Civil rights groups are suing the Trump Administration over its failure to enforce the 50-year-old Fair Housing Act.
The suit filed Tuesday morning by the National Fair Housing Alliance, along with the Texas Low Income Housing Information Service and Texas Appleseed, names the Department of Housing and Urban Development and HUD Secretary Ben Carson. The lawsuit aims to prevent discrimination in the allocation of funds pertaining to housing and infrastructure concerns after natural disasters, such as Hurricane Harvey. The organizations want an Obama-era rule reinstated that would require local governments receiving federal funds to create and submit plans to distribute those funds in a way that works toward ending segregation based on ethnicity, income, race, or physical disability, The New York Times reports.
Carson suspended the rule earlier this year because he felt it put an unnecessary burden on local governments. The suit claims that in doing so Carson violated the 1968 Housing Act, which was put in place to protect vulnerable communities after national disasters.
The concern is that going forward, HUD will distribute funds after natural disasters in a way that will prevent less affluent communities traditionally filled with minority residents from rebuilding as quickly as their majority counterparts.
The Times notes that housing segregation has been an ongoing issue for HUD, even long before this administration and that segregation concerns have “landed previous secretaries in the cross hairs.”
