The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will release the rules with the aim of ending segregation in neighborhoods around the country, The Hill is reporting.
HUD plans to offer grant money to communities willing to build affordable housing within affluent neighborhoods. On the flip side, the federal agency will also give money to poorer neighborhoods to improve those communities through better schools, parks, libraries and grocery stores.
"HUD is working with communities across the country to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all," a HUD spokeswoman told The Hill. "The proposed policy seeks to break down barriers to access to opportunity in communities supported by HUD funds."
The regulations are a continuation of a rule made by the Obama administration in 2013, in which HUD started gathering data about diversity in neighborhoods around the country for the purpose of making such policy changes.
The new regulation has its share of critics, especially among conservatives.
Arizona Republican Rep. Paul Gosar, who is working to block the rule, said that the Obama administration "shouldn’t be holding hostage grant monies aimed at community improvement based on its unrealistic utopian ideas of what every community should resemble."
"American citizens and communities should be free to choose where they would like to live and not be subject to federal neighborhood engineering at the behest of an overreaching federal government," Gosar told The Hill.
Via: News Max
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