HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge’s retirement: Secretary Fudge has been receiving many appreciations this week after her retirement announcement on Monday, and we would like to add our own appreciation for her leadership on civil rights and tenants’ rights – including the reinstatement of important civil rights rules on discriminatory effects and affirmatively furthering fair housing, continued expansion of Small Area Fair Market Rents in the Housing Choice Voucher program, new steps to address source of income discrimination, along with overseeing an extraordinary tenant-focused emergency housing response to the pandemic, increased investments in the voucher program, and the appointment of a leadership team in every division at HUD who understand and value the agency’s fair housing obligations. Secretary Fudge will be succeeded by Acting Secretary Adrianne Todman, who also shares much of the credit, as Deputy Secretary, for HUD’s progress over the last three years.
HUD and source of income discrimination: HUD has continued its recent initiatives on source of income discrimination with a new HUD webpage that lays out steps that PHAs can take to assist families with vouchers who experience discrimination in the increasing number of states and cities that ban discrimination against voucher holders.
Kentucky and source of income discrimination: On the bad news side of the scale, the Kentucky legislature last week overrode their governor’s veto to pass legislation preempting local source of income discrimination ordinances in Louisville and Lexington. This new law has an obvious discriminatory impact, and is in violation of the state’s legal duty to affirmatively further fair housing.
Small but important items from the President’s budget: In addition to ambitious new funding goals for the Housing Choice Voucher program, the 2025 HUD Budget Appendix released this week calls for a demonstration program for “a limited number of public housing agencies in difficult rental markets,” to assess whether flexible use of voucher funds for expenses like security deposits, utility payments, and other costs (e.g. apartment holding fees), would increase voucher tenants’ success rates (and, we assume, access to lower poverty neighborhoods). Over at theDepartment of Education, $10 million is requested to continue the Fostering Diverse Schools competitive grants program, “for activities to improve socioeconomic diversity in schools and, as permissible, to improve diversity as it related to other factors, such as race, ethnicity, or disability status.”
Other news and resources
Barriers to integration in pre-school programs: The Learning Policy Institute has published a helpful report on the barriers to achieving socioeconomic integration in pre-K programs, and some model strategies to overcome those barriers. See Strategies to Foster Integration in Early Childhood Education (February 2024). (See also PRRAC’s prior work on this issue here and here).
Interdistrict segregation: As researchers have pointed out, most current school segregation is occurring across school district lines. New America has just published a report and interactive map illustrating just how extreme these cross-boundary disparities can be, and how they also track funding inequities across districts. See Crossing the Line: Segregation and Resource Inequality Between America’s School Districts.
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