AFFH
HUD has announced the Final Rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).
This page provides a number of resources to assist HUD’s partners and the public to understand the provisions of the rule.
Background: The AFFH Final Rule includes a requirement for certain HUD grantees (PHAs and CPD block grant Consolidated Planning agencies) to conduct an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) planning process. The AFH planning process will help communities analyze challenges to fair housing choice and establish their own goals and priorities to address the fair housing barriers in their community.
Final Rule: Information including background materials can be found here.
In addition to the Final Rule, there are several other critical components to implementing AFFH. These include:
- The Assessment Tool , which HUD is developing with public input, to assist grantees in conducting an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH).
- Previous documents can be found on the Archives page.
- Additional information for HUD grantees and partners can also be found here.
HUD Rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has released a final rule to equip communities that receive HUD funding with the data and tools that will help them to meet long-standing fair housing obligations in their use of HUD funds. HUD will provide publicly open data for grantees to use to assess the state of fair housing within their communities and to set locally-determined priorities and goals. The rule responds to recommendations of the Government Accountability Office and stakeholders for HUD to enhance its fair housing planning obligations by providing greater clarity and support to jurisdictions receiving HUD funding, and facilitating local decision-making on fair housing priorities and goals.
For more than forty years, HUD funding recipients have been obligated by law to reduce barriers to fair housing. Established in the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the law directs HUD and its program participants to affirmatively further the Act’s goals of promoting fair housing and equal opportunity. The final rule on affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) aims to provide all HUD grantees with clear guidelines and the data that will help them to achieve those goals, because no child’s ZIP code should determine her opportunity to achieve.
HUD’s rule clarifies and simplifies existing fair housing obligations for HUD grantees to analyze their fair housing landscape and set locally-determined fair housing priorities and goals through an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH). To aid communities in this work, HUD will provide open data to grantees and the public on patterns of integration and segregation, racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty, disproportionate housing needs, and disparities in access to opportunity. This improved approach provides a better mechanism for HUD grantees to build fair housing goals into their existing community development and housing planning processes. In addition to providing data and maps, HUD will also provide technical assistance to aid grantees as they adopt this approach.
The Final Rule was published in the Federal Register on July 16, 2015.
A copy of the Final Rule can be found here.
To see a copy of the Press Release, click here.
An Executive Summary describing the Final Rule can be found here.
A copy of the Regulatory Impact Analysis that accompanied the Final Rule can be found here.
For additional resources for grantees click here.
Assessment Tool for 30-Day PRA
This page is intended to help facilitate public comment on the Assessment Tool for the AFFH Final Rule.
Under the AFFH regulation, HUD grantees that complete a Consolidated Plan for HUD’s CPD block grant programs as well as Public Housing Agencies (PHAs) will complete an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) every five years. They may also work together with other grantees and PHAs to submit a joint AFH. Members of the community will also have an opportunity to provide input for the Assessment of Fair Housing.
The link to the Federal Register website for the 30-Day PRA Notice is located here. This Notice provides a full explanation of the Assessment Tool, as well as instructions and the official deadline for submitting comments.
Links to the Assessment Tool. There are two versions that HUD is providing for public comment. The two versions differ only in their placement of contributing factors to be analyzed (see the Federal Register Notice for more detail).
Link to the Data and Mapping Tool
(AFFH-T). This is the beta test version of the HUD AFFH Data and Mapping Tool.
It is intended to help facilitate comments on the AFFH Assessment Tool for the
30-Day Public Comment period. After opening the AFFH-T, select a grantee
jurisdiction and choose from the available maps. There is also a draft User’s
Guide provided at the link. The final version of the Data and Mapping tool will
include additional functionality that is not yet available in this current
version.
Users experiencing technical issues with the data tool may want to
use a different internet browser to access the tool.
Data documentation - an explanation of the data in the AFFH-T Data and Mapping Tool.
For ease of reference, copies of the tables and maps, with slight revisions, that were previously released on September 26, 2014 for the 60-Day PRA comment period are included here. HUD intends to make further revisions to the final tables and maps to be included in the Data and Mapping Tool:
Descriptions of the tables and maps can be found in the Appendix in both versions of the Assessment Tool above.
Proposed Rule
To view an online hyperlinked version of the proposed Rule, click here,
and for a PDF version, click here.
To read the Regulatory Impact Analysis, click here.
To read the data methodology document, click here.
Assessment Tool for 60-day PRA
On September 26, 2014, HUD released a draft Assessment Tool for a 60-day public comment period. The Assessment Tool will assist HUD block grant recipients and public housing agencies (PHAs) in completing an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) that will accompany their 5-year Consolidated Plans and PHA Plans. Numerous public comments were received on the draft.
A revised version of the Assessment Tool will be released for an additional 30-day public comment period and will be made available here.
To read the preamble, which walks through the content of the draft Assessment, please click here.
To view the draft Assessment, please click here.
To view the HUD-provided data tables referenced in the Assessment, please click here.
To view the HUD-provided maps referenced in the Assessment, please click here.
To view the Federal Register, please click here.
User Friendly Guide
This document outlines the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) proposed strategy to refine and improve the process currently known as the Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice (AI), which HUD grant recipients must undertake in keeping with their obligation to ‘affirmatively further fair housing’(AFFH). HUD seeks public comment on this proposed approach and will incorporate all ideas that effectively enhance the spirit and requirements of the Fair Housing Act. While HUD drafted this proposal principally for HUD program participants, including states, local governments, and public housing agencies, HUD hopes that a broader audience of civil rights advocates, affordable housing developers, community development organizations, academics, housing development agencies, and other members of the public interested in fair housing in their communities will provide input. The goal of the proposed rule is to address concerns raised by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and stakeholders about the current AI process in order to better equip communities to fulfill their fair housing obligations and plan in a manner that promotes fair housing choice.
