REPORT TO HOUSING AND HUMAN SERVICES COMMISSION
SUBJECT
Title
Consider Draft Assessment of Fair Housing
Report
BACKGROUND
The City receives an annual award of federal grant funds from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). For 2022, the grant amount is approximately $1.5 million collectively for the Home Investment Partnerships (HOME) and Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) programs. The City uses these funds to support affordable housing, public improvements, and homeless prevention services.
Cities and counties that receive CDBG and HOME funds from HUD are required to complete an Assessment of Fair Housing (AFH) once every five years (the five-year rule was later modified, as discussed below). HUD requires federal entitlement jurisdictions (such as Sunnyvale) that receive CDBG and HOME funds to certify that they will affirmatively further fair housing by analyzing impediments to fair housing choices within their jurisdictions and to take appropriate actions to overcome the effects of any impediments identified through that analysis and maintain records on the progress being made through various actions. The City's current AFH was prepared in 2014.
The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing ("AFFH") Final Rule was published by HUD in July 2015 to establish a process that clarifies how recipients of HUD funding are required to meet obligations to affirmatively further fair housing as established by the Fair Housing Act, which was adopted as part of Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. In 2018, the Trump Administration made the Assessment optional. In response, the California Legislature passed Assembly Bill 686 (Santiago) in 2018. This California law requires that an AFH be included as part of a jurisdiction's Housing Element. The State law basically mirrors the 2015 version of the federal guidance for the AFH.
In 2019, the City partnered with the County's Office of Supportive Housing and other jurisdictions within the County of ...
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