Patton was appointed Wednesday to head up the U.S. Now President Trump has appointed longtime loyalist Lynne Patton - who has zero housing experience and claims a law degree the school says she never earned - to run the office that oversees federal housing programs in New York. Patton accepted the same figures her predecessors had rejected.Donald Trump has made plenty of dubious personnel decisions since winning the presidential election, but the New York Daily News reports on an apparent hiring that will be tough to defend. Then, officials resubmitted the same analysis that was insufficient in April. HUD agency rules in the settlement with Westchester, and subsequent administrative battles, were widely anticipated to be a target of the Trump administration, which viewed Obama’s desegregation efforts as “ social engineering.” Westchester waited a few weeks once Patton was put in charge of the HUD office with jurisdiction over the county. The county’s consultant disputed that conclusion in a response letter. When HUD rejected Westchester’s 10th submission of exclusionary zoning analysis in April, the agency found the county’s consultants had failed to scrutinize how zoning rules in various towns influenced the concentration of minority populations and segregation of white populations. “The county is playing the same old game of alternative facts,” Gurian told a local newspaper. Civil rights attorney Craig Gurian, whose organization first brought suit over Westchester housing segregation and believes HUD’s oversight of the county has been too lax, likened the county’s analyses to the Trump administration’s habit of making up information to justify its claims. Westchester’s repeated submissions have skirted the truth in similar fashion, according to both civilian observers and HUD’s own previous responses to the county. Towns and counties routinely blow off the spirit of the work - which is to conduct a serious, rigorous, and independent analysis of how the status quo of who lives where relates to the rules that govern housing development in the area - and do the bare minimum necessary to meet the limp requirements set out by HUD. Local housing analyses have been a joke for years, and not just in the prominent, lawsuit-driven Westchester case. The county struck a settlement with HUD in 2009, but has failed to comply fully with it for close to a decade. Westchester’s fight with HUD originated from a lawsuit brought by the Anti-Discrimination Center. ![]() The agency had rejected 10 previous versions of the county’s “Analysis of Impediments,” a document which HUD grantees must submit to demonstrate their use of taxpayer money will not get spent into systems that tacitly reinforce racial segregation in housing. ![]() Lynne Patton, a former event planner for the Trump family whose nomination to a HUD position drew criticism from policy experts and housing advocates last month, reversed HUD’s position on Westchester’s zoning laws on Tuesday. The county is officially free from court-imposed restrictions on its use of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) funding after a recently appointed agency official with close ties to President Donald Trump and no experience in housing policy work signed off on county arguments that federal officials have consistently rejected for years. ![]() The extreme racial segregation of neighborhoods in Westchester County, New York will now continue with the help of federal funding.
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