Jennifer Bragar’s article, “Affordable Housing, Planning, and the Environment: Why Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Needs Teeth”
June 23, 2025
Jennifer Bragar’s article, “Affordable Housing, Planning, and the Environment: Why Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Needs Teeth” just published in 30 Environmental History 565 (July 2025)
Download a copy here: Affordable Housing Planning and the Environment Why AFFH Needs Teeth
Jennifer’s article is part of the Environmental History Journal’s Forum on Fair Housing and Environmental Justice. Jennifer article examines the role of lawyers and litigation first in the rise of exclusive zoning, and now with attempts to dismantle the resulting segregatory patterns in neighborhoods across the United States. She examines the historic context for reliance on single-family and low-density residential zoning as a means to maintain racially exclusive residential developments, beginning with the 1926 passage of the Standard Zoning and Enabling Act, and the Hoover Administration’s committed effort to promote its adoption. In these early efforts, environmental protection was embraced as a sound reason to separate single-family housing from industrial uses.
But those early planning efforts overlooked multi-family housing which remained and continues to be adversely affected by environmental impacts. The article examines these adverse impacts on people of color, particularly African-American children. The article analyzes more recent trends in funding affordable housing through the inclusion of the low income housing tax credit (LIHTC) in the 1986 Tax Reform Act, and how that program perpetuates segregation and resegregation in urban neighborhoods. Finally, Jennifer finds hope in the Fair Housing Act enacted in 1968 and amended in 1974 and 1988 and its rule to affirmatively furthering fair housing as a sword to dismantle theses systemic segregatory policies and practices.
A case study arising in the early 2000s out of Westchester County in New York is provided as a cautionary tale about the potential threat of triple damages for accepting federal funds with a certificate that the jurisdiction is undertaking affirmatively furthering fair housing policies, when in fact the county was failing to act in accord with the certification. In contrast to the treble damages stick, a policy approach is set out about the state of Oregon’s recent adoption of affirmatively furthering fair housing as a matter of state policy to be implemented through housing production strategies to meet Oregon’s housing needs. History need not repeat itself, and lawyers and those versed in the genesis of fair housing law can be the vehicle for change to break past patterns of segregation and re-segregation by advocating in local, state, and federal land use processes.