Nearly two weeks after the Trump administration launched a probe into whether Boston’s housing policies discriminate against white people, local housing advocates gathered Monday to denounce the move as a blatant attempt to subvert fair housing law.
“HUD’s investigation is a baseless scare tactic that is antithetical, not only to the Fair Housing Act, but to over half a century of legitimate and necessary civil rights enforcement,” said Jillian Lenson, senior attorney with Lawyers for Civil Rights, at a news conference organized by advocacy groups including Reclaim Roxbury and the Boston Tenants Coalition.
Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sent Boston Mayor Michelle Wu a letter revealing its investigation into whether the city’s racial equity initiatives violate the civil rights of white people.
Lenson pointed to the context of the law undergirding the federal probe, and how it was designed to counteract racial discrimination against non-white people. She Boston’s efforts to direct resources to residents of color and invest in underserved communities “do not, and cannot violate the Fair Housing Act because they are exactly the types of efforts that the Fair Housing Act requires.”
Other housing advocates further criticized the government’s probe as racially motivated.
Rahsaan Hall, president of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, said any legal actions that follow the investigation may impact civil rights, economic mobility and racial justice.
“Where people are allowed to live shapes access to schools, to jobs, to transportation, to health care and opportunity itself,” he said, adding that Boston’s historic pattern of housing segregation, particularly against Black people, was “intentional, it was structural, and it was enforced by government policy.”
“That’s why it is astonishing, and frankly, infuriating to see civil rights laws that were born out of anti-Black racism twisted to attack the very communities that they were designed to protect,” he said of the investigation. “Pretending that efforts to address those harms somehow constitutes anti-white bias is a profound distortion of reality.”
Nadine Cohen is a housing equity advocate with the city’s Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Community Advisory Committee, and a former housing litigation attorney for Lawyers for Civil Rights. She said federal courts have repeatedly acknowledged the history of housing discrimination and the need to disrupt those patterns.
“I think this is part of the administration’s attempt to assert white supremacy throughout every aspect of government and our lives, and I think it’s very scary,” Cohen said.
Several Boston City Councilors, including Liz Breadon, Brian Worrell and Councilor-elect Miniard Culpepper, a former attorney for the federal department of housing, appeared alongside advocates to denounce the investigation.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Dec. 11 letter to Boston described that as part of its investigation, the agency’s Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity office would reach out to request information from the city before the month’s end. The mayor’s office did not immediately respond to request for comment regarding what information the federal office is seeking.
