Along with undermining democracy at each flip and turning the federal authorities into their private piggy financial institution, the Trump administration has spent a lot of its time arguing that white persons are the true victims of racism. The Division of Housing and City Improvement (HUD) introduced it might be launching an investigation into Boston’s reasonably priced housing efforts to see in the event that they discriminated towards white individuals.
In response to the New York Occasions, Craig Trainor, the assistant secretary for honest housing and equal alternative, despatched a letter to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, taking umbrage on the metropolis authorities’s prioritizing Black and brown communities in its reasonably priced housing insurance policies.
“As you might be conscious, the Trump administration is devoted to defending the civil rights of all Individuals. At your workplace’s route, nevertheless, metropolis officers have got down to smuggle ‘racial fairness into each layer of operations in metropolis authorities,’” Trainor wrote. I really feel like at this level they need to cease saying “all Individuals” and simply say “white Individuals.”
Trainor additionally had the audacity to say that Boston’s housing initiatives promote a “racialist concept of housing justice,” claiming that “in a shameful echo of a darker interval in our nation’s historical past,” Boston is trying to “revive government-sponsored redlining.”
So ol’ boy acknowledges redlining is a horrible factor that occurred, which resulted in wealth deprivation for generations of Black individuals, however is mad that Boston is doing one thing to deal with these historic inequities. Make it make sense, y’all.
Final 12 months, Mayor Wu launched the Boston Acquisition Fund (BAF), a public-private mortgage fund aimed toward combating the affordability disaster by way of housing. In response to an announcement launched by the mayor’s workplace, the BAF’s major targets are “to stabilize housing for at-risk people and households, completely take away naturally occurring reasonably priced housing from the speculative market, and promote the expansion of latest, native, and numerous improvement groups.”
Mayor Wu was fast to clap again towards Trainor’s claims, calling the investigation “unhinged assaults from Washington,” including, “Boston won’t ever abandon our dedication to honest and reasonably priced housing.” The investigation was introduced on the identical day Mayor Wu and the Mayor’s Workplace of Housing introduced that it had preserved 16 reasonably priced flats by way of the fund.
The second coming of the Trump administration has largely targeted its white grievance on variety, fairness, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in increased training, together with earlier this 12 months, when the Training Division introduced it was launching civil rights investigations into the universities and universities it believed engaged in “illegal DEI.”
The results of these DOE investigations has been a number of faculties shuttering their DEI applications, ending student-run publications for specializing in Black and ladies’s points, and even giving college students the braveness to attempt to get their professors fired for “spiritual discrimination” once they get a zero for referencing the Bible and never citing their sources in a scientific essay.
The HUD investigation could be the primary time that the Trump administration has investigated a metropolis’s housing initiatives underneath the Civil Rights Act. Trainor stated that relying on the findings, costs may very well be filed towards the town. Threatening to sue a significant metropolis over its efforts to offer reasonably priced housing throughout an affordability disaster is unquestionably a sensible transfer forward of the midterms. This received’t make the Trump administration look silly in any respect.
SEE ALSO:
Ballot Finds Almost Half Of Individuals Battle To Afford Fundamental Wants
The Initiatives: A Temporary Historical past Of American Public Housing
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