Boston Mayor Michelle Wu speaks during a Massachusetts Congressional Delegation press conference.Rod Lamkey/AP
The Department of Housing and Urban Development announced Thursday that it is opening an investigation into Boston’s housing policies, accusing the city of discriminating against white people.
“No person or entity—the City of Boston included—is permitted to violate civil rights protections in the name of ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion,’” Craig Trainor, the assistant secretary for fair housing and equal opportunity, wrote in a letter to Mayor Michelle Wu. The department is alleging that the city government had prioritized people of color in its affordable housing strategy and encouraged industry leaders to work with those communities.
Trainer cited the Fourteenth Amendment, said the city was engaging in a “racialist theory of housing justice,” and claimed that the city, “in a shameful echo of a darker period in our country’s history,” is attempting to “revive government-sponsored redlining.”
Wu’s office, in a statement to Boston 25 News, said, “Boston will never abandon our commitment to fair and affordable housing, and we will defend our progress to keep Bostonians in their homes against these unhinged attacks from Washington.”
In HUD’s letter, Trainer repeatedly mentions sections from a 2022 report from the city. That document, “City of Boston Assessment of Fair Housing,” details efforts to combat gentrification and outlines specific programs targeting Black and Latino residents, who the report says face increased risks of eviction and housing discrimination.
It’s the first investigation of racial discrimination in a city’s housing practices under the Civil Rights Act launched by President Donald Trump’s administration. In September, according to a New York Times investigation based on internal communications, memos, and other documents, there have been “efforts by the Trump administration to limit enforcement of the Fair Housing Act.” That act was hard fought in the Senate and was passed by the House in the days after the assassination of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.
Per the Times reporting, “half a dozen current and former employees of HUD’s fair housing office said that the Trump political appointees had made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs.”
Earlier this month, Wu announced that the City of Boston would join 11 other jurisdictions and nonprofit organizations in filing a lawsuit to “stop the Trump administration from creating unlawful and unreasonable restrictions on funding for proven solutions to homelessness, threatening to push hundreds of thousands of families and individuals onto the street as cold winter months arrive.”
Back in May, Boston joined another housing lawsuit to challenge the Trump administration’s decision to cancel $3.6 billion in housing and homelessness prevention grants if communities didn’t fall in line with the president’s executive orders.
On the city’s website, a report from February says that “more than 17,000 housing units have been built or started construction, including a third income-restricted, and another 12,000 units were added to the pipeline” in the first three years of Wu’s tenure.
Over fifty years ago, in 1973, the Justice Department was investigating the Trump family for discriminating against Black people in their real estate business. Donald Trump was named as one of the defendants. He was quoted at the time calling the allegations “absolutely ridiculous.” The Trumps went on the offensive, filing a contempt-of-court charge against one of the prosecutors and fervently denying the claims.
Eventually, the Trumps settled and signed a consent decree— which did not include an admission of guilt, but did set out ways to make sure the family desegregated their properties.
But it didn’t seem to stick.
In 1978, the government accused the Trumps of violating the consent decree. In a notice to the Trumps’ lawyer, Roy Cohn, a DOJ lawyer wrote, “We believe that an underlying pattern of discrimination continues to exist in the Trump Management organization.”
