UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA
NATIONAL FAIR HOUSING ALLIANCE,
TEXAS LOW INCOME HOUSING
INFORMATION SERVICE, and
TEXAS APPLESEED,
Plaintiffs,
v.
BEN CARSON and U.S. DEPARTMENT OF
HOUSING AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT,
Defendants.
Civ. Action No. 1:18-cv-01076-BAH
FIRST AMENDED COMPLAINT
INTRODUCTION
1. Fifty years ago, Congress enacted the Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 3601, et
seq. That Act is best known for barring a variety of forms of housing discrimination. Less
attention has been paid to its requirement that the Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing
and Urban Development (HUD) “administer the programs and activities relating to housing and
urban development in a manner affirmatively to further the policies of” that Act. Id.
§ 3608(e)(5). Although this Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) requirement was of
great importance to Congress in enacting the Act, for decades, HUD inadequately enforced it.
The agency has permitted more than 1,200 grantees—mostly local and state government
entities—to collectively accept billions of dollars in federal housing funds annually without
requiring them to take meaningful steps to address racial segregation and other fair housing
problems that have long plagued their communities.
2. Recognizing that the AFFH requirement had not been adequately enforced, HUD in 2015 promulgated—through notice-and-comment rulemaking—the AFFH Rule, a regulation requiring covered program participants, including cities and counties around the country, to take meaningful action to address longstanding segregation and otherwise carry out the Fair Housing Act’s requirements. The AFFH Rule creates a rigorous process to ensure that recipients of federal housing funds identify local fair housing problems and then commit to taking concrete steps to correct them (under HUD’s supervision and with considerable community input), while giving those jurisdictions flexibility to respond to local conditions. At the Rule’s core is the requirement that jurisdictions prepare and submit for HUD review an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH), a document that includes both the jurisdiction’s self-diagnosis of fair housing impediments and a plan to overcome them. Jurisdictions must create these AFHs by reference to a standardized Assessment Tool that HUD creates and publishes (after notice and comment and clearance from the Office of Management & Budget) to focus jurisdictions’ analysis on certain required elements of an effective and compliant AFH.
