Tag Archives: Fair Housing Act

Blast from the fair-housing past

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As one might expect, the Obama administration has roused fresh criticism by HUD’s release of the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” rule.

The rule has been castigated as a new example of federal “overreach” and as “social engineering”; to which administration defenders reply that the rule isn’t really new, but rather an exposition of a 47-year-old law (the Fair Housing Act), and that the nation’s residentially segregated housing patterns are themselves the product of social engineering.

Before the public debate over AFFH gets too partisan, however, consider the following presidential words:

“Effective enforcement of our nation’s fair housing laws is also essential to ensuring equal opportunity. In the year ahead, we’ll work to strengthen enforcement of fair housing laws for all Americans.”

The speaker was not Obama, but Ronald Reagan, in his 1983 State of the Union address.

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Later in 1983, in a July 9 radio speech, Reagan elaborated on his support of the Fair Housing Act and his intent to fortify it:

“We believe in the bold promise that no person in the United States should be denied full freedom of choice in the selection of housing because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. We’re proposing a series of amendments that will put real teeth into the Fair Housing Act.”

Those amendments included adding disability and familial status as protected classes, a revision accomplished by congressional year passage five years later. Reagan also proposed stepped up enforcement and stiff fines.

“We believe this is an important step for civil rights,” Reagan concluded. “For a family deprived of its freedom of choice in choosing a home, our proposal will mean swift action and strong civil penalties to prevent discrimination in the first place. As I said, we’re committed to fairness and we’re committed to use the full power of the Federal Government whenever and wherever even one person’s constitutional rights are being unjustly denied.”

So much for the notion that vigorous enforcement of the Fair Housing Act is merely a liberal cabal.

New push for integration

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When the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its AFFH rule yesterday, it was the second cause for celebration among fair housing advocates in the last two weeks.

The first was the U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding the disparate impact doctrine — a key civil rights enforcement mechanism, under which housing policies can be found discriminatory on the basis of their effects, not merely their intent.

The second was the long-awaited AFFH rule. AFFH stands for “affirmatively furthering fair housing,” language contained in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 but not fully elucidated until yesterday.

Essentially, as HUD summarizes it, the rule is a means of overcoming segregation and fostering inclusive communities. This is entirely in keeping with the intent of the Fair Housing Act’s original sponsors – chief among them Sens. Walter Mondale and Ed Brook, who can be seen flanking LBJ as the president signs the legislation into law on April 11, 1968.

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The main point of the Act according to Mondale, “was to replace the segregated living patterns with ‘truly integrated and balanced living patterns.’” To Brooke, the act was meant to break the “dreary cycle of the middle-class exodus to the suburbs and the rapid deterioration of the central city.” (They said as much in their amicus brief to the Supreme Court in the disparate impact case.)

Their vision hasn’t exactly played out over the last half-century, as most major metropolitan areas remain highly segregated. Consider Boston, for example, which has a white/black dissimilarity index of 68. On a scale of 0 to 100, 0 represents total integration and 100, total segregation. Any place that registers over 60 is considered highly segregated. (The State of Vermont, by contrast, came in at 38.8, according to a 2012 report.)

In this map of the Boston area, based on 2010 Census data by Eric Fischer, red dots represent white people; blue dots, black people; orange, Hispanics; and green, Asians.

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Similar maps, some even starker in the depiction of racial separation, can be seen for most major U.S. cities. The AFFH rule, which makes operational the Fair Housing Act’s intent, is seen as a tool that will help overcome these longstanding segregated patterns.

Even though Vermont is 95 percent white, AFFH will have broad application here. After all, a major thrust is to break up pockets of poverty and promote inclusive settlement patterns that give people in protected classes – among them, racial minorities and disabled people – the choice to live in low-poverty areas with access to transit and good services. Vermont has plenty of room for more housing development in keeping with AFFH standards.

 

Here we go!

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Thriving communities house (2)Welcome to the new website devoted to our “Thriving Communities” campaign. We’d like this space to become a Vermont forum for a continuing discussion of fair housing and affordable housing. These are two distinct but overlapping public policy concerns. They have something in common that we’ll get to in a moment.

Fair housing means the absence of housing discrimination. The federal Fair Housing Act, passed in 1968, sought to give Americans the right to live where they choose without begin discriminated against on the basis of race, color, national origin, or other protected characteristics. Vermont followed up with its own fair housing law about two decades later, expanding the list of protected categories.

Alas, housing discrimination is still with us. Thousands of individual complaints are filed across the country every year, and Vermont has its own share of violations. But beyond the individual cases are systemic, or organizational obstacles to fair housing choice, often in the form of planning, zoning or governmental policies that effectively restrict where certain people – particularly, those of lower income – can live. Nearly half a century after the Fair Housing Act was passed, much of our nation remains heavily segregated by race and by economic status.

Affordable housing, by the standard definition, is housing that doesn’t consume more than 30 percent of a household’s income. Families who pay more than that are termed “burdened”; and those who pay more than 50 percent, “severely burdened.” Unfortunately, these terms apply to a large share of Vermont’s renters. That’s because (a) market prices put housing out of reach, and (b) there aren’t anywhere near enough subsidized housing units to accommodate lower-income renters.

One goal of “Thriving Communities” – and of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, a key sponsor – is to reduce pockets of poverty and to proactively promote inclusive communities of high opportunity. We want to encourage municipalities to welcome more affordable housing – multi-family housing, in particular – that’s located in mixed-income neighborhoods, in close proximity to town centers, transit and other vital services.

OK, so what do these two issues – fair housing and affordable housing — have in common? They’re both off the political radar.   Housing segregation and unaffordability are both major national problems, disadvantaging tens of millions, but they get very little attention from presidential candidates or Sunday talk shows.

Why the disconnect? We welcome your comments on this or on our posts to come. We’ll try to be newsy.