Our future HUD Secretary faces huge challenges – working with Congress and the President to prevent a wave of mass evictions and homelessness, expand our social housing sector, and act on the President’s recent commitment to redressing our history of government-sponsored segregation and disinvestment – a project that includes restoring the Disparate Impact and AFFH rules, addressing segregation in HUD’s own housing programs, and working creatively across agencies!
We are especially excited about Congresswoman Fudge’s nomination based on her track record as a strong supporter of school integration in the House (as the lead House sponsor of the bipartisan Strength in Diversity Act, which passed the House in September). We hope that Secretary Fudge will work closely with the Department of Education to better connect fair housing and school diversity at the federal, state and local level. We also look forward to HUD taking action to connect housing, health justice, and environmental justice (including climate change response).
You can watch the confirmation hearing this morning at 10:00 here.
More school integration priorities: The National Coalition on School Diversity has released its second series of recommendations for the new Administration, titled School Integration Priorities for a Biden/Harris Administration. This brief follows NCSD’s list of ten priorities for the “First Hundred Days,” released in December.
PRRAC Presents: Race, Social Justice and the Arts in DC: Sheryll Cashin in Conversation with Natalie Hopkinson – February 26 @ 3:00. Please join writers Natalie Hopkinson and Sheryll Cashin for a lively exploration of racial justice, segregation, and the resilience of Black culture within our shared, ever-evolving democracy – in the context of our city, Washington, DC. This hour-long conversation will probe the topic of D.C.’s changing racial and economic demographics and touch upon what both segregation and gentrification have meant for its residents, in the arts, schools, neighborhoods, and halls of local and federal power. We are honored to present Dr. Hopkinson with the PRRAC Civil Rights Award marking our 30th anniversary year. Register here. Featuring:
- Natalie Hopkinson, Associate Professor of Communication, Culture and Media Studies at Howard University, co-founder of Don’t Mute DC, and author of Go Go Live and other works
- Sheryll Cashin, Professor of Law, Georgetown Law and PRRAC Board Member, author of White Space, Black Hood (forthcoming) and contributing editor, Politico Magazine
- Moderated by Megan Haberle, Deputy Director, Poverty & Race Research Action Council
Other Resources
The Housing Playbook: We commend to your attention an ambitious set of recommendations to HUD, Treasury, and Congress set out in the “Housing Playbook,” the end result of a consensus-building process funded by the Ford Foundation and led by the Center for Community Change that prioritizes fair housing and racial equity, community voice, and expansion of this indispensable piece of the social safety net. Read the 158-page report here.
De-designing segregation: Join the Connecticut-based Open Communities Alliance in their latest deep dive into the structures of segregation and how to undo them. Register here for the two-part series starting tonight at 6:00 pm.
OIRA in the spotlight:Among the many executive orders signed by President Biden in his first week, and complementing the important racial equity order and housing discrimination order, was a directive to require the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at OMB to correct course in how it assesses proposed regulatory actions, bringing in a focus on social benefits (such as equality) and the just distribution of impacts. This departs from recent trends to emphasize business costs. It also provides an opening for OMB’s more active involvement in helping agencies to prioritize equity-based actions. We welcome this change in the choice architecture of the administrative state, and look forward to further developments. See “Modernizing Regulatory Review” (January 20, 2021).
