The Evolution of SMART Grid Technology in Metropolitan Population Centers Being Hailed by Its Progenitors as a Veritable Utopia
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