This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, December 27th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

New federal rules that may soon govern fair housing would punish communities merely for having a proportion of minorities different from other communities.

Aido Institute Senior Fellow Randall O'Toole assesses the situation.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has issued new rules called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing.

And these are draft rules but we already know how it's

going to play out because they've successfully taken a community on Long Island

New York to court for violating fair housing standards.

How do they violate the standards?

Because the community, a bedroom community of single family homes,

has a proportion of minorities is different from the rest of the country.

And so because the proportion happens to be different, they are de facto assumed to be guilty

of discriminating against minorities.

Now is this similar to what, how banks had been treated fairly recently in terms of

having distributing their loans in such a way that indicated a

pattern.

Well it is, it's exactly the same process, but the kicker is that communities that fail to have the appropriate distribution of minorities

are going to be required to build multifamily housing in their neighborhoods of single-family homes.

Now this has been a goal of urban planners for many years to get more people out of single-family

homes and into multifamily housing and to increase the density of communities.

So it's just a mere coincidence that this Department of Housing and Urban Development

Policy that's supposedly aimed at fair housing is actually meeting smart growth urban planners goals.

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