On Thursday, March 29, Ben Carson found himself in the news again. This time the problem wasn’t his purchase of an expensive dining hutch (for which the housing secretary received condign criticism, including from this magazine) or his aim of shortening his agency’s garbled mission statement (for which he deserved no criticism at all, in our view).
This time, rather, Carson has committed a new offense—that of rejecting his predecessors’ policies.
“The policy shift,” explains the New York Times, “detailed in interviews with 20 current and former Department of Housing and Urban Development officials and in internal agency emails, is meant to roll back the Obama administration’s attempts to reverse decades of racial, ethnic and income segregation in federally subsidized housing and development projects.”
The implication given by the Times report is that whereas the Obama administration simply wanted to “reverse decades of racial, ethnic and income segregation”—and who wouldn’t want to do that?—the nasty ol’ Trump administration wants to “roll back” all those efforts. Nothing in the remainder of this 1,200 word story would lead the reader to believe the narrative is any more complicated than that.
The Times‘s charges, briefly, are these: (1) HUD’s current head of the Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity division, Anna Maria Farías, evidently at Carson’s direction, has put a hold on several fair-housing investigations considered high priority by the Obama-era HUD; (2) HUD didn’t investigate Facebook for allegations that the social-media company allowed advertisers to pitch their products mainly to whites rather than blacks and Hispanics; and (3) Carson’s HUD chose not to punish Houston city officials for blocking the placement of a mixed-race public housing development near a wealthier, predominantly white neighborhood.
Readers may draw their own conclusions about the merits or deficiencies of the Times story. In any case, it arises from a commonplace phenomenon that goes something like this: The new administration interprets its mission differently from the previous administration; bureaucrats accustomed to the former way of doing things take their complaints to the New York Times; the paper publishes a story about the new agency’s scandalous betrayal of its mission.
Fair enough, but forgive us if we fail to be outraged.
In this case, Obama-era HUD officials took an expansive view of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which outlawed race discrimination in housing. They considered it their duty not just to interdict clearly illegal discrimination, but to force local governments to take “proactive steps” to ensure racially integrated housing outcomes. The problem with that view, leaving aside the question of whether it’s a valid interpretation of the Fair Housing Act and the Civil Rights Act, is that people of the same race or ethnicity often prefer to live near one another. They do so because they would rather live near family and friends than near strangers. Bigotry may or may not play some part of their decision, but any fair-minded person can see that such cases admit of some ambiguity.
For the enlightened HUD of 2009-2017, however, people of the same race living in close proximity to each other is prima facie evidence of illegal race discrimination that must be countered by federal coercion. Any “segregated living pattern” is a “fair housing issue” and must be dealt with by force of law.
As Terry Eastland documented in a 2013 cover story for the WEEKLY STANDARD, Obama’s HUD saw no moral or practical difficulties in these and related questions. Under secretary Shaun Donovan (the same was true under his successor, Julian Castro), HUD moved aggressively against any local government or agency thought to be turning a blind eye to “segregation.” To achieve its ends, the department would, among other things, withhold anticipated funding from localities thought to be insufficiently vigilant against discrimination, badger municipalities to prove they weren’t countenancing racism and bigotry in their public housing policies, and urge counties to sue localities when the latter were reluctant to zone for HUD-approved housing developments.
On the evidence of the March 29 story, then, it seems the chief crime committed by Ben Carson’s HUD is to spurn the foregoing administration’s radicalism.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development was established in 1965, at the height of the civil rights movement. Racism in housing is no doubt still a problem, but is it so serious a problem as to require a cabinet-level federal agency? We are not sure. But we are old enough to remember when the HUD secretary didn’t do much beyond fly to New York on the taxpayer dime for the purpose of campaigning for governor.
