Published March 6, 2025
This past week, Scott Turner, President Trump’s new secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), announced that HUD would be terminating the notoriously intrusive Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule. By attaching strings to billions of dollars in community development block grants from HUD, AFFH gives the feds the ability to control zoning regulations and many other aspects of local government.
AFFH severely undermines our federalist system, not only by expanding central control but by turning suburban municipalities into helpless satellites of neighboring urban centers. Over and above engineering residential patterns by race, ethnicity, English proficiency, country of origin, and more, AFFH is designed to urbanize suburbs — forcing dense development to cluster around public transit hubs with the goal of coercing suburbanites out of their cars.
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Stanley Kurtz is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Beyond his work with Education and American Ideals, Mr. Kurtz is a key contributor to American public debates on a wide range of issues from K–12 and higher education reform, to the challenges of democratization abroad, to urban-suburban policies, to the shaping of the American left’s agenda. Mr. Kurtz has written on these and other issues for various journals, particularly National Review Online (where he is a contributing editor).
