June 17, 2005 – Community organizations and government agencies working to dismantle barriers to housing opportunities may soon be forced to stretch already meager budgets even tighter. Proposals in the federal budget bill pending in the US House of Representatives would gut programs to combat housing discrimination against minority groups.
Opponents of the budget cuts say that private groups and non-federal agencies already have too few resources for the enforcement of federal, state and local fair housing laws. They argue that at a time when segregation and discrimination are steadily eroding American communities, sapping resources from fair housing enforcement activities will undermine civil rights and heighten barriers to economic stability and opportunity for underserved populations.
The 2006 House appropriations bill proposes to carve $3 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development?s (HUD) Fair Housing Assistance Program, which provides training and technical assistance to state and local agencies that help enforce fair housing law.
More controversially, the bill would also cut the Fair Housing Initiatives Program, the main HUD allocation devoted to the fair housing work of private groups, shrinking the total allocation by 20 percent to $16.1 million.
According to a letter sent Tuesday to the House Committee on Appropriations, signed by 40 members of Congress who oppose the cuts, this proposal would effectively bring the program?s funding to a historical low.
White testers were frequently presented with more available units than minority testers in the same situation, who were sometimes falsely told that the apartment they sought was unavailable.
The co-signers of the letter also stressed that at this level, an estimated 40 percent of eligible private organizations would be barred from funds for enforcement activities; another 20 percent of groups would be shut out of funds for community education programs. Last year, the federal government disbursed $17.6 million in grants to 106 private organizations across the country, with awards ranging up to $220,000.
Drawing a connection between housing rights and economic advancement, the co-signers argued, "Fair housing education and enforcement play a pivotal role in increasing minority homeownership? without the benefits of homeownership and integrated neighborhoods, minority populations must bear the high costs of segregation."
In an analysis of housing trends from 1980 to 2000, the US Census Bureau found that residential segregation in metropolitan areas remained highest for blacks, though the rate of segregation has declined over time. Meanwhile, segregation of Asians and Hispanics has tended to rise.
A 2000 HUD study, in which agents were sent into the housing market as undercover "testers," showed that in rental transactions in urban areas, blacks and Hispanics, compared to white testers, received "consistent adverse treatment" at rates of 22 and 26 percent, respectively. White testers were frequently presented with more available units than minority testers in the same situation, who were sometimes falsely told that the apartment they sought was unavailable.
Last year, federal, state and local agencies fielded over 9,000 discrimination complaints from individuals, an increase of 13 percent over 2003, but still barely half of the number of complaints processed by private organizations.
Other HUD research indicates similar trends for Asians and Native-Americans, along with discriminatory patterns in home buying and financing transactions.
"We still see strong evidence of discrimination in all kinds of housing-related activities," said Sara Pratt, a housing policy consultant and former director of enforcement at HUD?s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. "Everything from the pants-down, overt discrimination ? to much more subtle kind of corporate, policy-driven discrimination -- sometimes inadvertent, I think, sometimes conscious."
?Equal Opportunity? on the Books and on the Ground
Federal fair housing law, which emerged from the Civil Rights Act of 1968, protects individuals from discrimination in housing transactions and practices, including the purchase, rental, construction and general operations of public and private properties.
The main law, called the Fair Housing Act, combined with other statutes and mandates, bars discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, gender, disability and a family?s size and age make-up. Some state and local governments have over time enacted further protections for people not covered by the federal law, prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, age or political affiliation.
On the federal level, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is chiefly responsible for handling and investigating cases of housing discrimination. Discrimination cases can be settled through an official "conciliation" process, or litigated, either through a federal- or state-level administrative court proceeding or through the regular civil court system.
Private, community-based groups, as well as state and local agencies, are tasked with providing local fair housing enforcement and education services, which can include conducting providing workshops, processing complaints, and conducting site investigations. In 2004, of over 27,000 housing discrimination complaints filed nationwide, private groups received more than 18,000, according to the National Fair Housing Coalition?s 2005 report on fair housing trends.
On top of its basic enforcement duties, HUD has an additional federal mandate to "affirmatively further fair housing" in its funding and regulatory programs.But critics say the "affirmative" directive is too vague to truly impact fair housing policy.
In general, many fair housing advocates contend that this seemingly comprehensive regime of anti-discrimination protections often caves in the face of a harsher reality on the ground.
"The laws are not fully realized," said Mary Scott Knoll, executive director of the Fair Housing Council of San Diego, a community education and advocacy organization.
"Of course," she acknowledged, "there?s been generic progress" from the days when the law openly enforced, rather than restricted, racial inequality. Nonetheless, in her view, now that less obvious forms of discrimination are enchaining minority communities, "We are becoming resegregated."
Systemic Barriers Fall Outside Confines of Enforcement
A common criticism in the fair housing advocacy community is that the governmental and legal channels available to people who experience discrimination inherently fail to address underlying problems that fuel bias and segregation.
According to John Hooks, a housing rights attorney with the public interest law group Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, the fair housing enforcement system is designed to help the many discrimination victims who lack the time and resources to take violators to court.
"We as a government should be enforcing the law on their behalf," he said. "And we just aren?t doing that in a way that gives quick and effective relief right now."
Last year, federal, state and local agencies fielded over 9,000 discrimination complaints from individuals, an increase of 13 percent over 2003, but still barely half of the number of complaints processed by private organizations. Disability-related and racial discrimination complaints each comprised about 38 percent of the total.
While approximately one-third of complaints were settled through the conciliation system, in cases that did not end in a settlement, HUD and partner agencies issued formal charges of discrimination for 457 of the complaints, or fewer than 10 percent.
In one case that HUD investigated, a Muslim couple of Arab descent applied for an apartment in a housing complex shortly after the September 11 terrorist attacks. While reviewing their application, the resident manager made remarks about reports in the area that "people who wanted to kill Arabs and Muslims" were purchasing weapons. The couple?s application was denied a few days later, supposedly because of their credit history.
Later, a white investigator from a private advocacy group went undercover as an applicant, presented a similar credit history, and was treated favorably. HUD?s official charge of discrimination was issued last September, three years after the violation.
Underlying the advocacy community?s perception of bureaucratic incompetence is a sense that the government is overlooking institutional types of discrimination. For example, critics say housing development policies and zoning restrictions that isolate low-income people in certain parts of a city may cut into the social fabric of marginalized communities more deeply than abusive landlords.
Pratt said that while government agents focus on discrimination complaints involving individuals, they continue to hedge around the relatively "intractable core" of housing-related inequality. "It?s hard to get to the bottom of that kind of discrimination and get to real solutions ? not just band-aids," she said.
Funding for Advocates Falls Short of Front Lines
For Pratt, the lack of rigor in fair housing enforcement goes back to a lack of resources. Inadequate funding hinders government agencies, she said, but inflicts even more damage on the so-called "ground troops": non-governmental service providers that directly interface with communities and understand local patterns and origins of discrimination.
One such battalion of activists is the Fair Housing Council of Oregon, a private advocacy organization that handles thousands of complaints and litigates on fair housing issues. Executive Director Pegge McGuire approaches local segregation as a byproduct of overarching inequalities. Often, two housing crises work in tandem: a lack of affordability and discriminatory barriers to access.
She said that when a community is faced with a scarcity in affordable housing, underlying inequalities intensify, revealing "the greater impact that actual, more overt discrimination has" on low-income people who are also members of groups especially susceptible to bias; doors tend to close even more tightly against minorities, the disabled and other legally protected categories.
Recognizing that private groups like McGuire?s "actually do a lot of the front-end work on these cases," Pratt has urged Congress to give them the funding they deserve. In 2004, she presented legislators with an alternative funding proposal to provide fair housing organizations with roughly $50 million. About two-thirds would have gone toward enforcement activities. The rest would have been allocated for education and outreach campaigns to promote fair housing rights, or for seed money for new organizations.
Pratt predicts that the current budgetary outlook for fair housing work will only exacerbate the struggles of groups that already "work on nickels and dimes and pennies."
Viewing the enforcement system from the ground up, McGuire called HUD?s "affirmative" mandate for fair housing "the biggest joke in the country."
Noting the ironic disconnect between fair housing activism and fair housing policy, she said, "all of us small folks out there, who are expecting to see civil rights furthered, are holding all these different entities to that standard, and? the powers that have the ability to enforce that requirement don?t enforce it."
