Key Definitions

Module 3.1: What is Fair Housing Planning in relation to AFFH?

Fair Housing Planning involves an analysis of a Program Participant’s programs, policies, practices, and procedures; patterns in the private sector; and existing circumstances that fall outside of the scope and control of Program Participants, to assess their impact on fair housing choice.

Fair housing choice means that individuals and families have the information, opportunity, and option to live where they choose without unlawful discrimination and other barriers related to race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), familial status, or disability.

Fair Housing Planning is planning that Program Participants conduct, consistent with the duty to affirmatively further fair housing, by analyzing their fair housing landscape and setting locally determined fair housing goals to:

1. Determine who lacks access to opportunity and address any inequity among protected class groups;
2. Promote integration and reduce segregation; and
3. Transform racially or ethnically concentrated areas of poverty into areas of opportunity.

The Fair Housing Planning analysis of a Program Participant’s programs, policies, practices, and procedures from a fair housing perspective typically involves:

• A review of state, entitlement jurisdiction, or PHA laws, regulations, and administrative policies, procedures, and/or practices that impact fair housing choice, access to opportunity, and other issues related to AFFH.
• An assessment of how those laws, regulations, and administrative policies, procedures, and/or practices affect patterns of segregation/integration and disparities in access to opportunity. For example, how do zoning and land use or siting decisions affect the location, availability, and accessibility of affordable housing?
• An assessment of housing stock conditions, both public and private, affecting fair housing choice, as well as access to opportunities and community assets for all protected classes.
• Any actions, omissions, or decisions taken because of race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), familial status, or disability, that restrict housing choices or the availability of housing choices.
• Any actions, omissions, or decisions that have the effect of restricting housing choices or the availability of housing choices on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), familial status, or disability.

Program Participants are encouraged to consider multiple factors when developing housing and community development policies as it relates to Fair Housing Planning. This encourages various activities that connect housing and community development policy and investment planning with meaningful actions that affirmatively further fair housing. This connection is a key concept when setting fair housing goals and methods of implementation to affirmatively further fair housing.

This may include, but is not limited to, place-based and housing mobility—or “people-based”—goals and methods of implementation.

Place-based goals and methods of implementation may include but are not limited to:

• Making investments in segregated, high poverty, and historically disinvested neighborhoods that improve conditions and eliminate disparities in access to opportunity between residents of those neighborhoods and the rest of the jurisdiction or region.
• Maintaining and preserving existing affordable rental housing stock, including HUD assisted housing, to reduce disproportionate housing needs.
• Investing in infrastructure to increase access to opportunities in traditionally underserved neighborhoods for individuals with protected characteristics.
• Developing a workforce training program in communities that have not historically received such an investment.

People-based goals and methods of implementation may include but are not limited to:

• Developing affordable housing in areas of opportunity to combat segregation and promote integration.
• Providing greater access to existing affordable housing in well-resourced areas of opportunity, for instance through housing mobility counseling for Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher recipients.
• Creating housing mobility programs that effectively connect low-income residents of segregated areas to affordable housing in integrated areas, providing greater access to opportunity.
• Reducing barriers to zoning that prevents the development of multifamily housing in well-resourced areas of opportunity.
• Developing partnerships with well-resourced school districts to expand access for children from low-income households.

It should be noted that providing affordable housing is not synonymous with AFFH. While the concepts may be related, there is a distinction between AFFH strategies and strategies to provide affordable housing. Providing affordable housing for low- and moderate-income families is not, in and of itself, sufficient to AFFH. The delivery of decent, safe, and affordable housing provides a valuable service, but it does not necessarily fulfill the goals and purposes of AFFH. To affirmatively further fair housing, a Program Participant must ensure that the housing is available regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), disability, or familial status. The Program Participant also must consider the location of affordable housing and strategically leverage affordable housing to overcome patterns of segregation, promote fair housing choice, and eliminate disparities in access to opportunity and disproportionate housing needs. Affordable housing can be a tool that Program Participants use to affirmatively further fair housing. But, if affordable housing is predominantly occupied by low-income racial or ethnic minorities and it is concentrated in or adjacent to geographic areas occupied by racial or ethnic minorities, Program Participants will need to develop strategies to overcome segregation, including the siting of affordable housing in areas of opportunity and people-based strategies that provide access to well-resourced areas of opportunity.

Approaches to Fair Housing Planning should also be consistent with fair housing and civil rights laws. For example:

• Goals and methods of implementation that rely solely on investment in areas with high racial or ethnic concentrations of low-income residents, to the exclusion of providing access to affordable housing outside of those areas, may be problematic from the AFFH perspective.
• In areas with a history of segregation, if a Program Participant can create opportunities outside of the segregated, low-income areas but declines to do so in favor of place-based goals and methods of implementation, there could be a legitimate claim that the Program Participant was acting to preclude a choice of neighborhoods for historically segregated groups and failing to affirmatively further fair housing.
• A people-based goal and method of implementation would likely not affirmatively further fair housing if voucher holders were encouraged to consider moving to other neighborhoods, but those other neighborhoods did not have affordable housing in low poverty areas with access to opportunity, such as high-quality schools, reliable transportation, and employment opportunities.

It is important to note that place-based and people-based goals and methods of implementation are not mutually exclusive. For instance, a Program Participant could conclude that to combat segregation and overcome disparities in access to opportunity, additional affordable housing is needed in well-resourced, higher opportunity areas where few racial or ethnic minorities live. In that case, new construction of affordable housing could be undertaken, and the use of vouchers could be incentivized for those well-resourced, high opportunity areas. At the same time, while such efforts are being implemented, preserving the existing affordable rental stock that serves communities of color and persons with disabilities, while decreasing disparities in access to opportunity for residents of that housing by revitalizing the areas where it is located.

Both place-based and people-based goals and methods of implementation must be designed to achieve fair housing outcomes such as reducing segregation and increasing integration throughout the jurisdiction, reducing disproportionate housing needs, transforming R/ECAPs by addressing the combined effects of segregation coupled with poverty, and decreasing disparities in access to opportunity, such as to high performing schools, transportation, and jobs. When goals are set and actions are taken to ensure fair housing choice regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including sexual orientation and gender identity), familial status, or disability; access to opportunity for all residents of the community; and residential integration, those are the actions that may affirmatively further fair housing.

Module 3.2: How to Analyze Programs, Policies, Practices, and Procedures from a Fair Housing Perspective

Local context and a knowledge of how existing policies, practices and procedures impact the Program Participants’ fair housing landscape is important for fair housing analysis. To that end, this Toolkit provides the following overviews of policies, practices, and procedures that may be relevant for Program Participants to assess from a fair housing perspective.

AFFH requires an array of strategies to address local, regional, and state-wide barriers to fair housing choice and disparities in access to opportunity, as well as to ensure participation by diverse community stakeholders. The non-exhaustive examples of strategies described in this section offer essential suggestions for taking meaningful action to affirmatively further fair housing. Ultimately, whether strategies affirmatively further fair housing will depend on the fair housing outcomes that are actually achieved. A strategy that may affirmatively further fair housing in one context may not work in another. Additionally, to affirmatively further fair housing, actions need to be meaningful. This means that they are designed and can be reasonably expected to achieve a material positive change.

Some jurisdictions and PHAs have leveraged housing voucher programs to allow people to move to well-resourced opportunity neighborhoods. Families that choose to exercise housing mobility options benefit from greater economic opportunities, greater educational achievements, improved mental and physical health, and less exposure to crime. Still, despite the objectives of expanding opportunity, voucher programs can concentrate families in high-poverty and segregated neighborhoods. Municipalities can and should implement additional measures to ensure their housing voucher programs achieve material positive change to fair housing choice and access to opportunity. Voucher programs can be improved by providing services such as housing search counseling and other services such as post-move counseling, second-move counseling, and financial literacy counseling.

Many Program Participants are engaging in a wide range of strategies to affirmatively further fair housing. The following outlines: 1) policy strategies; 2) programmatic strategies; and 3) collaborative strategies that the Program Participants might consider as best practices or innovative solutions.

Policy Strategies

• Targeted Zoning Reforms and Inclusionary Zoning. Municipalities are authorized under state law to adopt land use and zoning regulations; these so-called “enabling” laws provide the fundamental legal basis for such regulations. Zoning determines where housing can be built, the type and amount of permitted housing, and the form it takes. Land use and zoning regulations can directly or indirectly affect the cost of developing housing, making it harder or easier to provide affordable housing. Program Participants may choose to review their land use and zoning requirements to assess if they contribute to fair housing issues identified in a Fair Housing Plan. Targeted zoning reform could include removal of exclusionary zoning barriers that restrict fair housing choice or implementing inclusionary zoning (IZ). Inclusionary zoning ordinances take various forms: developers may be required to build affordable units in exchange for development rights (e.g., density bonuses or fee waivers), or a City may require a specific percentage of affordable units in developments. Inclusionary zoning policies are more effective when long-term affordability is built into the provisions. IZ can include set-asides of units in the context of both single family (e.g., townhouses) and multifamily rental housing (e.g., a set-aside of units within a larger apartment building). Set-asides of rental units could be combined with a central registry of affordable housing opportunities and with required ongoing non-discrimination based on the source of income for the set-aside units. IZ can also be applied to residential development involving city funding, tax increment financing or HOME funds or requiring certain zoning changes, including changes, land purchased from the city, or within designated redevelopment districts. Such policies may be developed at the jurisdiction, regional, or state level; either approach may be particularly helpful in addressing fair housing issues and affirmatively furthering fair housing.
• Architecture of Inclusion through Mixed-Income Housing and Scattered-Site Housing. Mixed-Income development creates income diversity within public and private housing developments by providing both affordable and market-rate units within one development. Mixed-income rental housing may use bands of income levels relating to the average median income (AMI), such as below 30 percent of AMI, 30 to 50 percent AMI, 50 to 80 percent AMI, and above 80 percent of the AMI. Scattered Sites is the term used to describe individual public housing units or other affordable housing units that are dispersed throughout a geographic area. Scattered Site residents live among private renters and homeowners within the surrounding community as an alternative to large projects that concentrate poverty and are often isolated. Mixed income redevelopment can also be used as part of a revitalization strategy for lower-income areas to replace large, assisted projects while preserving affordable units. Alternatively, it can be a strategy for providing affordable units in well-resourced, higher opportunity areas, for instance, by setting-aside a portion of new construction units in such areas for lower-income families.
• Strategic and Targeted Investment. Target areas most in need of neighborhood investment and where investment will promote integration based on the protected characteristics of residents. Distribute funds to areas in greatest need of community revitalization or access to opportunity through a points-based bidding process that assigns a high value to demonstrated need for revitalization. In practice, these areas may be historically marginalized areas or lower-income neighborhoods or regions, communities of color, and underserved geographic regions such as rural communities. Community revitalization needs may be determined based on a variety of factors, including existing access to jobs, transportation, educational opportunity, or the need for additional private investment, such as retail, reputable financial institutions, and grocery stores. Public services and facilities include schools, recreational facilities and programs, social services, parks, roads, transportation, street lighting, trash collection, street cleaning, crime prevention, and police protection activities. Locations near neighborhoods undergoing new construction and revitalization may require investment and efforts to preserve existing affordable housing options for existing residents and potential future low-income renters or owners. Strategic investment may need to take a broad approach to community development and include what occurs in those places (the quality of services); the total physical and social structure of the community (including issues such as transportation and public safety); and evaluation of institutional barriers to the physical, financial, and emotional well-being of the people who live in those communities. Addressing a wide variety of needs across a spectrum of programs and issues often also requires intergovernmental coordination between agencies.

Programmatic Strategies

• Housing Mobility Programs. Housing mobility programs assist families that wish to move into neighborhoods that will improve their access to opportunity, including neighborhoods with proficient schools and greater economic opportunities. Through housing mobility programs, neighborhoods that offer opportunities and assets, including quality housing and positive economic characteristics, are promoted to low-income residents through housing mobility counseling. Housing mobility programs can be for general lower-income families or Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) recipients. General programs can include establishing registries of affordable rental housing and support for housing counseling agencies. HCV housing mobility strategies include housing mobility counseling, landlord outreach to increase the number of participating properties, use of funds for security deposits and moving expenses, and extended search times for particular groups such as larger families with children or persons with disabilities. Innovative housing mobility policies for PHAs include regional cooperation and administration of vouchers (such as through portability and shared waiting lists); improved housing mobility counseling focusing on “second moves” as well as “post move” supports; increasing use of Small Area Fair Market Rents to set payment standards at the sub-market level; use of Project-Based Vouchers as siting mechanism in well-resourced, higher opportunity areas, including in conjunction with the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program; and use of expanded PHA jurisdictional authority to administer vouchers outside its boundaries. When coupled with existing strategies, including landlord outreach, improved initial counseling programs, and extended search times, these housing mobility practices can have an even greater effect. In addition to increasing housing options and fair housing choice, they can also lead to improved success rates in initial lease ups easing other PHA administrative requirements to offset some of the time and effort involved in implementing them.
• Affirmative Marketing Programs. Affirmative marketing can be targeted at promoting equal access to government-assisted housing or promoting housing outside the immediate neighborhood to increase awareness and the diversity of individuals in the neighborhood. Affirmative marketing requires assessing who is living in the housing and who is least likely to live in the housing and then establishing standards for public outreach and advertising that encourages diversity by marketing units to those families least likely to apply and those who currently live outside the neighborhood.
• Fair Share Programs. Fair share programs promote an equitable distribution of affordable housing throughout a region by assigning a target number of affordable housing units to each municipality in a given region. One common way to implement a fair share program is a top-down approach, in which a statewide program requires all counties and municipalities with insufficient affordable housing to adopt an affordable housing plan. Other options include tying the funding of community development projects, LIHTCs, other public financing arrangements, and infrastructure improvements to compliance with an affordable housing plan.
• Accessibility Programs. Accessibility programs focus on improving access to the built environment—housing, public buildings and facilities, sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, and businesses, public websites, and other programs, services, and activities for persons with disabilities. Accessibility programs can also include access to supports that enable persons with different types of disabilities to live independently in apartments and other integrated, community-based settings.

Collaborative Strategies

• Regional Coordination. Fostering coordination across jurisdictions and sectors provides a wide range of housing choices, ensures access to opportunity, and creates desirable places to live and work. Fair housing issues not only cross multiple sectors—including housing, education, transportation, and commercial and economic development—but also are often not constrained by political or geographic boundaries. Collaborative regional planning structures can be a useful approach to coordinate responses to identified fair housing issues and related fair housing issues.
• Statewide Land-Use Planning Programs are an Example of Regional Coordination. These statewide plans better allow regional approaches to ensure that land use and zoning provisions work to affirmatively further fair housing. In the context of PHAs, regional coordination can include implementing HCV portability agreements and shared waiting lists or combining project-based vouchers with LIHTC allocations in well-resourced, higher opportunity areas.
• Partnerships to Develop Key Community Assets. From lack of quality schools and economic opportunity to food deserts and lack of retail services, many R/ECAPs lack adequate access to opportunity and critical community assets. Many such neighborhoods have suffered from disinvestment, leaving them with failing schools, inadequate services, physical and environmental blight, and high levels of crime and violence. However, many Program Participants can catalyze development and revitalization projects through creative financing and strong leadership. Impact investing—the blending of social and financial return—leverages private investment for community revitalization. Community development activities can leverage additional philanthropic, public, and private investments. A strategy of effectively using and aligning all the tools available from public and private partners (foundations, grants, private investment, and nonprofits) can increase the impact of AFFH goals and methods of implementation.
• Mixed-Income and Mixed-Financing and Public-Private Partnerships. Partnerships between Program Participants and the private sector—both the business sector and community-based nonprofit housing providers—can help communities develop affordable housing and community assets in well-resourced, high opportunity areas by bringing additional resources and skills to the development process. There are a variety of public-private partnership approaches: affordable housing task forces; developer partnerships; program-based partnerships; and public sector-partnerships. Mixed-income financing emphasizes forming new public and private partnerships to ensure the long-term sustainability of housing and community development and expands access to opportunity in the jurisdiction and region.

Program Participants should ask themselves, “What programs, policies, practices, and procedures impact fair housing choice in my jurisdiction or region and should be analyzed in my Fair Housing Plan?” The following is a chart of examples of what types of programs, policies, practices, and procedures should be examined by Entitlement Communities/Participating Jurisdictions and PHAs. Please note that this chart is not exhaustive; there may be additional items to examine in certain communities during Fair Housing Planning.

Resources

• Lessons From the Ground: Best Practices in Fair Housing Planning
• Tools for Project Planning in Community Development