Showing posts with label racial covenant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racial covenant. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 24, 2024

Senator Smith (D-MN) Introduces “Mapping Housing Discrimination Act”

Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) has introduced the “Mapping Housing Discrimination Act” (S.5534) in the U.S. Senate last week. The bill would support efforts to map and digitize data on racially restrictive covenants in property records and establish a grant program to enable educational institutions to collect and analyze racial covenants and racially or ethnically restrictive language in local governments’ property records. The legislation would also help local governments digitize deeds and would create a publicly accessible database administered by HUD to gather together information about historic housing discrimination patterns in property records.  

The National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) has endorsed the legislation and will work with Senator Smith’s office to support efforts to document the impacts of racial covenants and other tools of discrimination used to keep Black families and other households of color from moving into certain neighborhoods. While such racial covenants were made illegal by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, documenting such records is crucial to tracking the history of housing discrimination, along with the impacts of housing segregation that persist today.  

Senator Smith also introduced a similar bill in July, 2021, that would examine the connection between historical racial discrimination and current racial disparities in housing. The bill would have created "a grant program for academic institutions to study the history of racially restrictive covenants - which were used as tools of discrimination to keep Black families and other households of color from moving into all-white neighborhoods - to better understand their scope and legacy. The bill would create a national, public database at HUD of historical housing discrimination patterns in property records and support local governments’ efforts to digitize local property records."

Read the 2024 bill text here

Read more about the history of fair housing in “Lofty Rhetoric, Prejudiced Policy: The Story of How the Federal Government Promised— and Undermined—Fair Housing” in NLIHC’s 2024 Advocates’ Guide.