Trump administration doesn’t care about the housing needs of low-income people

Last month Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Local Zoning Decisions Protection Act of 2017 to Congress. This was a quiet affair. Something the mainstream media weren’t too concerned about.

A dry, technocratic bill pertaining to zoning and the use of federal funds to monitor where and how people were living. It got lost amidst the clamorous noise generating from President Trump’s latest tweet, or perhaps because the NY Giants had just been beaten 13-38 at Green Bay.

Then one day later, Congressman Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) also introduced another bill to Congress that likewise went unnoticed. But both of these bills, like many of the quiet, administrative decisions currently being made by the Trump administration, are significant and will have a profound impact upon the lives of ordinary, American citizens.  And yet they are going unnoticed.

{mosads}In the case of these two bills, both nullified the affirmative action policies introduced by the Obama administration, which intended to track the condition of those living in below-acceptable housing and to see which American citizens were unduly affected.

These quiet, technocratic bills proposed to prohibit the use of federal funds for any kind of data collection effort that intended to track disparities in access to affordable housing, particularly along racial lines.

What this means in effect is that the Trump administration and the current Congress don’t really care whether black people are living in substandard housing or, indeed, have housing at all. That they don’t intend to focus on lifting up those living in poverty and giving everyone an equal chance at life. And they certainly don’t think we should be using taxpayers money to monitor the wellbeing of, none other than, a large swathe of disadvantaged America taxpayers.

This is not just negligence or penny-pinching. It is a deliberate and very chilling decision, which is echoed in other seemingly dry, technocratic, data-decisions of the current government.

Take for example the census. A census is an essential tool for governments all around the world. It tells the government how many citizens it has, how many are eligible to pay tax, where people live, what services they have, what belief systems they share and so on.

Censuses are a tool for governments to understand their populations, and to help direct their economies. It is not and should not be a mechanism to report on or intimidate residents.

Yet, a recent White House draft Executive Order suggests it wants to rebrand the census (or American Communities Survey which complements the decennial census) to be a tool to control American workers.

The draft, entitled “Executive Order on Promoting American Jobs and Workers by Strengthening the Integrity of Foreign Workers Visa Programs,” proposes to ask respondents whether they are citizens and questions about their immigration status.

What this essentially means is that those who are concerned about their status, or are even illegal, will be too intimidated to complete the census and we will have little to no understanding of the condition of the most vulnerable people living in the United States.

These examples are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to concerns over the new administration’s intended use, or misuse, of data to marginalize people and issues. Scientists and academics the world over have been scrambling to download climate and energy data from US Federal servers for fear that Trump and his climate-denying cabinet would wipe it.

Others fear that what data is publicly available on climate, energy, inequality or race may be hidden from public view altogether, thereby denying people the opportunity to track these crucial phenomenon and hold the government to account.

Data is a powerful tool for governments. Not collecting it can hide a multitude of sins, whilst collecting it and not releasing it to the public can result in gross abuses of power.

Administrative decisions about how we collect data, which groups we monitor, and what we do with that data should be a lively public debate. Not least of all as good quality, open data gives us the ability to tackle social and economic inequalities.

If we leave these decisions to the quiet corridors of the new White House, or ignore them when they are put before Congress, we will wake up in four years time with no sense of how the poorest and most vulnerable are faring, or even worse, with a government that routinely collects data to intimidate and alienate people. This isn’t just about data; it is about who we are, what we do and the world we want to live in.

Jessica Espy is the associate director of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network a global research network focused on climate change and sustainable development where she leads programs on data and sustainable urban development. She is also a Senior Research Officer at Columbia University in New York.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.