. . .
Fair-housing advocates said the agency’s move to withdraw the tool is simply another way for HUD to suspend communities’ obligation to examine and fix residential segregation.
“They’re trying to achieve the same goal, just through a different avenue,” said Lisa Rice, president and chief executive of the National Fair Housing Alliance, one of three housing advocacy groups that filed the lawsuit. “They’re trying to get out from under the lawsuit. Instead of suspending the rule, they’re making the tool that communities use to follow the rule null and void.”
Rice had met with Carson prior to the lawsuit being filed to ask him to reinstate the 2015 rule and enforce it, to no avail.
Sasha Samberg-Champion, lead attorney on the lawsuit, said HUD’s withdrawal of the very action being challenged in court doesn’t “fundamentally change anything in the real world.”
The Trump administration is still allowing local and state governments to receive billions of dollars in federal housing grants without demonstrating compliance with the full requirements of the Fair Housing Act, he said, despite HUD’s claims Friday that its latest actions show its commitment to the 50-year-old law.
