Cities, Towns, and Counties Implicitly Issue AFFH Court Orders – What!

By Smith Young

Like school busing, AFFH becomes a court order when local governments accept grants and sign that they will Affirmatively Further Fair Housing (AFFH).  It’s effectively a court order backed up by the False Claims Act such that local governments make the community liable and can find themselves in expensive lawsuits if they don’t live up to their AFFH commitments.  Court ordered school busing that started in 1971 failed primarily due to the so-called white flight from urban cities that changed housing patterns by the early 1990’s thus releasing school districts from court supervision.  How will the AFFH rule end?

Court ordered AFFH effectively mandated on communities will similarly fail.  Rejecting AFFH is not only about avoiding legal liabilities, protecting property rights and local government authority.  It’s also about rejecting AFFH data tools and new goals required to continue receiving grants.

There’s no such thing as “statistical proof” of integration.  Integration, as Martin Luther King put it, is “true intergroup, interpersonal living … the positive acceptance of desegregation and the welcomed participation of Negroes into the total range of human activities.” Integration is the forming of relationships based on mutual trust and respect.  Schools could be forced to desegregate—that is, to accept black students—but genuine integration, as King said, was an “unenforceable” demand.  The government can put us in the same room, but they can’t make us get along.
Tanner Colby,  author of Some of My Best Friends Are Black: The Strange Story of Integration in America.

Letting the government put us in the same room is exactly what HUD is doing with the co-conspiracy of local governments (ignorance is no excuse) that is indeed bound by a contract with HUD and is effectively a court order issued by town and city council members and county commissioners.