The Trump administration said Thursday it is investigating whether Boston’s housing policies violate the federal Fair Housing Act, escalating its efforts to use landmark civil rights laws to target diversity, equity, and inclusion policies.
In a letter to Mayor Michelle Wu, Craig Trainor, assistant US secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, accused Boston of discriminating against white people and prioritizing people of color, rather than all low-income residents, in its efforts to support homeownership and affordable housing development. The investigation suggests Trump housing officials intend to target as discriminatory local programs that aim to level inequities created by decades of racial discrimination.
Quoting from the city’s own racial justice initiatives, Trainor wrote city officials “have set out to smuggle ‘racial equity into every layer of operations in City government.’”
“To this dubious end, the City of Boston (the City) has developed and intends to implement discriminatory housing policies in violation of the Fair Housing Act,” Trainor wrote.
The investigation could result in discrimination charges or a referral to the US Department of Justice, he said.
In a statement, a spokesperson for Wu rejected the accusations as “unhinged attacks from Washington.”
“Boston will never abandon our commitment to fair and affordable housing, and we will defend our progress to keep Bostonians in their homes,” the spokesperson said.
Housing specialists told the Globe that invoking the 1968 Fair Housing Act — passed to rectify the country’s history of residential segregation and racial discrimination in housing — fits into the same playbook the Trump administration has used to target diversity initiatives on college campuses.
Earlier this year, for example, the Education Department invoked the Civil Rights Act to try to force universities to end race-based admissions.
Jillian Lenson, a senior attorney for Lawyers for Civil Rights, called the Trump administration’s use and interpretation of the civil rights legislation, “antithetical to the very authorities that it cites.”
“It’s clear that civil rights as we know them, and as they have been understood in our country since these offices were created, is under attack and being turned on its head,” Lenson said. “It demonstrates how the Trump administration is trying to undermine decades of legitimate and necessary civil rights enforcement.”
In his letter to Boston, Trainor did not say which of the city’s housing policies HUD would investigate. But he referred to several programs, including “Welcome Home, Boston,” a Wu administration initiative that awards contracts for affordable housing developments on vacant city-owned parcels to local minority-owned developers. Trainor also cited the city’s “Anti-Displacement Action Plan,” which aims to stabilize gentrifying neighborhoods and keep longtime residents in their homes.
James Jennings, an emeritus professor of urban planning at Tufts University who authored the most recent study of fair housing in the city, said HUD’s letter reads like “something meant to stick it to the City of Boston and Mayor Wu, rather than a substantive critique of the city’s policies.”
Boston’s fair housing policies, Jennings said, do not create opportunities exclusively for Black residents and other residents of color. Rather, they are designed to create greater opportunity in neighborhoods still suffering from the detrimental impacts of discriminatory housing policies from decades ago.
“This is an ideological attack on the city, and they’re using fair housing as a tool for this political attack,” said Jennings.
Boston’s housing policies have been reshaped over decades by multiple mayors. Major changes were made in the wake of a landmark 1989 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, which found that local banks were systematically discriminating against residents of predominately Black neighborhoods, issuing far fewer mortgages in those communities than in mostly white neighborhoods.
The legacy of racist federal housing policy is still apparent. The homeownership rate among Black residents is around 35 percent, compared to nearly 70 percent for white households. And in 2023, the latest year for which data is available, just 9.4 percent of mortgages for one to four unit residences went to Black households, while white households accounted for 65 percent.
Fair housing and anti-displacement policies exist today because the ripple effects of old federal housing policies are still being felt by residents in low-income neighborhoods that were formerly redlined, added Tom Callahan, executive director of the Partnership for Financial Equity, a nonprofit that aims to close the racial wealth gap.
“If you’re running a program targeting first-time homebuyers, and 70 percent of white folks already own their home, and only 35 percent of Black folks own their home, you’re going to want to make sure you reach the people who don’t own, because those are definitionally the people who qualify for the program,” Callahan said. “You have to have a strategy to reach those folks, and that’s why these programs work.”
The letter Thursday was the latest salvo from a White House that has often sparred with the progressive Wu, particularly on issues of immigration. Wu was hauled before Congress earlier this year to face questioning about the city’s policies on cooperating with immigration authorities. She was reelected this fall in a landslide after a campaign built largely around pushing back against Trump.
News of the investigation angered housing and civil rights advocates who have worked on housing policy in Boston. Several said the policies Trainor is scrutinizing have been essential for increasing the homeownership rate in the city among Black residents and cutting down on lending discrimination that was once rampant here.
“It’s infuriating to see civil rights laws born out of anti-Black racism twisted to attack the very communities that they were designed to protect,” said Rahsaan Hall, chief executive of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts.
“The fear is that other municipalities and state agencies that are attempting to address a history of inequity and exclusion will then begin to backpedal out of fear of the attacks from this administration,” Hall said.
Housing and civil rights advocates said they were particularly stunned Trainor compared Wu’s anti-displacement plan to redlining, a practice prevalent in Boston in the 1930s and 1940s, when banks refused to issue loans in Black neighborhoods the federal government had identified as “high risk.”
“We have decades of research that demonstrates that the federal government has historically been the greatest implementer of racial discrimination in housing policy,” said state Senator Lydia Edwards, a Democrat from East Boston. “Redlining was a federal policy. So for them to accuse the city of discriminating against white people, when we know the history of the federal government’s housing policies, is laughable.”
Niki Griswold can be reached at niki.griswold@globe.com. Follow her @nikigriswold. Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker. Emma Platoff can be reached at emma.platoff@globe.com. Follow her @emmaplatoff.