Fair Housing Enforcement Failure

Redlining, the practice of only allowing people of a certain race, ethnicity or income level to live in a certain area, and loan discrimination practices of banks refusing to grant loans to certain groups of people have contributed to the modern housing landscape. The area in which you live may no longer have rules about who can live there but the modern landscape is very much a product of an area’s history.

Under the Obama administration fair housing laws that worked to undo years of this discrimination were implemented and enforced. However, under the Trump administration the Housing and Urban Development administration (HUD) is reversing such efforts. These actions which can be seen in the removal of “inclusive” and “free from discrimination” from HUD’s mission statement are just the beginning of a failure to enforce fair housing practices.

The head of the Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity division ordered a hold on several fair housing investigations which were given the highest priority under the previous administration. Ben Carson, the head of HUD, also told lawmakers that he planned to delay a ruling that governments had to create detailed plans of how to integrate racially divided areas. Rulings such as these could have a big impact on cases of overtly unfair housing practices such as in Houston.

In Houston, the mayor is under investigation for killing a multi-racial and multi-income housing development that was supposed to go into a predominately white, affluent area. The mayor is alleged to have stated privately that he killed it in order to achieve support for a restructuring of Houston’s pension system. The head of the Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Division negotiated directly with the mayor that was less stringent than forcing the city to pay $14 million to the Houston Housing Development for blocking this project.

The move of the Housing and Urban Development administration to not focusing on enforcing fair housing laws is a scary prospect. For decades fair housing practices have not been the way of life in America. The idea that people should not be barred from certain areas because of race or ethnicity is a relatively new one and if it is not stringently enforced businesses will continue to exploit people based on race, ethnicity or income level. It is alarming to consider this return to overt redlining and loan discrimination practices within housing because despite the 50 years between the Fair Housing Act of 1968 very little has changed and that is unacceptable.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/28/us/ben-carson-hud-fair-housing-discrimination.html