Dear Colleague Letter Asks Colleges to End Affinity Housing

The Trump administration is urging colleges and universities to end affinity and multicultural housing, calling the voluntary, minority student–focused living arrangements “neo-segregation” and claiming they violate the Fair Housing Act. Legal experts say the move is an attempt to scare institutions into pre-emptive compliance with guidance that will almost certainly fail if challenged in court.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development on Tuesday circulated a Dear Colleague letter from Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Craig Trainor, in which he wrote that affinity housing is a “disturbing trend” and that HUD “will no longer tolerate the unlawful racial discrimination in university housing that has gone on for far too long in this Nation’s educational institutions.”

In addition to standard dorm living, many colleges offer thematic housing that gives students the opportunity to live, work and learn alongside peers with similar interests or identities. For example, some institutions offer honors houses, language houses or cultural houses. In most cases, students apply for spots in these residences and living in one is optional.

Trainor took issue with such offerings in his letter, pointing to the Halisi Scholars Black Living-Learning Community at California State University, Los Angeles, as an example of what he called “Black-Only” student housing. Cal State LA opened the community in 2016 for “students who are a part of or interested in issues of concern to the Black community,” according to the university’s website, which notes that the living community is open to students of all backgrounds.

Trainor’s memo also highlighted a 2016 photo on the University of California, Berkeley, housing website that “featured ‘a picture of black students’ in a segregated dormitory alongside the statement: ‘I enjoy being around peers who look like me,’” he wrote.

“The outrage that would follow from pairing the same statement with a picture of white students in a dormitory is not difficult to imagine. And for good reason: decent Americans will not tolerate the morally contemptible project that is race segregation—and neither does federal law,” Trainor wrote. “Yet educational institutions persist and deploy dissembling terminology to facilitate this conduct.”

HUD spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment Thursday.

It’s unclear who has received the Dear Colleague letter and how it will be distributed to colleges, said Lindsey Tepe, director of government relations at the American Council on Education. As of Thursday afternoon, HUD had not posted the letter to its website and ACE was working on getting the word out about the guidance to its members. In a statement, the Association of College and University Housing Officers–International said it’s aware of the letter and committed to supporting its members and the students they serve.

The Dear Colleague letter is full of “misrepresentations and broad statements that appear pretty clearly aimed at scaring colleges into ceasing engaging in lawful activity,” which includes operating student affinity spaces, said Michael Pillera, director of the educational opportunities project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

Trainor posted the letter on LinkedIn on Thursday and compared it to the Feb. 14, 2025, Dear Colleague letter he wrote for the Education Department, which adopted an expansive interpretation of the Supreme Court’s ban on race-conscious admissions to issue broad prohibitions on anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion, including race-based programs, resources and financial aid.

“The educational-industrial complex would do well to remember: I have not gone away,” he wrote on LinkedIn.

Two federal courts blocked the February guidance two months later. Pillera said Tuesday’s letter feels like “Groundhog’s Day,” and expects it will face a similar fate.

“Just because [housing has] a theme or a purpose doesn’t make it unlawful if it is open to everyone,” he said. “This letter seems to imply that there’s this broad world of race-exclusive housing on campuses, which I think anyone who’s ever been on a college campus knows doesn’t exist.”

HUD plans to “pursue every available remedy to bring discriminatory institutions into compliance,” including compensatory and punitive damages, civil penalties, and injunctive relief, Trainor wrote. The threat echoes similar efforts by the Trump administration to eliminate DEI in other facets of higher education; earlier this month, the Justice Department announced new probes into 15 medical schools that it suspects of using race in admissions.

If any institutions do offer involuntarily segregated housing, that would be concerning to ACE, Tepe said. But that doesn’t appear to be what the letter is targeting, she added.

“The literature and research around affinity housing is pretty deep and suggests that students foster a greater sense of belonging when they have opportunities to interact with people who have similar affinities,” Tepe said. “I think conflating involuntary segregation with intentional opt-in communities for living is not quite accurate, to say the least.”