Roberta on a rampage - social policies of Roberta Achtenberg, Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, Department of Housing and Urban Development

National Review, May 2, 1994 by Bruce Bartlett

No one outside the Bay Area would have heard any of this had Miss Achtenberg not met with Bill Clinton in January of 1992. At first skeptical of him--"a little too moderate for me"--she was won over at that meeting. Most gay activists would fall for Clinton after his impassioned West Hollywood speech supporting gay rights in May. The gay community raised about $5 million for Clinton in 1992, and the Human Rights Campaign Fund had ten thousand gays and lesbians canvassing for him around the country. When Clinton won, it was pay-back time.

Not Just Talk

NOW, what does Roberta Achtenberg mean for HUD? For one: action. Says an admiring former aide: "Where there's injustice, Roberta will show up." Whereas liberal fair-housing groups at first worried about her lack of experience, they now see an energetic ally. "On the whole," says National Fair Housing Alliance executive director Shanna Smith, "[HUD's fair housing] staff just needed someone with Roberta's leadership."

For anyone doing business connected to housing this means trouble. Fair housing doesn't mean just desegregation any more; it means rooting out the "systemic" discrimination of routine business practices that have a "disparate impact." Here Miss Achtenberg's keen sense of "civil rights" as now interpreted, is indispensable--because the "racism" she'll be rooting out is subtle indeed.

Fair housing, HUD maintains, depends on both fair lending and fair insuring--and Miss Achtenberg has promised to form special "units" to promote both. An indication of her approach to these issues came in a tussle over an interagency statement on fair lending released in March. The Achtenberg-backed version would have had language about advertising, marketing, and branching decisions that went beyond equal access to something approaching affirmative action (e.g., requiring banks to locate branches in heavily minority areas). "It was really pushing the envelope," says Karen Thomas, the regulatory counsel for the Independent Bankers Association of America.

The traditional banking agencies--like the Fed--quashed HUD's version. But for the banking industry it signals the entry of an aggressive new player on the scene. "This is already a very heavily regulated industry, and there's no need for one more regulator," says one insider. And bankers worry about what HUD might do on its own-like its recent proposal (as reported in the American Banker) that banks agree to set specific lending and hiring targets. (This amounts to lending by quota, which would essentially mandate risky loans.) Banks won't sign off on that. But Miss Achtenberg is in the process of formulating new lending regulations for Fair Housing Act compliance over which banks won't have a veto.

The insurance industry too is bracing for the Achtenberg Crusade. "[There is an] incredible impediment to economic empowerment that is insurance redlining and race-based discrimination, which is all too pervasive in the insurance industry," she told a seminar sponsored by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. "It is time ... to recognize that so many of these practices, though not motivated by discriminatory intent necessarily, have had a discriminatory and detrimental destructive effect."