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Trump party planner-turned-housing official gives segregation a thumbs up

If you can’t win an argument about federal housing policy, just wait for Trump to put a crony in charge of answering your letters.

Housing and Urban Development official Lynne Patton, right, has close ties to the Trump family. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci
Housing and Urban Development official Lynne Patton, right, has close ties to the Trump family. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

The extreme racial segregation of neighborhoods in Westchester County, New York will now continue with the help of federal funding.

The county is officially free from court-imposed restrictions on its use of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding after a recently appointed agency official with close ties to President Donald Trump and no experience in housing policy work signed off on county arguments that federal officials have consistently rejected for years.

Lynne Patton, a former event planner for the Trump family whose nomination to a HUD position drew criticism from policy experts and housing advocates last month, reversed HUD’s position on Westchester’s zoning laws on Tuesday. The agency had rejected 10 previous versions of the county’s “Analysis of Impediments,” a document which HUD grantees must submit to demonstrate their use of taxpayer money will not get spent into systems that tacitly reinforce racial segregation in housing.

Westchester’s fight with HUD originated from a lawsuit brought by the Anti-Discrimination Center. The county struck a settlement with HUD in 2009, but has failed to comply fully with it for close to a decade.

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Local housing analyses have been a joke for years, and not just in the prominent, lawsuit-driven Westchester case. Towns and counties routinely blow off the spirit of the work — which is to conduct a serious, rigorous, and independent analysis of how the status quo of who lives where relates to the rules that govern housing development in the area — and do the bare minimum necessary to meet the limp requirements set out by HUD.

Westchester’s repeated submissions have skirted the truth in similar fashion, according to both civilian observers and HUD’s own previous responses to the county. Civil rights attorney Craig Gurian, whose organization first brought suit over Westchester housing segregation and believes HUD’s oversight of the county has been too lax, likened the county’s analyses to the Trump administration’s habit of making up information to justify its claims.

“The county is playing the same old game of alternative facts,” Gurian told a local newspaper. “It’s a fantasy version of Westchester.”

When HUD rejected Westchester’s 10th submission of exclusionary zoning analysis in April, the agency found the county’s consultants had failed to scrutinize how zoning rules in various towns influenced the concentration of minority populations and segregation of white populations. The county’s consultant disputed that conclusion in a response letter.

HUD agency rules in the settlement with Westchester, and subsequent administrative battles, were widely anticipated to be a target of the Trump administration, which viewed Obama’s desegregation efforts as “social engineering.” Westchester waited a few weeks once Patton was put in charge of the HUD office with jurisdiction over the county. Then, officials resubmitted the same analysis that was insufficient in April. Patton accepted the same figures her predecessors had rejected.

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The swift reversal effectively ends the decade-long quest to require Westchester towns to take an active role in promoting desegregation when spending federal housing dollars. It upholds the county’s longstanding argument that its people live in massively segregated patterns by race and income because that’s what the market has dictated, not because their communities have acted to reinforce whatever amount of initial, organic ethnic clustering was already in place.