HUD must reform its current structure by strengthening its leadership of the affirmatively furthering obligation. A regulatory structure must provide guidance and direction to ensure that programs that receive federal funds advance fair housing.

The affirmatively furthering requirement must be monitored aggressively, through HUD’s own program monitoring function. Analyses of Impediments must be periodically updated, submitted, and reviewed by a single entity with the authority to return the plans for revision, conduct its own analysis of sitting decisions and all proposed actions, and assess performance under the plans. A reformed structure should be based on existing guidance in HUD’s Fair Housing Planning Guide,^[250] but HUD should also provide a structure that includes benchmarks and performance standards and sanctions for failing to comply with the requirements.^[251]

HUD must provide training and technical assistance to support the reformed affirmatively furthering initiative, including training and technical assistance to support groups that will work locally and regionally in communities to advance fair housing principles.

In addition to a more aggressive monitoring and enforcement effort at HUD, failure to affirmatively further fair housing should become directly actionable through administrative complaints filed by individuals and organizations with the new fair housing enforcement structure.

The CDBG program should provide structural and funding support for community-based initiatives to affirmatively further fair housing at the local and regional levels. Fair housing and affirmatively furthering activities should be funded directly as an eligible activity under the CDBG program by obligating at least five percent be of the CDBG funding to entitlement communities and state agencies to support activities by fair housing groups directly related to affirmatively furthering fair housing.

Next Section: Regionalism and Fair Housing Enforcement

Footnotes

[250] U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Fair Housing Planning Guide, Vol. 1 available at http://www.hud.gov/offices/fheo/images/fhpg.pdf

[251] Written testimony of Harry Carey (Atlanta).