Giving Compass' Take:

· Howard Husock at the Manhattan Institute discusses news that HUD Secretary Ben Carson is rolling back the Obama-era housing policy aimed at enforcing anti-discrimination laws. Although this news may be misinterpreted, Husock explains that it is beneficial for minority families and that HUD will now be addressing other housing regulations with the same goals in mind.

· Why wasn't former President Obama's housing policy successful? How is Ben Carson planning to address discrimination in housing?

· Here are nine rules for better housing policy.

At first glance, the news that HUD Secretary Ben Carson is dialing back an Obama-era regulation called “affirmatively furthering fair housing” is apt to be misinterpreted — as a move away from enforcing anti-discrimination laws. In fact, that Obama policy itself had been a radical — and impractical — departure from traditional fair housing enforcement, and Carson is pursuing a policy which one can hope will be more constructive.

“Affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH) had nothing to do with a common sense version of anti-discrimination enforcement, which has, historically, meant ensuring that minority buyers or renters would not be turned away from a home or apartment they could afford — when similar white buyers were approved. Instead, AFFH defined discrimination to mean that any jurisdiction which accepted federal community development funds should take steps to ensure that poor, minority households were included in affluent zip code, through the construction of subsidized housing.

This was ill-conceived on any number of counts. Such an approach would inevitably serve just a tiny handful of low-income households; land costs in affluent areas are high; so is the cost of subsidizing housing construction. What’s more, the social distance between rich and poor — or between the working-class and the poorest, for that matter — is a recipe for tension. Obama’s HUD, moreover, was sending an unhelpful message to poorer households — better to hit the housing lottery and move to Beverly Hills than to make the positive, incremental life choices that allow one to move up the ladder of housing, from lower to higher-income.

Read the full article about rolling back Obama-era housing policy by Howard Husock at the Manhattan Institute.