Enterprise: Community Developments: HUD Invites Public Comment on Its 2013 Disparate Impact Rule

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• Yesterday HUD announced that it will formally seek public comment on whether its 2013 Disparate Impact Regulation is consistent with the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. Under the disparate impact rule, which aims to enforce the Fair Housing Act, housing providers, lenders and insurers can be held liable for seemingly neutral practices that have a discriminatory effect on classes of persons protected under the Fair Housing Act. The 2015 ruling by the Supreme Court established that the Fair Housing Act allows lawsuits based on disparate impact, but the court did not specifically rule on HUD's regulation. (HousingWire, May 10) As previously highlighted in Community Developments, earlier this year HUD suspended the deadline for local governments that receive HUD funding to submit an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) - an examination of the local housing landscape that helps jurisdictions set their fair housing priorities and goals - until the next AFH submission date that falls after October 31, 2020.
  
• In an interview with Place Makers, Enterprise's Ahmad Abu-Khalaf discusses innovative strategies for expanding the supply of affordable homes. This discussion is part of a series of interviews with panelists for the “Affordability: The Intersection of Everything” forum that will take place at the Congress for the New Urbanism conference on May 17 in Savannah, GA. Abu-Khalaf notes that Enterprise recognizes that the rising demand for affordable housing has created a pressing need to identify innovative solutions for containing the cost of construction and expanding the supply of affordable homes. He notes several Enterprise-led efforts to increase cost-effectiveness and supply in the affordable housing delivery system, including identifying methods for bending the cost curve, using publicly owned parcels to create affordable homes, and understanding the small and medium multifamily housing stock, which provides 54 percent of the nation's rental housing stock and is a key source of affordable housing. In addition, Abu-Khalaf points out that Enterprise has conducted research on promoting opportunity through Equitable Transit-Oriented Development (eTOD), aiming at identifying barriers and best practices to expanding the supply of affordable homes near transit and navigating federal transportation policies and programs that can support eTOD.