The Metropolitan Housing Coalition’s (MHC) 2015 State of Metropolitan Housing Report (SMHR) contained a detailed description of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) final rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).

The 2015 SMHR also contained nine measures of fair and affordable housing. The data show severe segregation, not only by race, but also of those having a disability and by family types with children. Shocking, but although in a survey of Louisville Magazine readers in the January 2016 issue, 77 percent of people responded that Louisville is a racially segregated city and 60 percent thought it was a problem of some magnitude, only 37 percent thought Louisville is a racist city. The respondents were not scientifically chosen, but they summarize our failure to come to terms with the active legacy of historic intentional racial segregation.

In the Louisville Metro Human Relations Commission’s report on the history of housing segregation, Making Louisville Home For Us All:  A 20-Year Action Plan for Fair Housing, it is clear that our home-grown segregation continues as a legacy today and that brings us back to the AFFH.

Segregation was implemented by hard and deliberate work. Many of our current policies, such as confining multi-family zoning to only 6 percent of the land available for residential use, are laws we created that have the specific consequence of herding people with limited income into very small geographic areas. Laws, not the free market, limit where people are allowed to have a type of residence. Thankfully, some progress has been made in the past year to expand where multi-family housing can be built.

Although the new AFFH assessment will not be used by Louisville until 2020, HUD has produced maps for every area in America so you can see how any community is doing.  https://egis.hud.gov/affht/

Why are there so many data sites listed? So you can see for yourself the need to break our enduring legacy of segregation as it lives on today. The AFFH is a tool to dismantle the remaining injustice.