The Future of Fair Housing in America: A Q&A with Chiraag Bains

This article is part of The Rooftop, a blog and multimedia series from New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Featuring insights from experts across diverse fields, the series is a home for bold ideas to improve housing in the United States and globally.

New America’s Yuliya Panfil sat down with Chiraag Bains, deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Biden, to discuss antidiscrimination protections in housing being rolled back by the Trump administration. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Yuliya Panfil: Welcome everyone to The Rooftop. My name is Yuliya Panfil, and I’m the director of New America’s Future of Land and Housing program. Today we are so excited to be joined by Chiraag Bains. Chiraag served as the deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Biden, and in that role was also deputy assistant to the president for racial justice and equity. He is now a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a senior fellow at the Democracy Fund. Welcome, Chiraag.

Chiraag Bains: Thanks for having me, Yuliya. I’m glad to be here.

Panfil: Chiraag, in these last few months, the Trump administration has been working overtime to dismantle the federal civil rights and antidiscrimination protections in housing that we’ve relied on since the passage of the 1968 Fair Housing law. Can you tell us a little bit about what’s been happening, and what has you the most worried?

Bains: Yeah, quite a lot. Before we go through it, though, I think it’s important to just start with an understanding that housing discrimination is widespread and persists in America. That’s the baseline that it’s important that we be operating off of. And just to give one stat, 74 percent of white Americans own their own homes. That compares to just 46 percent of Black Americans. And that gap in homeownership is actually wider than it was in 1960, when housing discrimination was still legal. So we have a long way to go and a lot of work to do. And yet the administration is undermining federal efforts to attack that gap and attack housing discrimination by destroying the federal apparatus that fights discrimination.

Just to give a few examples here, the first thing I’d highlight is that overall the Trump administration is attacking what it calls DEI: diversity, equity, and inclusion. Most people, when they think about DEI, they think about corporate trainings. When the Biden administration talked about diversity, equity, and inclusion, it was about making programs open to all, fighting discrimination, and ensuring equal opportunity. The Trump administration has defined DEI to mean any efforts that pay attention to inequality based on race, gender, disability, or other identity-based factors, and any efforts that try to create equal opportunity along those lines. That includes, for them, civil rights enforcement. And that’s why they’re gutting the government’s work to protect people from discrimination.

Example number one, the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 contained not just a mandate that discrimination be banned throughout the land, but also that the jurisdictions that receive federal housing money take affirmative steps, proactive steps, to address housing discrimination, to overcome patterns of segregation, and to foster inclusive communities. That means assessing their practices around zoning that may be discriminatory around where they are placing housing, where they’re building housing, where they’re building affordable housing, to ensure that they’re not deepening segregation. And there are rules on this. Actually, there was no real action from the federal government on this for years after the Fair Housing Act passed. This was a dormant part of the law. And then finally, the Obama administration passed a rule in 2015 that required recipients of federal funding—local governments—to assess their housing activities, collect data, and then take steps to try to ensure equal opportunity, non-discrimination, and to reduce segregation.

The Trump administration came in and removed that rule. The Biden administration then came in and put a version of the rule back on an interim temporary basis. And then now, the Trump administration is back, and they have eliminated this rule and just recently said that they’ll accept self-certification. A jurisdiction just has to say, “Yes, we’re taking steps to address segregation.” They don’t have to submit any detailed plans, don’t have to answer any questions. And there’s no danger that they’ll lose funds if they don’t live up to their congressional mandate here. So that’s the first thing I’ll say.

A second example is there’s an important program called the Fair Housing Initiatives Program. That program is all about leveraging nonprofit organizations around the country to try to fight discrimination. Congress recognized many years ago that the federal government couldn’t do it themselves. And certainly our civil rights laws aren’t self-executing. It’s not enough to just pass a law and then all of sudden you end discrimination. You have to enforce that law. So in 1987, with President Reagan’s support, Congress created a pilot program that a few years later was made permanent, that authorized funding for fair housing groups to investigate discrimination and then make referrals to the government for enforcement actions. These nonprofits process about 75 percent of discrimination claims. Another almost 20 percent is state and local [governments]. The federal government, DOJ [Department of Justice] and HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development]? They actually process just 6 percent of claims. So we really rely on these nonprofit organizations.

“It’s not enough to just pass a law and then all of sudden you end discrimination. You have to enforce that law.”

The Trump administration has slashed funding for these groups. They cut $30 million in funding to 66 different groups operating in 33 different states. This is gonna hurt folks from New York to Idaho, and it’s a significant loss. And there’s a lawsuit over this right now, actually. A bunch of nonprofit groups just achieved a temporary restraining order to put a stop to these cuts while the litigation continues. [Editor’s note: HUD reinstated these grants in response to the restraining order, issued by a U.S. District Court judge.]

And then the third thing that I’ll mention here is something that the Biden administration did called the PAVE [Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity] Task Force. This was a task force that was set up to combat appraisal bias in home ownership. This is essentially when you go to get your home appraised, because maybe you want to sell it or perhaps you want to refinance it, there’s a lot of evidence that Black families in particular were having their homes valued at a much lower rate than white families. It was actually so bad that a lot of families would ask for a second appraisal. They’d hide all their family pictures and they’d have a white friend stand in when the appraiser showed up and they would get an appraisal that was $300,000, sometimes $500,000 more. So the administration took a number of steps to try to reduce bias in the appraisal system: collecting more data, enforcement actions from the federal government, creating a rule that you could ask for a reconsideration of value if your appraisal comes in too low.

The Trump administration now has come in and wiped that out. They have undone that rule that I just mentioned, and they’ve ended the work of the PAVE task force. So you can see here just systematically, the Trump administration is walking away from and dismantling work that was meant to combat discrimination in housing.

Panfil: Yeah, thank you for laying all of that out. And I think it’s so important to highlight, as you’ve done, that the framework following the 1968 Fair Housing law and laying out the scaffolding for antidiscrimination was really passed across both Republican and Democratic administrations. I think that that’s really important to highlight here, and we’re really winding the clock back.

You touched on this briefly, but I’d love for you to expand a little bit: There are also major changes happening at HUD, both in terms of staff cuts and funding cuts that will detrimentally impact fair housing and equal access issues. Can you tell me a little bit about what you’re seeing and what some of the impacts of those changes will likely be?

Bains: Yes, the administration is trying to cut staffing and funding across the board, trying to shrink the size of government. I think this is part of a larger plan to try to point to apparent savings in order to justify what’s going to be a tax cut for extremely wealthy individuals in the coming tax negotiations, the tax bill. Also, they just don’t believe that government is part of the answer to stamping out discrimination and improving access to housing. So they are really with a hacksaw, not a scalpel, going after federal programs in that vein.

So let’s start with slashing affordable housing funding. This is really egregious because we are in an affordable housing crisis. The administration recently cut $60 million in grants to small community development nonprofits. That is really seed money, seed funding for affordable housing projects. Folks can get a project started and then draw in more public and private investment. Often it’s just hard to get that initial money. Sometimes this is a couple hundred thousand dollars. And the federal government is providing these grants. Many of these projects—building new affordable housing—are in process right now. You’ve got local contractors doing the work, framing up the walls, and installing HVACs. And now, all of that just stops because they have cut off the funding. So all these projects are in limbo.

This is truly unconscionable at a time when we’re facing a crisis in that we are down 7 million units of affordable housing in this country from where we need to be—7 million units that we don’t have, that if we did, the cost of housing would be far lower, [and] rent would be affordable. It’s these kinds of projects that help us get there—community-driven projects with seed funding from the federal government. And that could just be the beginning. There’s much more money that goes into supporting affordable housing from HUD, and I expect we’re going to see additional cuts.

The second point is, as you mentioned, staffing cuts. There was a memo that came out that showed that the Trump administration intends to cut HUD by over half—to reduce its employees from over 8,000 to just around 4,000. And the cuts are specifically severe in the areas that are most focused on affordable housing and fighting discrimination.

So, a couple of examples. The Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Office at HUD, the office that combats discrimination, is set to be cut by 77 percent. They’re going to be shuttering field offices, especially in rural areas where people directly engage with the federal government. There’s going to be an 84 percent cut to the Office of Community Planning and Development. That’s the office at HUD that supports homelessness services [and] veterans’ homelessness, provides rental assistance, plans for disaster response, and [oversees] other community development projects. So just major hits to offices that are focused on the problems that people are struggling with across America in housing.

Then just to zoom out, the administration is programmatically walking away from an evidence-based program and approach called Housing First. Housing First is the idea that the first thing we should do is get vulnerable people into housing and then provide them the supports they need to stabilize their lives, around mental health treatment, around drug addiction. The idea is that you get people into housing first. That begins to stabilize their lives and then you try to help them address the additional problems that they’re struggling with.

This is in contrast to an old school model that was, well, “No, we’re not going to help you with housing until you get your life together. And even that is on you.” Housing First has been extremely effective when compared to requiring people to be sober or to be in mental health treatment before you’ll find them housing. Housing First is 88 percent more effective at reducing homelessness [than a “treatment first” approach], according to a comprehensive study that was done. The secretary of HUD has said that they’re going to be ending Housing First. Trump also indicated this in the past and they’re already starting to do it. They are modifying contracts to say you no longer have to abide by Housing First requirements that were in the contracts for recipients of federal funds. They have gutted the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, which is an interagency body that tries to work with every agency in government to see what they can do to reduce homelessness. And they’ve also cut the affordable housing grants, as I mentioned earlier. Instead, they’re moving to a model that is punitive.

Trump has said he wants to force people into tent cities and mandate treatment on the threat of arrest and incarceration. We’ve seen that play before. It does not work. This is an extremely dangerous direction that the administration is going in.

Panfil: And to put that 8,000 HUD employee number in context, that is a relatively small federal agency compared to many of the other federal agencies. The Defense Department has close to a million employees, about 775,000. The Department of Veterans Affairs, we’re talking about nearly 500,000 employees. So we’re talking about an agency that is already quite small and tasked with an enormous mandate that is being more or less decimated.

Bains: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think that’s a great point, Yuliya. And here I would just say the American taxpayers are getting a lot for that low level of staffing and funding. Again, these are funds that are going toward perhaps the most salient issue in America today—lowering costs and specifically lowering costs in housing. And to cut the staff that are working on that, especially given how small the staff is compared to the need, I think is really misguided.

Panfil: So where do we go from here? You and I have talked before about the 100-meter dash, the 5K, and the marathon when it comes to policy response and just generally responding to this moment. Can you talk a little bit about how we think about the response here?

Bains: Yeah, I think that’s a good metaphor, the running metaphor.

In the short term, that 100-meter dash, I think immediately people should be thinking about their legal recourse—bringing lawsuits to fight back against what are actually unlawful cuts that are being made both to staffing and to funding. These cuts, most of them are the result of Elon Musk’s team coming in, DOGE, and essentially saying, “That doesn’t look worthwhile to us. We’re going to cut that.” Calling activities waste, fraud, and abuse without actually inquiring into what the money is going toward and then misrepresenting to the public what these programs are. These programs are congressionally mandated programs. The president does not have the ability to just shut them down or shut down offices. And there are also civil service protections around staff. They have done this in a blunderbuss way, in terms of saying, “We’re going to cut thousands of people.” These are not terminations for cause in the sense that people are underperforming and they’ve actually evaluated that.

They’re now trying to use the reduction in force methodology, but they’re running afoul in some cases of union contracts and other protections in the law. So there are mechanisms for recourse here. Essentially, people have claims that they could be bringing in court. And I mentioned it briefly, but just on the grants to nonprofits to support antidiscrimination enforcement out in the field, they got a temporary restraining order immediately, when they sued, by the courts. Now that case will continue and they’ll have to litigate that, but they have an extremely strong claim and the judge recognized it. So I would say litigation is an immediate strategy.

Maybe a little bit more medium term than that, the 5K, I suppose, is that state and local jurisdictions need to step up. This is also an even longer-term strategy, but I think it’s one that’s going to be really important in these four years of the Trump administration.

Local jurisdictions should ensure that they have robust antidiscrimination laws. They should make sure that they’re not just relying on the Fair Housing Act, but that they have a local version of that, and that is as expansive as possible. One thing we often talk about in the housing rights community is that at the federal level, there’s no protection against source of income discrimination. So if you’re receiving a Section 8 voucher, for example, and you’re being turned away because you have federal assistance to pay your rent, there’s no direct federal claim under the Fair Housing Act for that. But a local jurisdiction could pass a source of income discrimination provision that would make that kind of refusal unlawful.

So local jurisdictions should make sure they have their own laws and should make sure that they’re expansive and protective in all the ways that they need to be. Then they should put more of their funding into investigation and enforcement. Local human rights offices have the ability to enforce those kinds of local laws, and they’re going to need to do it a lot more. As nonprofits out there that are doing the work are receiving complaints, [and] as individuals have their own complaints, they’re not going to be able to refer those claims and find a willing audience with the federal government right now. So local [governments] really need to step up.

And then in terms of the marathon, a longer play, this I think is really important. It’s really important for us not to lose track of where we need to go. We need an expansive, exciting vision that is about plentiful housing, that’s affordable for everyone in America, where discrimination is not tolerated and is completely stamped out.

“We need an expansive, exciting vision that is about plentiful housing, that’s affordable for everyone in America, where discrimination is not tolerated and is completely stamped out.”

And we need to build that for the long term in this period. Clearly what we have done in the past, while we’ve made progress at times, it’s not enough. We’re still struggling. The affordable housing crisis has deepened. There are more complaints about housing discrimination year after year. We just hit over 34,000 complaints made in 2023, the year for which we have the most recent data.

So we really need to develop bigger, bolder plans. And they should be about ensuring we’re developing affordable housing all over the country and doing it quickly. But we should not be sacrificing our protections around civil rights to do that. I don’t think there’s any evidence that antidiscrimination law has been a real impediment. It’s more been about the will and the desire to free up contractors and attack this problem with alacrity.

We have to have that vision, and it’s on us to develop that even as we are fighting back against these unlawful acts that are undercutting the existing infrastructure we have to build affordable housing and fight discrimination.

Panfil: I love that, and I love ending with that expansive, optimistic vision. You have to fight bad policy with good policy. And I think that even as we are playing defense against some of these most egregious cuts, I think that it’s incumbent upon our sector—and our sector is doing that—to really reimagine what equitable and fair housing for all, and affordable housing for all, looks like in this country. So I love ending on that note.

Chiraag, thank you so much for taking the time to share your wisdom with us today.

And thank you to everyone listening. If you are a listener and you have a housing innovation that you’re interested in talking or writing about, please reach out to FLH@newamerica.org. Thanks so much, Chiraag. Thanks, everyone.

Editor’s note: The views expressed in the articles on The Rooftop are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policy positions of New America.