Furthering Fair Housing: Prospects for Racial Justice in America?s Neighborhoods

The 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule was the most significant federal effort to increase equality of access to place-based resources and opportunities, such as high-performing schools or access to jobs, since the 1968 Fair Housing Act. However, in an effort to appeal to suburban voters, the Trump administration repealed the rule in 2020, leaving its future in doubt.

Furthering Fair Housing analyzes multiple dimensions of this rule, identifying failures of past efforts to increase housing choice, exploring how the AFFH Rule was crafted, measuring the initial effects of the rule before its rescission, and examining its interaction with other contemporary housing issues, such as affordability, gentrification, anti-displacement, and zoning policies.

The editors and contributors to this volume—a mix of civil rights advocates, policymakers, and public officials—provide critical perspectives and identify promising new directions for future policies and practices. Placing the history of fair housing in the context of the centuries-long struggle for racial equity, Furthering Fair Housing shows how this policy can be revived and enhanced to advance racial equity in America’s neighborhoods.

Justin P. Steil is an Associate Professor of Law and Urban Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the coeditor of The Dream Revisited: Contemporary Debates about Housing, Segregation, andOpportunity and Searching for the Just City: Debates in Urban Theory and Practice.
Nicholas F. Kelly is a Ph.D. candidate in Urban Studies and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he works on affordable housing and public policy, with a particular focus on segregation and urban politics. Previously, he worked at the New York City Economic Development Corporation and for U.S. Senator Charles Schumer.
Lawrence J. Vale is Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning and Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of After the Projects: Public Housing Redevelopment and the Governance of the Poorest Americans and several other prize-winning books about low-income housing.
Maia S. Woluchem is a graduate of the Masters in City Planning program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and currently serves as a Technology Fellow at the Ford Foundation, focused on the intersection of civic engagement, structural democracy, and emergent technology. She was previously a researcher at the Urban Institute.