Julian Castro, Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, is in South Florida this week for the National Urban League Conference.
Castro spoke with WLRN about the latest decision by HUD to put pressure on cities that receive federal dollars to do more to provide fair housing. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
HUD recently told cities and communities across the country that if they receive federal dollars for fair housing, to work harder to buck the trends of housing segregation.
In 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act. It says that HUD has the responsibility to affirmatively further fair housing. The problem was that we never truly never defined what that means for local communities.
We just finished a rule-making process that gives guidance to local communities to help them ensure that there's a fair housing landscape in their cities. What that means is that they're going to get an unprecedented data set on community assets, demographics that will allow them to identify how they can better ensure people of modest means and different backgrounds have the chance to get good housing in high opportunity neighborhoods.
Last month the U.S. Supreme Court passed a major ruling on the Fair Housing Act. How is that linked to what HUD decided a couple weeks ago?
They're separate, but they're both related to the Fair Housing Act. What SCOTUS said was that you could still use disparate impact analysis in terms of showing discrimination in fair housing claims. That's important because sometimes actions that landlords or governments take have a discriminatory effect but it's very difficult to show absolutely a smoking gun intention of discrimination.
How does the court decision affect the person who has been turned away when they've applied for housing and they believe they were discriminated against?
What it means is that they now have one more legal option when filing a claim. I'll tell you, we get the news clippings at HUD. The good news is we've made a lot of progress since 1968 as the president has said before, we can't deny that ours is a nation that's made a lot of progress when it comes to discrimination. At the same time we see that it happens all too often. Ensuring that we have the disparate impact analysis is one more tool to continue that progress so there's a level playing field out there in the U.S. when someone is out looking for a home.
What do you tell a person when they believe they've been discriminated against?
I would tell them to go to HUD.gov. We have fair housing resources that they can read about. There are also non-profits that do fair housing advocacy and I would encourage them to find them.
Let's be honest, a lot of times people walk away from a situation and they're not sure why they were denied, or not sure if something is up or not. It's always something that is a judgment call for the individual. But we encourage people to go to HUD.gov or talk to a housing advocate in their community, because a lot of times it is hard to tell.
We'd like to think that in a majority of circumstances, folks are denied for rightful reasons, but sometimes that's not the case. People should know their rights and follow up if something happened that they're concerned about.
After the SCOTUS decision, the National Review posted: "Attention, America's Suburbs: You Have Just Been Annexed." What do you say to concerns like that? Why do you think they exist?
Before becoming secretary of HUD, I was a mayor. I was the mayor of San Antonio. I have a profound respect for local decision making. That's the best kind of decision-making because it's the closest to the people. At the same time, it is clear that you find instances where you find opportunity is being blocked from people because of the color of their skin, or they have a disability, or based on sexual orientation, and we need our fairing housing laws to ensure that there's a level playing field out there.
It's not unexpected that some folks, as they have been for 45 years, are going to be concerned about that. It's our job at HUD just to make that there's a level playing field and nothing more.
How did you handle fair housing issues as the mayor of San Antonio?
As mayor, every other week we would have zoning cases and planning cases. Oftentimes you would have a NIMBY-ism in neighborhoods, "not in my backyard." Many times it's for justifiable reasons. Folks are concerned about the character of their neighborhood, they're concerned about density and other land-use issues. Nothing wrong with that, all of us are.
Every now and then, you could tell, that there was something else motivating the opposition. Sometimes it was a racial element. Other times it was perceptions of the type of people, if they're low income people that would likely be moving in -- you see this a lot around discussions when apartments are going into a neighborhood.
As policymakers, at the local level, we're the front line in trying to untangle that and make sure there was a level playing field, unfortunately sometimes that doesn't work out. And that kind of animus and that kind of bias does bubble up, it does influence the policymakers, and that's when our fair housing laws are necessary to protect people.
What role does government play when it comes to integrating communities?
Each circumstance is different. But here's an example from the news: A settlement with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office and the Housing Authority of the County of L.A., where African-American voucher holders who were living in Palm Dale were harassed by the Sheriff's office.
And they were visited ostensibly as a means to ensure compliance with their obligations as Section 8 voucher holders, and were being harassed. Because they were an element that was not wanted in that community.
Now these are folks, they're Section 8 voucher holders, they're working, this just covers part of their rent usually. They're good folks, they're trying to get back on their feet and get their life back where they want. But because of their race they're being picked on.
You do still have these instances still in the U.S., in 2015, where this is happening. That is not something I would say is happening all the time in every community, but it does happen in a significant number of cases, and probably more than most Americans would like to think.
Mixed-use developments have been built in cities across the country with success. But Miami-Dade County director of public housing and community development Michael Liu said some developers in Miami are skeptical about mixed-income projects. In private discussions with certain developers, they said they were deathly afraid of them. How do you overcome that form of community segregation?
There could be a couple of issues there. Not knowing the context of those comments, that could be a comment about making the numbers work economically. Fortunately there are tools like the low-income housing tax credit, like HUD's home initiative that make those numbers work. ...
Secondly, if it's a comment related to the character of a community because it's mixed-income, I would say that folks should take a look at any number of communities around the U.S. where they were able to do mixed-income developments. That's not breaking new ground. These mixed-income properties have been around for quite a while.
Let me give you an example of when these things go awry. In the last twelve months we've seen a lot of controversy around something called poor-door developments. In other words, you might have an apartment complex, where for the market rate renters you have one entrance and one set of amenities, and for the voucher holders or low income renters in that mixed income community you have different amenities or no amenities and literally a different entrance, a different door.
Those poor-door developments as you can imagine are not something most folks are comfortable with. Most folks believe that you ought to pursue a model where everyone in a mixed income community is able to share in the benefit of that community. But aside of that challenge there are a whole bunch of examples across the U.S., in city after city -- in cities like Miami where you have a lot of pressure in the rental market, where mixed-income developments do work -- and I would encourage folks to look at those.
How much of what's happening in Miami is on HUD's radar?
A lot of it is. This is not the first time that I visited Miami. I was here a few months ago to make the announcement on Section 3. That's a push to get more residents and low-income folks who live around public housing into employment, when we have government contracts to go and do a developments.
Miami is one of the communities that has performed the best in terms of getting employment for folks. On the rental side and home ownership side, Miami is on the radar screen, because like a number of other cities, there's is a tremendous amount of pressure here. What we see is a rental affordability crisis. We want to do our part at HUD, for instance our FHA works with multi-family developers. It makes multi-family development more affordable.
At FHA, in terms of single family home-ownership, we lowered the mortgage insurance premium just a few months ago, which will save the average family who borrows through FHA, about $900 dollars a year. So we're trying to do our part to increase access and affordability when we talk about the rental market or the home ownership market.
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