Investigations into the fair housing practices of two US cities directly contradict race-neutral guidance from the Supreme Court. Cities must continue this work.
January 30, 2026 Opinion in Shelterforce
In a letter sent to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu last December, the current political leadership of HUD turns this principle on its head. Assistant Secretary Craig Trainor took a break from dismantling HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity to mischaracterize various city strategies aimed at furthering fair housing as violations of the Fair Housing Act. He both misrepresented how the policies he mentioned actually work and what the requirements of the law actually are. The city of Boston does not consider the race of individuals and households when deciding who receives governmental housing assistance. Whether it would be lawful for the city to do so is beside the point. Instead, the city has carefully considered how its policies may affect what even Assistant Secretary Trainor agrees is the goal of “equal access” for groups that have been subjected to discrimination and has refined its policies accordingly. In doing so, partly through its first-in-the-nation AFFH zoning ordinance, the city has staked out a leadership position among its peers. Time has proven that the letter was not an outlier: On Jan. 16, 2026, the assistant secretary sent a similar letter to the city of Minneapolis.
Designing programs that do not consider race as an eligibility factor, with an eye toward advancing racial justice, is the essence of “targeted universalism.” There is simply no legal authority to sustain HUD’s attack on targeted universalist policy interventions. In fact, conservative critics of affirmative action and school desegregation have often offered targeted universalism as an alternative to policies that consider race. In Students for Fair Admissions v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, the plaintiff argued that Harvard did not need to consider race in its admissions process because it could adopt a policy similar to that of the University of Texas system, which automatically admits public high school students who graduate in the top 10 percent of their class. In Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, Justice Kennedy juxtaposed approaches like looking at neighborhood racial demographics when deciding where to site new schools as an acceptable alternative to considering an individual student’s race in determining school assignments. These historically noncontroversial strategies are directly comparable to the policies of the city of Boston and the city of Minneapolis that HUD is now attacking.
The policies that HUD cites actually underscore how well Boston is complying with fair housing laws. The letter notes that in its 2022 Assessment of Fair Housing, the city stated that it would continue to target outreach efforts regarding homeownership programs at Black and Latine neighborhoods in an effort to reach income-eligible Black and Latine households. Not only is this not prohibited, but there is also a strong argument that the city is legally required to do just what HUD is criticizing. HUD’s longstanding affirmative fair housing marketing plan regulations, which HUD itself adopted to better comply with its own AFFH duty, require HUD grantees to conduct outreach to demographic groups identified as the “least likely to apply” based on empirical analysis. Unsurprisingly, the 2022 Boston Assessment of Fair Housing included data from the U.S. Census Bureau showing that, while 44 percent of white households in Boston own their homes, only 30 percent of Black households and 16 percent of Latine households do.
Although HUD has initiated the process of rescinding its affirmative marketing requirements, they remain in effect at this juncture. Moreover, it is important to recognize that households not specifically targeted by marketing efforts can still benefit from the programs being marketed, such as downpayment assistance. For this reason, the courts have upheld practices that are analogous to what HUD is attacking Boston and Minneapolis for doing, including through the landmark decision in South-Suburban Housing Center v. Greater South Suburban Board of Realtors in 1991.
Similarly, HUD grasps at straws regarding the activities of the city of Minneapolis, lobbing non-sequitur attacks at Governor Tim Walz (not a city official) and the Somali community, and referencing supposed misuse of programs that are not even funded by HUD. When it comes to fair housing, HUD claims that Minneapolis has a practice of identifying neighborhoods for targeted revitalization efforts in part based on their racial and ethnic composition. Even if true, such an approach would mirror strategies for drawing school attendance zone boundaries that Justice Kennedy blessed in Parents Involved. It should go without saying that white residents of racially diverse Minneapolis neighborhoods also benefit from these community development efforts. Such policies are wholly consistent with applicable case law.
This is a watershed moment, not just for the cities of Boston and Minneapolis but for our entire society. The housing affordability crisis rages; its harms increase daily, and its effects are not felt equally. Over half of Black households in Boston spend an unsustainably high percentage of their income on housing costs, compared with just over a third of white households. As of 2021, the Twin Cities region had the largest Black-white homeownership gap in the country. These problems are acute in Boston and Minneapolis, but they are not unique to these cities. What is unique to Boston is the degree to which the city has proactively addressed long-neglected needs and lived up to its duty to affirmatively further fair housing in recent years. We must stand behind the cities of Boston and Minneapolis and encourage them to double down on their commitment to civil rights, while also urging other large cities to take similarly ambitious steps. Doing so requires rejecting the bad faith maneuvers of HUD’s political leaders.
