Southwest Fair Housing Council is where the people of Arizona can go if a landlord refuses to rent to them because they’re parents or if they’re disabled and they need a grab bar. The organization gets thousands of calls every year from across the state, and its staff walk people through the evidence they need if they want to file a housing discrimination complaint. Since it started doing this work decades ago, the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP) funding, which gives federal money to nonprofits across the country to carry out fair housing enforcement and education, has been “the cornerstone of our funding,” said Executive Director Jay Young.
But the second Trump administration has put that funding at serious risk. Last June, the Southwest Fair Housing Council’s three-year grant ran out, but the Trump administration hadn’t released a notice of funding (NOFO) to allow it to apply for another. Young laid off four of his eight staff members. The organization was able to keep its doors open, but those who remained had to take on more work. They weren’t able to respond to people who reached out as quickly or help them as robustly. “We were really impaired,” Young said.
After a lawsuit forced the administration to open up funding applications, the nonprofit was able to secure new grants this April, and Young hired three people, one of whom he had previously laid off, but it’s taken time and work to train and integrate them into the team. When we spoke in late August, they still weren’t operating at the level they had been before the layoffs.
When one of these fair housing organizations closes in a community, that leaves residents without someone to help them if they experience discrimination.
The uncertainty isn’t over. HUD has continued to make it difficult for organizations like Young’s to get the funding they have relied on for decades, and now new hurdles could make it almost impossible. In its most recent round of funding notices for fiscal year 2026, the administration has added two new hurdles that will almost certainly exclude most, if not all, nonprofit housing organizations like Young’s. “They are trying to disqualify existing FHIP recipients from receiving FHIP funding,” said Sasha Samberg-Champion, special civil rights counsel at the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), who served as deputy general counsel for enforcement and fair housing at HUD under President Biden.
Private Enforcement Initiative grants like the one funding Southwest Fair Housing Council’s work allow HUD to extend housing discrimination enforcement across the country through nonprofits with expertise in the field. HUD does not employ the inspectors to do this work directly. The 82 organizations across the country that are funded by FHIP grants processed about three-quarters of the 32,321 complaints of housing discrimination in 2024; HUD itself processed less than 5 percent, while state and local fair housing agencies took on about 21 percent.
Since the Trump administration has halted most of HUD’s fair housing enforcement and made no effort to hire more housing inspectors, using bureaucratic rules to force FHIP recipients out of business will halt most housing discrimination enforcement. This effort comes at the behest of a president who, over a half-century ago, helped his father run a real estate business that was sued by the Department of Justice for discriminating against Black people after a long history of such discrimination.
A HUD spokesperson defended its actions to the Prospect. “HUD stands behind the lawfulness of its NOFOs which reaffirm HUD’s commitment to its stewardship of taxpayer dollars,” the spokesperson said.
THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION HAS SLOW-WALKED funding for fair housing so much that it didn’t get around to sending out funding notices for fiscal years 2025 and 2026 until this July. HUD has stipulated that any organization that applies for a fiscal year 2026 grant can’t have received one in fiscal years 2023 or 2024. But Private Enforcement Initiative grants are always given out for three years; by definition, any organization that’s applying after its grant ended began that grant in FY2023. “Effectively, they are disqualifying all of the recipients,” Samberg-Champion said. The organizations will have no choice, if these restrictions stand, but to wait until next year to get funding, creating a gap of up to a year. Some organizations have other sources of funding that can get them through; the rest will face difficult financial choices, including possible closure.
Another big problem is that HUD is now saying that its grants can’t make up more than 50 percent of an organization’s operating budget. “That has everybody in a panic,” Samberg-Champion said. For “a very large number” of fair housing nonprofits, HUD funding makes up the majority of their budgets, which will now disqualify them from receiving any money at all. Some, he said, are able to get substantial outside funding, but it’s a minority.
For those that rely so heavily on this funding, these changes “almost by definition means they’re going to shut down,” Samberg-Champion said. His organization has sued the administration; that lawsuit is still pending.
The Trump administration’s changes are “an enormous break with history,” Samberg-Champion said. “The FHIP program has continued in roughly the same form across administrations in a fairly bipartisan form.”
Some other troubling changes HUD has attempted to make are on hold, for now. In fiscal year 2025 grants, the administration tried to change the recipients of FHIP grants from nonprofits to universities and other entities focused on technical efficiency, not fair housing investigation. It said it wouldn’t spend any money on enforcement or on fair housing outreach and education. It also included a demand that applicants include a statement about how the money would be used to further the administration’s objectives, Samberg-Champion said. There has been no grant money awarded for enforcement so far this year, which means that any organization whose three-year grant expired in 2026 hasn’t been able to apply for new funding.
After NFHA sued, a judge recently vacated those funding notices and ordered HUD to distribute the money using the structure it used in 2024, although the administration could still decide to appeal the decision. The Trump administration has defended the conditions it placed on the grants and said it “will continue these efforts, including availing itself of all legal options.” A successful appeal would “direct money away from the core of the program,” Samberg-Champion said.
There’s also a question about when and how the Trump administration will comply with the judge’s ruling and award the money. As of the end of August, no fair housing nonprofits had actually received FY2025 grants. That leaves them in severe financial strain and, for some, facing closure.
When one of these fair housing organizations closes in a community, that leaves residents without someone to help them if they experience discrimination. Sometimes all that needs to happen to resolve a problem is a phone call to a recalcitrant landlord, but these organizations can also help people file lawsuits.
By far the largest category of complaints stems from disability discrimination, which accounted for about 55 percent of all complaints in 2024. An example would be someone who uses a wheelchair being denied a first-floor apartment and having to navigate stairs. After that, racial discrimination accounted for about 16 percent, while discrimination on the basis of sex, including sexual harassment, represented about 7 percent.
These organizations do “all the work that makes fair housing real in a community, as opposed to something distant that happens in Washington,” Samberg-Champion said. “It’s not like someone else is going to pick up that work and do it all of a sudden.”
ALTHOUGH JAY YOUNG’S GRANT LASTS for two more years, he still has to come to an agreement with HUD every year in order for the money to flow. He’s concerned that the new restrictions will mean Southwest Fair Housing Council won’t be able to.
“I’m very concerned about having the same situation at the end of March of 2027,” he said. If that were to happen, and he had to go without the money again, “I’ll have to lay off half my staff again, there’s just no two ways about it. It would be devastating,” he said. “With our capacity much diminished, there will just be people who will not follow through with the process and be like, ‘Why bother.’” That would mean “fewer people that are able to exercise their fair housing rights.”
The second Trump administration has been attacking fair housing rights since coming into office. Early on, HUD and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) abruptly cut grants to over 60 fair housing organizations; NFHA sued and got the grants reinstated. Then HUD refused to make FHIP grants with fiscal year 2024 funding entirely. NFHA again sued, and a judge issued a permanent injunction compelling the administration to keep administering the funding. Eventually, the administration issued the notices of funding on September 30, the last possible day to issue them in the fiscal year.
After the DOGE-era staffing purges, those who are left inside HUD say they’ve been prevented from doing fair housing work. Trump issued an executive order purporting to end disparate impact litigation that looks for patterns of discrimination, and Samberg-Champion said that since last year it banned other fair housing organizations from doing work on disparate impact cases with FHIP funding. HUD has also turned its back on gender identity housing discrimination and redlining, and it’s refused to reimburse state and local housing agencies if they work on these issues, too.
Between January and July of 2025, HUD approved settlements that came to less than $20,000 total, compared to $4 million to $8 million a year previously; civil and criminal charges fell to just four in that time compared to 25 a year on average.
Things could get even worse for Southwest Fair Housing Council. The nonprofit has been able to secure other sources of funding over the year besides HUD, such as cities and counties in Arizona that chip in some of their own budgets. But they do that because they know the organization is getting such a big chunk of federal funding. If that continues to be erratic or even disappears, Young fears the other funding sources will dry up, too. Under that scenario, at some point he thinks he wouldn’t be able to keep his doors open.
That would have a huge impact on the people his organization serves. “There are just not a lot of avenues that people can go to if they’ve experienced illegal housing discrimination,” Young said. People can go straight to HUD or the Arizona attorney general, but they’re much less likely to succeed. “The deck is stacked against people when they don’t have a fair housing organization or an attorney to help them,” he said. Without his organization, “People are going to be on their own.”
