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Director Raphael Bostic Interviewed on New Fair Housing Rule

Published by Aubrey Hicks on

by Justine Dodgen

Bedrosian Center Director Raphael Bostic recently spoke with DS News to discuss HUD’s new Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, which was announced in early July. AFFH intends to help communities that receive HUD funding meet long-standing fair housing obligations. During the interview, Bostic discussed what he hopes AFFH will help accomplish:

My hope is that the rule actually results in different patterns of community investment such that everyone has access to real opportunity. What we know now is that there are a number of neighborhoods and communities across the country that are isolated. They don’t have good schools, they don’t have real access to jobs. They don’t have parks and other things which have been shown to really improve people’s quality of life and help them to be productive contributors to society. What I hope the rule does is lead us all to think about “How can we invest in ways that change that reality for those isolated places?”

In some cases, that’s going to mean trying to build housing in some neighborhoods that have them, so we may start to see some more integrated patterns. In many other cases, it’s going to involve saying, “Let’s use our HUD dollars to improve linkages between jobs and housing. Let’s use our HUD money to help support training programs that can better position our residents to be competitive when they’re looking for work. Let’s use our community resources to help make the streets safer so that our kids can play, or let’s build a park or community center so that we can improve our network.”

Read the full interview on DS News.

Bedrosian Center