Establish new federal funding for pro-integrative housing
The incoming Administration confirms that a substantial part of its massive economic stimulus package will be spending on needed infrastructure improvements. At a moment where various units of state and local government will be applying for supplemental federal funding, we need to demand that a some portion of those funds be limited to proposals that:
- promise to build new mixed-income housing
- are located in municipalities and neighborhoods that have traditionally resisted affordable housing development and that have high levels of residential racial segregation
- have outreach and selection procedures designed to be open to all residents of a broad metropolitan area.
More than 40 years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, it is not too much to ask that some federal funding for new construction be explicitly limited to pro-integrative construction.
Such an initiative, of course, is intended to be supplemental to the longstanding obligation of all recipients of federal funding to "affirmatively further fair housing."