Donald Trump has gleefully announced that mostly white people who are “living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream” will no longer be forced to live near poorer Black and ethnic minority people.
In a tweet posted on Wednesday, the president announced he was rescinding legislation last amended by Barack Obama that sought to overcome historic patterns of segregation in urban areas of the US.
The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH) helped towns and cities plan new housing in a way that countered the decades-long pattern of more affluent white Americans settling in the suburbs while poorer Black and ethnic minority Americans were forced to live in cheaper and sub-standard inner city housing.
This trend was seeing some reversal since the turn of the century, assisted by an Obama-era tweak to the AFFH that required towns and cities to examine if any new housing projects exacerbated racial segregation.
In his tweet, the president said scrapping the rule would mean people “living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream” would no longer have to deal with crime and falling house prices.
He ended the thread: “Enjoy!”
The tweet was instantly called out as “racist” and “elitist”.
Back in the 1970s, Trump and his father were sued by the US Justice Department for allegedly racially discriminating when deciding who could buy flats in their new housing developments.
In 2016 during the presidential election, Hillary Clinton highlighted the issue, saying: “Donald started his career, back in 1973, being sued by the Justice Department for racial discrimination – because he would not rent apartments in one of his developments to African-Americans, and he made sure that the people who worked for him understood that was the policy.”
Trump said the case was settled with no admission of guilt.
“Yes, when I was very young, I went into my father’s company – had a real estate company in Brooklyn and Queens,” he said. “And we, along with many, many other companies throughout the country – it was a federal lawsuit – were sued. We settled the suit with zero, with no, admission of guilt.”