Fighting Discrimination Against Mothers of Children with Disabilities

 

"Discrimination that Requires a Remedy: The Case of Mothers of Children with Disabilities," by Ewa Rejman (2025).  Mercer Law Review: Vol. 76: No. 2, Article 4. https://digitalcommons.law.mercer.edu/jour_mlr/vol76/iss2/4.

International human rights law devotes particular attention to the protection of vulnerable groups owing to their special needs and distinctive challenges which should be adequately considered. Building upon this premise and stressing the importance of gender approach, the Article describes particular vulnerabilities that mothers of children with disabilities face and explains how addressing them remains contingent upon safeguarding, in particular, the right to the highest attainable standard of health, the right to social security, the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to family life. Through the analysis of the responsibility for the omission in international law, as well as binding positive obligations in the area of economic, social and cultural rights, it identifies states’ duty to remedy discrimination that mothers of children with disabilities experience.

To this end, the article argues that these mothers suffer from associative discrimination on the basis of disability and indirect discrimination on the basis of sex. It relies on the definition of discrimination provided by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, according to which the discriminatory effect, even in the absence of intent, suffices to establish the existence of discrimination if other conditions - distinction, exclusion, restriction or preference or other differential treatment nullifying or impairing the recognition, enjoyment or exercise of rights on equal footing - are fulfilled. In doing so, it critically discusses the relevant jurisprudence on discrimination of vulnerable groups of the European Court of Human Rights, the European Court of Justice, the Inter‑American Court of Human Rights, and treaty-monitoring bodies by deducing the underlying principles and applying them to the protection of these mothers. 

As a remedy, the author proposes the introduction of “special measures” - instruments already recognized in international legal treaties - explaining that in cases concerning disability, unlike those involving race, measures should not be necessarily described as “temporary.” Considering the rights of mothers of children with disabilities, it is crucial to focus on indirect discrimination. The most relevant difference for our considerations is the presence of discriminatory effect on certain groups even in the absence of discriminatory intent, for example, “when the agent is simply unaware of and indifferent to the effects” of the act.

Associative discrimination is the legal term that applies when someone is treated unfairly because either someone they know or someone they are associated with has a certain  protected characteristic. The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) explicitly prohibits “excluding or otherwise denying equal jobs or benefits to a qualified individual because of the known disability of an individual with whom the qualified individual is known to have a relationship or association.”

Mothers of children with disabilities have to be treated differently from other people because their situation is significantly different.  These individuals simply have different needs that have to be addressed differently in order to enjoy opportunities as close as possible to those available to others. The same logic should be applied to caregivers, in this case, mothers of children with disabilities, whose needs also change because of situations in which they find themselves.

Book Review: "Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (Politics and Culture in Modern America)"

 

Cracked Foundations: Debt and Inequality in Suburban America (Politics and Culture in Modern America), by Michael Glass. University of Pennsylvania Press: October 7, 2025. 336 pages, hardcover $34.95.

This book describes how debt and speculation financed the suburban American dream and led to today’s inequalities. In the popular imagination, the suburbs are synonymous with the “American Dream” of upward mobility and economic security. After World War II, white families rushed into newly built suburbs, where they accumulated wealth through homeownership and enjoyed access to superior public schools. In this revelatory new account of postwar suburbanization, historian Glass exposes the myth of uniform suburban prosperity. Focusing on the archetypal suburbs of Long Island, Cracked Foundations uncovers a hidden landscape of debt and speculation.

The author shows how suburbanites were not guaranteed decent housing and high-quality education but instead had to obtain these necessities in the marketplace using home mortgages and municipal bonds. These debt instruments created financial strains for families, distributed resources unevenly across suburbs, and codified racial segregation. Most important, debt transformed housing and education into commodities, turning homes and schools into engines of capital accumulation. The resulting pressures made life increasingly precarious, even for those privileged suburbanites who resided in all-white communities. 

For people of color denied the same privileges, suburbs became places where predatory loans extracted wealth and credit rating agencies punished children in the poorest school districts. Long Islanders challenged these inequalities over several decades, demanding affordable housing, school desegregation, tax equity, and school-funding equalization. Yet the unequal circumstances created by the mortgages and bonds remain very much in place, even today.

Cracked Foundations not only transforms our understanding of housing, education, and inequality but also highlights how contemporary issues like the affordable housing crisis and school segregation have their origins in the postwar golden age of capitalism.

Glass is an Assistant Professor of History at Boston College.

Book Review: "Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality"

Patchwork Apartheid: Private Restriction, Racial Segregation, and Urban Inequality by Colin Gordon. Paperback / Ebook, $37.50 284 pages. Russell Sage Foundation: 2023.  ISBN:978-0-87154-554-1.

For the first half of the twentieth century, private agreements to impose racial restrictions on who could occupy property decisively shaped the development of American cities and the distribution of people within them. Racial restrictions on the right to buy, sell, or occupy property also effectively truncated the political, social, and economic citizenship of those targeted for exclusion. In Patchwork Apartheid, historian Gordon examines the history of such restrictions and how their consequences reverberate today. 

Drawing on a unique record of property restrictions excavated from local property records in five Midwestern counties, Gordon documents the prevalence of private property restriction in the era before zoning and building codes were widely employed and before federal redlining sanctioned the segregation of American cities and suburbs. This record of private restriction - documented and mapped to the parcel level in Greater Minneapolis, Greater St. Louis, and two Iowa counties - reveals the racial segregation process both on the ground, in the strategic deployment of restrictions throughout transitional central city neighborhoods and suburbs, and in the broader social and legal construction of racial categories and racial boundaries.

The author also explores the role of other policies and practices in sustaining segregation. Enforcement of private racial restrictions was held unconstitutional in 1948, and such agreements were prohibited outright in 1968. But their premises and assumptions, and the segregation they had accomplished, were accommodated by local zoning and federal housing policies. Explicit racial restrictions were replaced by the deceptive business practices of real estate agents and developers, who characterized certain neighborhoods as white and desirable and others as black and undesirable, thereby hiding segregation behind the promotion of sound property investments, safe neighborhoods, and good schools. 

These practices were in turn replaced by local zoning, which systematically protected white neighborhoods while targeting “blighted” black neighborhoods for commercial and industrial redevelopment, and by a tangle of federal policies that reliably deferred to local and private interests with deep investments in local segregation. Private race restriction was thus a key element in the original segregation of American cities and a source of durable inequalities in housing wealth, housing opportunity, and economic mobility.

Patchwork Apartheid exhaustively documents the history of private restriction in urban settings and demonstrates its crucial role in the ideas and assumptions that have sustained racial segregation in the U.S. into the twenty-first century.

The author Gordon is a Professor at the University of Iowa.

Read the RSF Russell Sage Foundation article.

Source: Read the Google Books overview.

The Maryland Commission on Civil Rights 2025 Civil Rights Gala is on August 23rd!

 

Thursday, April 24, 2025 SAVE THE DATE & JOIN US Maryland Commission on Civil Rights Annual Civil Rights Gala ​Looking Ahead, No Turning Back: Transforming Challenges into Opportunities Saturday, August 23, 2025 The Hall at Maryland Live! Casino & Hotel 7002 Arundel Mills Circle #7777 Hanover, Maryland 21076 Check back soon for exciting announcements on the evening's program and festivities! Early Bird tickets are available through May 31! Purchase your ticket today to lock in this special promotional price. Victim of Discrimination? Training & Partnerships HOME      ABOUT MCCR      SERVICES      PUBLICATIONS      EVENTS      PRESS      CONTACT US

Bergen-Belsen Survivors Mark the 80th Anniversary of Camp’s Liberation

Survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen and their families have gathered at the site in northern Germany to officially commemorate the 80th anniversary of its liberation by British troops. Representatives of victims’ associations and the military took part in the ceremony along with the British deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner. During the second world war, Soviet prisoners of war and later Jewish prisoners were held at the camp under extremely hostile conditions. According to the foundation responsible for the upkeep of the camp as a memorial site, about 20,000 prisoners of war and at least 52,000 concentration camp prisoners died there, including Anne Frank, the Jewish diarist, and her sister, Margot.

Accompanying about 180 British Jews, including survivors and their relatives, the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, read a psalm. Lola Hassid Angel, 88, from Greece, described the camp in an interview with the Guardian earlier this month as “an abomination that historians will one day refer to as a dark page but which we, as the last survivors, are duty-bound to describe”.

At the ceremony, another survivor, 100-year-old Albrecht Weinberg, from Germany, recalled being taken half-dead by train from Auschwitz to Belsen. “I found myself lying amid the dead and the living on a wagon in Bergen-Belsen. Our bodies were tipped out. Two days later, a tank drove in. I thought now I’ll finally be freed by death, but it was British soldiers coming to liberate us. They later told me I’d weighed 29kg [4st 8lb].”

At the time in April 1945, the Guardian (London) reported that a senior medical officer with the British army had witnessed thousands of typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis cases on entering the camp, calling it “the most horrible, frightful place” he had ever seen.

“There was a pile - 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide, and 4ft high - of the unclothed bodies of women all within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead and men had come to the gutters to die, using the curbstones as back rests,” the correspondent David Woodward wrote. Accounts from the camp by soldiers and journalists were spread around the world and proved more shocking in many ways than other discoveries of death camps to the east, such as Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz, as they had either been demolished to hide evidence of the crimes committed there, or emptied of their inmates, who, like Weinberg, were sent on death marches.

At Belsen, the camp construction and the evidence of what had occurred there remained intact. Some of the Nazi soldiers involved in the death machine were still on site. The large number of prisoners and the conditions at the camp led to mass outbreaks of dysentery, typhus, and malnutrition, leading to about 500 deaths a day, most during the final weeks of the war. A documented 14,000 survivors died by the end of June 1945, many of whose digestive systems had been unable to cope with the food they were given after the liberation of the camp.

Every year, about 250,000 people visit the Memorial and over 1,000 groups take part in guided tours, study days, and projects here.

Read the April 27, 2025 the Guardian article.

"You Don’t Need Zoning to be Exclusionary: Manufactured Home Parks, Land-Use Regulations, and Housing Segregation in the Houston Metro

 

"You don’t need zoning to be exclusionary: Manufactured home parks, land-use regulations and housing segregation in the Houston metropolitan area," by Andrew Rumbach, Esther Sullivan, Shelley McMullen, & Carrie Makarewicz, Land Use Policy, Volume 123, 2022, 106422, ISSN 0264-8377, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landusepol.2022.106422. 

Manufactured home parks (MHPs), businesses that are “designed, developed, operated and maintained for the placement and occupancy of manufactured homes on a long-term basis,” are an important source of affordable housing in the U.S. and other countries1. The social and spatial stigma surrounding MHPs has been widely documented, and the location of these communities is a key feature of their marginalization.

This study examinea the how land use regulations contribute to the spatial distribution and segregation of MHPs in Greater Houston, a fast-growing urban region in the southern U.S. At the local-government scale, we collect land-use regulations from the 134 jurisdictions in the Houston MSA to analyze how jurisdictions shape development, expansion, or improvement of MHPs within their boundaries, and how the regulation of MHPs varies across jurisdictions. At the scale of the individual MHPs, we draw a random proportionate sample of 400 MHPs and collect data from primary and secondary sources including tax parcel records, local zoning maps, remotely sensed imagery, and a proprietary real estate dataset. 

The study discusses four key findings. First, local governments use a variety of land-use tools, not just zoning, to exclude, limit, or condition the placement of MHPs within their respective jurisdictions. Second, we show that these land-use regulations have widely varying requirements for the (re)development of MHPs. Third, we find that a significant number of MHPs are already located in unincorporated areas and that new MHPs will be less likely to be in incorporated areas. Finally, the study finds that local governments often treat MHPs as something other than housing, which introduces important uncertainties about the future of MHPs.

Read the December, 2022 Science Direct article.

The Maryland Center for History and Culture has a Great Digital Collection of Exhibits - Including on Segregation - on its Website and Available in Balltimore

The Museum at the Maryland Center for History and Culture  (in the Meyerhoff Courtyard at 610 Park Avenue, Baltimore, MD 21201. 410-685-3750.) has a great digital collection of audio and informational exhibits on its website and available in person. It is  a statewide resource headquartered in f Baltimore’s Mount Vernon neighborhood cultural district, featuring over 1,000 objects on display in 15 permanent and rotating exhibition galleries and with a library housing 7 million books, documents, manuscripts, and photographs available for research and scholarship. The Center has a museum, library, holds educational programs, and publishes scholarly works on Maryland. Altogether, the Center houses one of the country’s largest collections of state heritage maintained by a private, nonprofit institution. Formerly the Maryland Historical Society, it was founded on March 1, 1844, and is the oldest cultural institution in Maryland. 

There is a vast collection at the H. Furlong Baldwin Library. The online collection on segregation includes "Juanita Jackson Mitchell and Virginia Jackson Kiah interview, 1975  (1975-07-15)," Gwynn Oak Amusement Park protestors riding ‘Freedom Now’ bus (1963-07-04), and Paul Robeson and Dr. John E. T. Camper protesting Ford’s Theatre Jim Crow admission policy (1948-03). The online resources has Research Guides, Finding Aids, Educator Resources, and more. Highlights of museum collection include: Native American archaeological artifacts dating to 5,000 B.C.; the world’s largest assembly of paintings by members of the Peale family; nine portraits by artist Joshua Johnson—recognized as the first professional African American artist in the United States; and Maryland landscape painting by Francis Guy. Visit the Exhibitions page for more information about all of the current exhibitions.

The Center is a community partner of Preserve the Baltimore Uprising, a digital archive devoted to preserving and making accessible media created and captured by people and organizations involved in or witness to the protests following Freddie Gray's death in 2015. The 2016-2017 exhibit "What & Why: Collecting at the Maryland Historical Society" included items from the Preserve the Baltimore Uprising collections in a video installation.

To visit the Museum, due to hourly capacity limits it is strongly encouraged that you book your ticket in advance. The admission rates are $12 - Adults, $10 - Seniors $9 - Students, free - Members and Children under 2, free first Thursdays. The The museum and shop hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Sunday (With extended hours the first Thursday of each month until 8:00 p.m.).

Read the FAQs of the Center.

Plaque Honoring Housing Segregation Leader William L. Marbury Removed from Bolton Hill and Decommissioned by Baltimore

Baltimore's Board of Estimates has decommissioned and removed a raised plaque honoring a segregationist from public property in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city. The William L. Marbury Plaque was placed in the late 1930s at the south end of a wide median strip in the 1700 block of Park Avenue near the intersection of Park Avenue and Wilson Street by the Mt. Royal Garden Club, a predecessor of today’s Bolton Hill Garden Club where it remained for almost 90 years. It was installed to honor an attorney who lived in Bolton Hill in the early 1900s. After the November 2024 removal, there remains a hole in the ground Its removal from public property is consistent with the community’s wishes and the plaque has been given to the Marbury family, which was “willing and anxious” to receive it.The plaque was been removed in November 2024 from city-owned land in Bolton Hill and decommissioned by the city on Wednesday, January 8, 2025. The inscription on the plaque read: "William L. Marbury, Dec. 26, 1859   Oct. 26, 1935, Planted by Mt. Royal Garden Club."

He served as the U.S. Attorney for Maryland during the Grover Cleveland administration or as president of Maryland State Bar Association in 1910. He ran unsuccessfully for the U. S. Senate in 1913. The firm where he and his son worked for many years, then known as Marbury Miller and Evans, merged in 1952 with Piper, Watkins, Avirett & Egerton to create Piper & Marbury, now part of DLA Piper.

William Luke Marbury Sr. was also a segregationist - the founder in 1910 of the Mount Royal Protective Association, whose mission was “to halt African Americans from renting or purchasing property in the Mount Royal District, which included present-day Bolton Hill and Reservoir Hill.” Marbury had a record of promoting residential segregation.

“Marbury is credited with being the architect of redlining laws in Baltimore,” neighborhood resident and a past president of the Bolton Hill Community Association David Nyweide wrote in the December issue of The Bolton Hill Bulletin. “He actively tried to disenfranchise voters in Maryland with dark skin, even arguing, unsuccessfully, before the U. S. Supreme Court that the State of Maryland could legally strip their voting rights because Maryland never ratified the Fifteenth Amendment. He himself was a descendant of the plaintiff in Marbury v. Madison about a century earlier, the case which famously established the power of the Supreme Court to invalidate state laws and acts of Congress that contravene the Constitution.”

Historians also note that Marbury came from a family of plantation-owners in Southern Maryland who held slaves before moving to Baltimore in the 1870s. “Marbury helped draft several state bills designed to disenfranchise Black Marylanders’ voting rights from the late 1890s to 1911,” a 2020 report by the Bolton Hill committee. about Marbury. said. “As he told the Baltimore Sun in January 1910, ‘it is an anomalous condition that an inferior race should share the government with the superior one.’ “

By 1910, “Marbury had also become an advisor to members of the Baltimore City Council who were promoting residential segregation, and he help them draft a series of residential segregation laws between 1910 and 1917, among the earliest such urban statues in the country,” the report stated. “When they proved so conservative as to fail to pass constitutional muster in the Supreme Court, Marbury favored enforcement tools in the form of restrictive covenants and the Mount Royal Protective Association, which was founded with the explicit purpose to stop Black people from renting or purchasing homes in Bolton Hill.” In 1910, Baltimore was the first U.S. city to pass a residential segregation ordinance.

Marbury “did not…simply hold beliefs about racial segregation that were not uncommon for other white people of his time,” the committee stated in its report. “[H]e was instead a locally prominent white man who actively shaped the world of Jim Crow during the early twentieth century” and the plaque “memorializes a former resident of Bolton Hill who would not be honored today for his public, proactive efforts to disenfranchise Black people and inhibit them from living in the neighborhood.” Because of “the unverified reasons for the plaque’s placement but unequivocal knowledge of the revolting public reputation of the man honored by the plaque, the committee recommends removal,” the committee concluded, adding a suggestion that the plaque be given to “a Marbury descendant.” The garden club’s executive committee agreed with the recommendation to remove the plaque. The committee “considers the plaque to no longer represent the values of the garden club and the Bolton Hill neighborhood as it is a painful reminder to many of exclusionary and discriminatory times.”

Nyweide said in his article that there was some debate within the community about removing the plaque. “Reasonable, dissenting voices to removing the plaque were concerned that it would erase the odious history it signified, where dispensing with it would be a convenient means of ignoring the history of segregation in Bolton Hill,” he wrote. “Yet, that history remains despite the absence of the plaque on the Park Avenue median, and the public historic markers committee’s work was a means of drawing attention to it. As the committee concluded, the plaque was placed to honor a man whose legacy would not be honored with such a plaque today by the Bolton Hill Garden Club nor by the Bolton Hill Community Association. His former residence does not bear a Blue Plaque [marking the homes of noteworthy Bolton Hill residents who have died.] The Marbury plaque’s placement amid a grassy median on Park Avenue had become as incongruous as the man himself would be today.”

“To his descendants, the Marbury plaque is a familial artifact,” he wrote. “They had no say in inheriting the racist legacy of their forebearer, just as today’s residents of Bolton Hill did not live in the neighborhood of Marbury’s day. The Marbury plaque remains, just not where it was originally planted.”

Read the January 8, 2025 Baltimore FishBowl article.

U.S. Department of Justice Secures $360,000 Settlement in Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Against New Mexico Property Manager & Apartment Complex

The U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ) has announced that the owners and former property manager of a federally subsidized apartment complex in Albuquerque, New Mexico have agreed to pay $360,000 to resolve a lawsuit alleging that the former property manager sexually harassed female tenants in violation of the Fair Housing Act.

The department’s lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico in March 2024, alleges that for over 10 years, property manager Ariel Solis Veleta (Solis) sexually harassed female tenants at St. Anthony Plaza Apartments, a Section 8 Project-Based Rental Assistance property with 160 units in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The suit alleges that Solis’s conduct included making unwelcome sexual comments to female tenants, touching female tenants without their consent, locking female tenants in his office to demand sex acts, and threatening to evict female tenants who did not give in to his sexual demands.

“A home should be a place of refuge, not fear,” said Deputy Assistant Attorney General Kathleen P. Wolfe of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “The Justice Department will hold property managers and landlords accountable when they target and exploit vulnerable tenants with sexual harassment.”

The department’s lawsuit also names as defendants the owners and operators of St. Anthony Plaza Apartments, PacifiCap Properties Group LLC, St. Anthony Limited Partnership, PacifiCap Holdings XXXVIII LLC, and PacifiCap Management, Inc. The lawsuit alleges that these defendants are vicariously liable for the sexual harassment of their agent, Solis. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Inspector General participated in the investigation that uncovered the evidence leading to the lawsuit.

Under the consent decree, which must be approved by the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico, the defendants must pay $350,000 to tenants harmed by Solis’s harassment and a $10,000 civil penalty to the U.S. The consent decree permanently bars Solis from contacting tenants harmed by his harassment, permanently bars Solis from managing residential rental properties, and mandates training and the adoption of policies and procedures to prevent future discrimination at residential rental properties owned or managed by defendants.

If you are a victim of sexual harassment by another landlord or property manager or have suffered other forms of housing discrimination, call the USDOJ’s Housing Discrimination Tip Line at 1-800-896-7743, email the Department at fairhousing@usdoj.gov, or submit a report online. More information about the Civil Rights Division and the laws it enforces is available at www.justice.gov/crt.

Read the February 13, 2025 USDOJ article.

U.S. Department of Justice (USDOJ) Files Proposed Settlement Agreements Regarding Accessibility Retrofits

 

The settlement agreements were filed on March 25 and 27, 2025, the  at, respectively, The Kendrick, in Needham, Massachusetts, and Emerson at Edge on the Hudson, in Sleepy Hollow, New York. The complaint, which was filed on June 18, 2024, alleges that several Toll-related entities and others violated the Fair Housing Act by failing to design and construct residential properties in New York and elsewhere with the required accessibility features.  The case was referred to the Department of Justice after the Department of Housing and Urban Development received a complaint, conducted an investigation, and issued a charge of discrimination.  The complaint is also based on evidence obtained by the USDOJ's Fair Housing Testing Program.

On June 25, 2024, the court approved a consent decree between the U.S. and Defendant Lendlease Construction LMB Inc.  The decree requires Lendlease not to discriminate in future design and construction, implement an educational program, and pay a $10,000 civil penalty.  On July 28, 2024, the court approved a consent decree between the U.S. and Defendant GreenbergFarrow Architecture, Inc.  The decree requires GreenbergFarrow not to discriminate in future design and construction, implement an educational program, and pay a $30,000 civil penalty. 

On January 8, 2025, the U.S. Attorney’s Office filed a second amended complaint.  On March 1, 2025, the court approved a settlement agreement regarding retrofits at Parc at Princeton Junction, in Princeton, New Jersey.  On March 4, 2025, the court approved a proposed settlement agreement regarding retrofits at another property, The Morgan, in Jersey City, New Jersey.

Read the April 2, 2025 USDOJ article.

Missouri GOP Close to Passing Bill Letting Landlords Discriminate Against Section 8 Renters

 

This week, the Missouri Senate passed legislation that if becomes law, the state will prevent municipalities in Missouri from enacting source of income discrimination bans, and will void bans already in place in St. Louis, Webster Groves, Columbia, and Clayton, along with a portion of Kansas City. Kansas City passed a source of income discrimination ban last year, though it was largely paused by the courts in February. Columbia, St. Louis, Webster Groves and Clayton have similar protections on the books. The laws make it illegal for landlords to discriminate based solely on the fact of renters’ lawful sources of income, including Section 8, veterans’ benefits and Social Security.

Source of income discrimination bans are designed to prevent landlords from refusing to rent to potential tenants based solely on the kind of income that they have available to them. Many landlords will only consider W-2 wages when evaluating potential tenants, but this helps to prevent many of the poorest from being able to access safe, stable housing. A single mother may have child support payments as her primary source of income, but a landlord is not bound to consider that when she applies for tenancy. A bus driver who has suffered repetitive stress injuries and now receives Social Security Disability Insurance may also struggle to find a landlord who is willing to rent to them. 

The most common form of source of income discrimination is a refusal to accept Housing Choice Vouchers, also known as Section 8, a federal housing program that has been addressing homelessness in the U.S. since 1974. Despite being chronically underfunded by the federal government, these vouchers have proven to raise people out of poverty, improve mental and physical health outcomes, and decrease homelessness. 75% of HCV holders have extremely low incomes, defined as less than 30% of the federal poverty line (currently $32,150 for a family of four) or less than 30% of the local area median income. The Section 8 program allows these families to pay 30% of their income in rent while the government pays the balance.

The legislation, which has cleared the House and Senate in differing forms, would make it extremely difficult for these low-income renters, the majority of whom have already experienced chronic homelessness, to find housing. A 2018 study showed that over 67% of landlords refused to rent to voucher-holders in cities without source of income anti-discrimination laws. In comparison, less than 31% of landlords refused to rent to voucher holders in cities with source of income discrimination bans in place. This demonstrates that source of income discrimination bans are effective local public policy and should not be preempted by our state government.

This legislation is being framed as a protection for landlords, seeking to prevent them from being “forced” to participate in a federal program. They say that this is government infringement on the property rights of landlords. They say that it’s too hard to comply with government regulations for landlords who participate in the section 8 program. To participate as a landlord, property owners simply have to submit to an annual inspection and ensure that their rental rates are in compliance with federal Fair Market Rent standards, which are typically very generous. Inspection protocols have recently been revised to only consider key health and safety factors rather than cosmetic issues.

A Missouri Independent reporter said that in listening to Missouri legislative committee discussion on this issue over the last two years, it seems like the concerns of landlords are actually centered on a prejudiced belief that poor renters are bad tenants.

Federal data shows that renters using housing vouchers are actually excellent tenants who stay in a unit for an average of 7 to 8 years, despite the fact that landlords are free to evict them for breaking the terms of their rental agreement. This is because of the program’s smooth transitions in employment status of renters, adjusting the amount paid by the government based on fluctuations in the income of the renter. Voucher holders are also typically assigned a case manager that helps renters to understand the terms of their lease and comply with landlord regulations. 

Over 86% of rental units in the country are owned by for-profit entities. If we allow these landlords to opt-out of renting to single parents living on child support, individuals with disabilities that prevent them from working full-time, and seniors and other low-income families utilizing these federal vouchers, where do we envision they will go?

Read the April 26, 2025 Missouri Independent article.

Read the April 24, 2024 KCUR 89.3 article.

Read the April 24, 2025 NPR article.

White House May Slash Federal Housing Aid to the Poor

 

The White House is considering deep cuts to federal housing programs, including a sweeping overhaul of aid to low-income families, in a reconfiguration that could jeopardize millions of Americans’ continued access to rental assistance funds. The potential changes primarily concern federal housing vouchers, including those more commonly known as Section 8. The aid generally helps the poorest tenants cover the monthly costs of apartments, town homes, and single-family residences.

Administration officials recently discussed cutting or canceling out the vouchers and other rental assistance programs and potentially replacing them with a more limited system of housing grants, perhaps sent to states, according to three people familiar with the matter. The overhaul would be included in Trump’s new budget, which is expected to be sent to Capitol Hill in the coming weeks.

The exact design and cost of the retooled program is unclear, and any such change is likely to require approval from Congress, as White House budgets on their own do not carry the force of law. But people familiar with the administration’s thinking said the expected overhaul would probably amount to more than just a technical change, resulting in fewer federal dollars for low-income families on top of additional cuts planned for the rest of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Recently, the Trump administration took the first steps toward potentially selling the agency’s headquarters in Washington.

Federal voucher programs currently provide assistance to 2.3 million low-income families, according to the government’s estimates, who enroll through their local public-housing authorities. The aid is part of a broader universe of rental assistance programs set to exceed $54 billion this fiscal year. But the annual demand for these subsidies is far greater than the available funds, creating a sizable wait list as rents are rising nationally.

“If there were a cut to the voucher program, essentially, you would see a decrease to the number of families that are served by the program,” said Eric Oberdorfer, the director of policy and legislative affairs at the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials. At the moment, one in four families eligible for vouchers are able to obtain them because of funding constraints. A federal cut would put public-housing agencies in a position in which “they would need to make difficult decisions” and in some cases stop providing benefits, Oberdorfer said. Rachel Cauley, a spokeswoman for the White House budget office, said in a statement that “no final funding decisions have been made.”

A potential overhaul of the housing agency comes on the heels of a congressional deal to fund the government through September that increased some housing spending yet did not keep pace with rising rents and the growing demand for federal aid. The funding gap could result in about 32,000 voucher recipients soon losing access to federal housing aid, according to Democrats’ estimates, on top of additional cuts once funding runs out in a pandemic-era program that expanded voucher availability.

Read the April 17, 2025 New York Times article.

META Oversight Allows Anti-Trans Hate from Others, But Tells Meta to Remove Its Own

 

GLAAD, the world’s largest lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) media advocacy organization, has responded to a new decision announced by the Oversight Board, the body that makes pseudo-independent rulings about Facebook, Instagram, and Threads content moderation cases. GLAAD’s analysis of the ruling found a clear disagreement among the Oversight Board on the cases - the issued decision permits two posts containing anti-trans content, while notifying Meta that it must also remove anti-trans rhetoric it added to its hate speech policy in January. The Washington Post has reported that top Meta executives told the Oversight Board that the ruling should be “treated carefully” … “given the fraught political debate” about the rights of trans people in the U.S.

The Board ruled that the two harassing posts, one intentionally misgendering a transgender woman and the other intentionally misgendering a transgender girl, should remain (one on Facebook, the other on Instagram). They were both reshared by a prominent anti-LGBTQ account, inviting more visibility and harassment. The ruling expressly notes that the posts “misgender identifiable trans people,” yet asserts that the posts do not “represent bullying and harassment,” instead characterizing them as “public debate.” Although the majority of the Oversight Board supported Meta’s decision to allow the content, a minority expressly noted (in concurrence with GLAAD’s public comment submitted for the Board’s consideration) that the posts violate Meta’s Bullying and Harassment policy. The policy prohibits targeted misgendering of transgender people, stating: “all private minors, private adults (who must self-report), and minor involuntary public figures are protected from… claims about… gender identity.” Additional background is below, including the company’s caveats about who is protected by the policy and who is not.

Acknowledging Meta’s use of an anti-trans trope in its January 7, 2025 policy changes, and urging the company to remove it, the Oversight Board states: “Finally, the Board is concerned that Meta has incorporated the term ‘transgenderism’ into its revised Hateful Conduct policy. To ensure Meta’s content policies are framed neutrally and in line with international human rights standards, Meta should remove the term “transgenderism” from the Hateful Conduct policy and corresponding implementation guidance.” (“Transgenderism” is a popular right-wing anti-trans trope intended to falsely imply that being trans is an ideology.)

In September 2024, GLAAD submitted an official public comment regarding the two cases (“Gender Identity Debate Videos“), which address anti-transgender hate and harassment content. The Board’s ruling acknowledges Meta’s recent sweeping changes to its Hateful Conduct policy, including the removal of many policy protections for transgender people. Among the many rollbacks, the company said it will now allow calls “for exclusion or use insulting language in the context of discussing political or religious topics, such as when discussing transgender rights” (e.g. “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism [sic] and homosexuality [sic]”). GLAAD has spoken out extensively about how this policy language is dehumanizing hate speech in itself which is attempting to normalize anti-LGBTQ bigotry.

While Meta rolled back LGBTQ protection aspects of its Hateful Conduct policy in January, its policy continues to state that it prohibits hate and harassment on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. Even in Meta’s own logic, and as a minority of the Oversight Board expressly agree, the posts clearly violate Meta’s policy which still prohibits targeted misgendering of transgender people (i.e. “claims about gender identity”). While Meta’s updated Hateful Conduct policy still prohibits hate and harassment of people on the basis of protected characteristics including gender identity, the company has stated that it will now primarily rely on user reports to identify “less severe policy violations.”

While there are many interesting and complex aspects to the case, this primary aspect above (Meta’s existing policy protecting people from “claims about … gender identity”) should have made the Oversight Board’s adjudication straightforward. Arcane facets of Meta’s policy enforcement considerations created disagreement amongst the Board: including the question of whether the targeted subjects must self-report the accounts who target them, and whether the subjects should be considered public figures. (The policy only protects: “private minors, private adults (who must self-report), and minor involuntary public figures.”) GLAAD has long advocated for the removal of these distinctions and requirements — everyone should be protected.

Read GLAAD’s full public comment here.

As in GLAAD’s 2024 SMSI report, Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads are largely failing to mitigate anti-LGBTQ hate and harassment. Meta’s enforcement failures have elicited longtime concern from the Oversight Board, trust and safety experts, human rights advocates, and Meta’s shareholders.

A 2024 GLAAD report found that Meta is failing to moderate extreme anti-trans hate across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. The fourth annual GLAAD Social Media Safety Index & Platform Scorecard (SMSI)was released in June 2024. After reviewing six major platforms on 12 LGBTQ-specific indicators, all received low and failing scores: TikTok: 67%, Instagram: 58%, Facebook: 58%, YouTube: 58%, Threads: 51%, and X: 41%.

Key findings of the 2024 SMSI include:

• Anti-LGBTQ rhetoric on social media translates to real-world offline harms.
• Anti-LGBTQ hate speech and disinformation continues to be an alarming public health and safety issue.
• Platforms are largely failing to mitigate this dangerous hate and disinformation and inadequately enforce their own policies.
• Platforms disproportionately suppress LGBTQ content, including via removal, demonetization, and shadow-banning.
• There is a lack of effective, meaningful transparency reporting from the platforms.

Read the April 24, 2025 GLAAD article.

Trump's Order Guts Cornerstone of Modern Civil Rights Law Used to Enforce Antidiscrimination Laws

 

Trump’s order directs federal agencies to “deprioritize enforcement” of statutes and regulations that include disparate-impact liability, which has long enabled courts to stop policies and practices that unfairly exclude people on the basis of protected characteristics such as race, gender, and disability. The order also instructs the U.S. attorney general to repeal key components of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that bar any program receiving federal financial support from discrimination based on “race, color, or national origin.”

Disparate impact claims allow consumers to challenge a variety of discriminatory practices aimed at people of color, people with disabilities, families with young children, and women, among others. These practices would otherwise, even when identified, go unaddressed. Lawsuits bringing disparate impact claims have exposed and remedied longstanding patterns of discrimination and brought relief to thousands of consumers. During the subprime lending boom that led to the Great Recession of 2008, communities of color were targeted for high-risk, high interest rate loans, and they were hit especially hard by the financial crisis. Many lawsuits bringing disparate impact claims were filed in an attempt to alter this toxic reality and bring relief to individual consumers. These lawsuits unmasked widespread discriminatory lending practices. 

Derek Black, who directs the Constitutional Law Center at the University of South Carolina, said the administration was misstating the law. “If it were true that disparate-impact liability creates ‘a near insurmountable presumption of unlawful discrimination,’ we might have rid the country of disparities long ago,” he wrote on X. The concept of disparate impact, she said, prevents employers from excluding qualified candidates because of their race, gender or another protected characteristic.

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court set precedent when it unanimously ruled in Griggs v. Duke Power Co. that the company could not use arbitrary tests or requirements in hiring and promotion if it could not prove they served a genuine business need. The court found that even if the company was not purposefully trying to discriminate based on race, if the policies had a discriminatory effect, they were illegal.

“There’s been an effort to say that with discrimination, the only kind of harm we care about is the egregious, smoking-gun evidence of animus or harassment, or where somebody is bigoted,” Yang said. “But there is often very significant harm to individuals from organizational practices that are discriminatory, yet very difficult to prove.”

While Trump’s executive order does not stop private individuals from suing over workplace and other kinds of discrimination. States and localities are also strengthening their nondiscrimination laws.

Read the April 24, 2025 Washington Post article.

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Obituary: Herbert J. Gans, Poverty & Urban Researcher, 97

Gans, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who became an innovative sociologist in the U.S., explored the myths and misconceptions surrounding poverty, class, urban renewal, and suburban malaise. A longtime professor at Columbia University and former president of the American Sociological Association, Gans was an Ivy League academic, an advocate for liberal causes and a social critic, contributing essays to many publications. He aimed, he said, to connect his research with the lives of ordinary people, and to work toward answering a fundamental question: “What is a good society, and how can sociology help bring it about?” His writing covered Americana from the postwar years into the 2000s, exploring race relations, economic problems, highbrow and popular cultures, nostalgia for the rural past, and an assortment of provocative questions: Why do the poor get poorer and the rich richer? Can Jews and Italians get along in Canarsie? Is landmarks preservation elitist? 

Gans served on the Kerner Commission, which President Lyndon B. Johnson established in 1967 to investigate the cause of riots and unrest that had broken out in cities around the country. He helped draft the commission’s report, an indictment of White racism that warned that “our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white - separate and unequal.”

His first book, The Urban Villagers: Group and Class in the Life of Italian-Americans (New York: Free Press, 1962), was a vivid chronicle of an Italian American enclave that was displaced and leveled by urban renewal. Gans showed how the area was far from the slum that government officials had made it out to be, and argued that a middle-class bias had caused the low-rent neighborhood to be wrongly perceived as derelict and run-down. Gans wrote frequently about the poor and working classes, arguing for new anti-poverty measures in his 1995 book The War Against The Poor: The Underclass And Antipoverty Policy. As he saw it, the country’s least privileged had been stigmatized through terms like “underclass,” which contributed to a sense in which the poor were to be blamed for their condition, and ignored or punished rather than helped. An important article in this vein was his "The Uses of Poverty: The Poor Pay All," (Social Policy, July/August 1971: pp. 20-24).

Read the April 24, 2025 Washington Post obituary.

On Behalf of Equal Rights Center, Relman Colfax PLLC Alleges Washington, DC-Based UDR Tenant Screening Policies are Discriminatory

On April 25, 2025, Relman Colfax filed a lawsuit in Washington, D.C. Superior Court on behalf of the Equal Rights Center against UDR, Inc. and the owners of The MO apartment building (in northeast D.C.) alleging that The MO’s tenant screening policies discriminate against housing voucher holders and housing applicants with criminal legal histories in violation of the Washington, D.C. Human Rights Act and the D.C. Fair Criminal Record Screening for Housing Act of 2016.

The complaint alleges that the defendants openly discriminate based on applicants’ source of income and criminal legal history, even posting some of their illegal policies on The MO’s website. ERC claims that these policies erect yet another barrier to housing for populations for which stable housing is particularly important.

The ERC conducted an investigation using fair housing testers to ascertain whether Defendants were engaging in unlawful discrimination against individuals attempting to rent units at The MO. Through its investigation, the ERC found that Defendants and their agents have a policy or practice of making statements and/or imposing conditions that exclude voucher holders based on illegal criteria, as well as renters with criminal histories from access to rental units at The MO. 

“ERC’s lawsuit employs consumer protection law in a pioneering effort to secure safe and affordable housing for D.C. residents,” stated Mirela Missova, Supervising Counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. “Discriminatory policies significantly hinder the ability to safeguard low-income tenants.”

Through its complaint, ERC seeks declaratory and injunctive relief to ensure that The MO comes into compliance with District requirements for equitable tenant screening policies. This lawsuit represents a critical step toward making equitable housing opportunities a reality in the District. The Relman Colfax litigation team consisted of Zoila Hinson, with paralegal assistance from Miriam Farah. The co-counsel is Mirela Missova of the Washington Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs.

Unfortunately, discrimination against tenants by rental housing providers for such illegal screening as housing discrimination are too frequent of late. For instance, a complaint was filed in November, 2024 regarding alleged discrimination against two private equity landlords in Indianapolis, Indiana.

A copy of the complaint can be found here.

Read the April 23, 2025 RC article.

Read the November 21, 2024 NBC TV10 Philadelphia article.