April is National Fair Housing Month! Opening Ceremony is April 11th.

 

This April, HUD is commemorating the 56th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, the landmark civil rights law signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11, 1968, that made discrimination in housing transactions unlawful. The theme of this year’s Fair Housing Month is "Fair Housing: The ‘Act’ in Action."

Please join us virtually on Thursday, April 11, 2024, at 2:00 P.M. (EDT) for this year’s Fair Housing Month Opening Ceremony, hosted by the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO). Please sign up to attend here.

This virtual event will highlight HUD’s progress toward protecting and expanding fair housing rights for all. Our program will include remarks from the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for FHEO, Demetria McCain; the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, Legislative Initiatives, and Outreach, Melody Taylor; and the President and CEO of the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Damon Hewitt.

For additional information, visit the Fair Housing Month 2024 Website or follow us on X and Facebook. 

FHEO Technical Assistance 

• HUD and FHEO are continuously developing technical assistance materials, resources, and trainings to educate housing consumers and providers on their fair housing rights and responsibilities. You can view all HUD training opportunities here.

During Fair Housing Month 2024, FHEO is highlighting its efforts to provide fair housing education to our stakeholders. Click the links below to view these recently developed technical assistance resources:

• Assistance Animals and Fair Housing: Navigating Reasonable Accommodations Webinar
• Data and Fair Housing Planning: AFFH-T Video Series
• Fair Housing Act’s Familial Status Protections Webinar
• OHC and FHEO Conference - Fair Housing 2021: What Counselors Need to Know
• Preventing Sexual and Other Discriminatory Harassment in Housing
• Respondent’s Obligations Toolkit
• LGBTQIA+ Fair Housing Toolkit

HUD FHEO Talk Talks Series

The FHEO Talk Talks Series provides the Agency with the opportunity to strengthen its partnerships with leading community stakeholders and inform HUD’s mission to ensure fair housing for all.

The series was developed in accordance with President Biden’s Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities through the Federal Government. It covers topics related to fair housing and racial equity and includes discussions with experts, practitioners, leaders, and social justice activists engaged in work relevant to fair housing opportunities. To learn more or view previously recorded episodes of the FHEO Table Talks Series, please visit HUD’s YouTube channel.

HUD proudly remains committed to expanding and protecting fair housing rights for future generations to come. We hope you will join us to make our progress towards achieving housing equity for all who call America home. 

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Source: HUD email, March 19, 2024.

Urge Your Maryland Senator to Vote Yes on SB57 to Support Fair Housing

SB57 has passed through second reader! This bill would carve a narrow exemption in two party consent law to allow fair housing testers to record their testing interactions in accordance with the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development's testing recommendations.   

39 other states allow one-party recordings for fair housing testing. All of the states that have had large fair housing court settlements have relied on recordings. SB57 will strengthen Maryland’s ability to enforce its fair housing laws. SB57 is on its third and final reader in the Senate TODAY. Take one minute to contact your senator and ask them to vote YES on SB57.

Click HERE to urge your State Senator to support SB57!
 

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Source: Economic Action Maryland email, March 18, 2024.

Ben Stern, Holocaust survivor who challenged neo-Nazis, 102

Stern, who survived the Warsaw Ghetto, nine Nazi concentration camps, and two death marches, helped rally opposition to a planned neo-Nazi demonstration in Skokie, Illinois, in the 1970s. He also spoke to hundreds of audiences about Antisemitism and prejudice. Stern, a Polish-born Jew, lost his parents, his sister, and six of his seven brothers in the Holocaust. He evaded the gas chambers at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other Nazi camps and was marched for weeks before his liberation in 1945.

In the US, Stern established a chain of laundromats across Chicago and settled with his family in the suburb of Skokie, home to a large Jewish community and an estimated 6,000 Holocaust survivors.

In 1977, the National Socialist Party of America, a small group of neo-Nazis led by Frank Collin, announced plans for a rally in Skokie. In a legal battle that ultimately landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, Stern joined other activists to try to stop them.

The neo-Nazis were represented in court by the American Civil Liberties Union, whose principal lawyer faced death threats for arguing that even speech as abhorrent as that of neo-Nazis must be defended if the First Amendment protection of free speech is to last. The neo-Nazis won their legal proceedings because their speech was rules to be protected under the First Amendment. But they canceled their rally in Skokie, partially because they were faced with a massive counter-demonstration organized by Jewish groups and activists including Stern, who had written letters to the editor, appeared on television, gathered petitions, and rallied people to the cause.

Stern later spoke to hundreds of audiences about his experience in the Holocaust. He also protested anti-Muslim bigotry in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the Trump administration policy of separating immigrant children from their parents at the U.S. border.

Stern once talked with Ira Glasser, who, after becoming executive director of the ACLU in 1978, had strongly defended its representation of the neo-Nazis in their petition to gather in Skokie. Scheduled to speak together on a panel in California, Stern and Glasser met at the airport and Stern extended to him a hand and said, “We’re not going to agree, but we’re going to be friends.” “There was no meeting of the minds,” Glasser later commented. “His agony was too imprinted on his soul by what happened to him. And I remember thinking that if I were in his [place], I would probably be taking the same position.” Stern’s defiance, Glasser said, had been “heroic.”

Stern and his daughter wrote his 2022 memoir, Near Normal Man: Survival with Courage, Kindness and Hope (Redwood Publishing). She also produced a documentary based on the book, which is available on YouTube. 

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Read the March 12, 2024 Washington Post article.

Read the February 5, 2023 Berkeleyside article.

18 Consumer Groups Oppose Proposed Capital One and Discover Merger

 

A coalition of 22 advocacy groups warned in a letter to Jerome Powell, the Fed chair; Martin Gruenberg, chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp; Michael Hsu, acting comptroller of the currency; and Jonathan Kanter, assistant attorney general at the Department of Justice (DOJ), that the merger would "further concentrate risk" in the financial system and should be stopped. They urged regulators to block Capital One’s $35bn takeover of Discover. Urging the Federal Reserve and DOJ to intervene, the coalition stated that combining two of the largest US credit card companies would damage competition, and permit Capital One to hike fees after closing the acquisition, announced by the companies last month.

Signatories included the National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC), the American Economic Liberties Project (AELP), Public Citizen, and Americans for Financial Reform.

In a statement, a Capital One spokesman said it had a “long history” of serving consumers and businesses with “best-in-class” products and services. “As this process moves forward, we are fully committed to engaging with consumer organizations and other stakeholders to demonstrate the significant benefits of this transaction to consumers, communities, and competition in the marketplace.”

The NCRC responded that “Capital One is a notorious bad actor, even at its current size, and should not be allowed to further concentrate market power.” Capital One is one America’s biggest banks, and a key issuer of Visa and MasterCard credit cards in the US. Discover, with 305 million global cardholders, is one of the largest card payment networks in the US.

While Capital One argues that the merger would enable it to “build a payments network that can compete” with the market’s largest players, the AELP pointed out that “Vague claims that the merger will benefit competition in payment networks are a Trojan Horse concealing the merger’s real goals: higher interchange fees, more costly credit cards, and a surge in size connoting an implicit too-big-to-fail government backstop. It might be lucrative for Capital One, but everyone else will pay.”

Capital One expects to close the deal by late 2024 or early 2025, subject to regulatory and shareholder approvals. 

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Read the March 6, 2024 Guardian article.

Read the March 6, 2024 NCRC article.

The Fed declined to comment.

The Difficult Problem of Fighting Source of Income Discrimination

 

Over 2 million low-income families use Section 8 housing vouchers to cover their rent. The program is one of the federal government’s most effective, keeping more than 5 million individuals housed. Nationally, all vouchers are getting used. But housing voucher discrimination limits where exactly recipients can live. A household with a voucher sometimes discovers that the only willing landlords are in unsafe neighborhoods, or that they must need to move into a different school district to use the voucher. There also are a number of landlords who say that the reason why they're not renting to someone is because of the voucher when really it is because of their racial discrimination or discrimination on the basis of disability. 

To combat this, 17 states and dozens of cities and counties ban source-of-income discrimination covering almost 60% of renters. Enforcement of these laws, though, is lacking or spotty in many places. The best systems for enforcement include well-publicized outreach to property owners and the real estate community to inform them of the law and their obligations. 

The most powerful method of enforcement involves “testing,” in which a government agency or nonprofit organization submits two very similar rental applications to a property owner, with one application including a housing voucher and the other without. Authorities than can determine if discrimination possibly is suspected, and proceed with enforcement. Subsequent publicizing of those results and getting public judgments is important to show other property owners that the city or state is serious about voucher discrimination enforcement. 

However, such testing is expensive. Funding for housing discrimination testing comes primarily from HUD, which until February 12, 2024, did not give funding to its funded agencies to do sources-of-income discrimination investigations. This decision to fund HUD recipients is a positive development. Unfortunately, most agencies and nonprofits do not receive HUD funding, and cannot do testing because of the cost. Commitment and action by these authorities is also needed to reduce this stubborn problem.

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Read the Route Fifty January 31, 2024 article.

HUD Increases Efforts to Reduce Source of Income Discrimination

HUD recently took an important step forward to protect families with vouchers, authorizing the use of federal Fair Housing Assistance Program (FHAP) funds by state human rights agencies for testing and investigation of source of income discrimination cases. This follows a similar 2021 memo authorizing source of income discrimination testing and investigations at HUD funded fair housing centers.

Specifically, HUD informed organizations and agencies funded under HUD’s Fair Housing Assistance Program (FHAP) that funding can be used to support "source of income testing activities, source of income testing projects that are designed to uncover discrimination that violates the Fair Housing Act or substantially equivalent state or local fair housing laws.

In addition, HUD informed Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP) grantees that FHEO will approve and pay for FHIP testing activities as long as they are designed to identify violations of the Fair Housing Act, whether they be instances of intentional discrimination, discrimination with unjustified discriminatory effects or less discriminatory alternatives, refusals to grant reasonable accommodations for persons with disabilities, or cases where discrimination erodes compliance with the duty to affirmatively further fair housing. Some state and local fair housing laws, which have been deemed by HUD as substantially equivalent to the federal Fair Housing Act, may include “source of income” or the like as a protected class. Testing for discrimination because of someone’s source of income could be funded with FHIP PEI funds because such discrimination can violate the Fair Housing Act.

This memorandum also clarifies that FHAP funds can be used to conduct source of income testing activities to detect discrimination that may violate the Fair Housing Act or substantially equivalent state or local fair housing laws. 

In accordance with 24 C.F.R Part 115, FHAP agencies are permitted to use HUD funds to enforce substantially equivalent local or state laws. FHAP agencies may use FHAP funds to conduct source of income testing as an investigative tool in processing dual-filed complaints. FHAP funds may also support source of income testing activities as part of special enforcement efforts, partnerships initiatives, or other fair housing projects developed by FHAP agencies to enforce state or local fair housing laws. 

HUD said that it is doing this because one specific type of source-of-income discrimination - based on someone’s use of a Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) - remains extremely high. This is important particularly because the HCV program is HUD’s primary program to assist very low-income families, elderly persons, and individuals with disabilities to afford decent, safe, and sanitary housing in the private housing market. Under the law, HCV participants can apply to any housing meeting HCV requirements are not located in subsidized housing projects. In practice, housing providers - especially those with units in low-poverty, well-resourced neighborhoods - often refuse to rent or sell to voucher holders. And because households who use HCVs are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, people with disabilities, families with minor children, and female-headed households, discrimination against voucher holders can violate the Fair Housing Act’s prohibition on discrimination because of protected characteristics, including but not limited to race, color, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status.

HUD regards fair housing testing as a critical investigative tool because it effectively detects hidden disparate treatment in housing practices. However, the Department urges FHAP agencies to not limit their testing and enforcement programs to intentional discrimination. HUD encourages testing activities designed to identify discrimination that violates the Act - through disparate treatment or unjustified discrimination. 

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Read HUD's February 12, 2024 Source of Income Discrimination Memorandum.

Study Finds Families Leaving HUD Assisted Housing Likelier to Become Homeowners

A recently-released study conducted by University of California, Berkeley of family households with children who leave HUD’s public housing and Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) programs found that households with children that left public housing assistance saw improvements in the areas they moved to - a significant decline in their neighborhood poverty rate. Although households that exited the HCV program also experienced decreases in their neighborhood poverty, those decreases were smaller than the decline in neighborhood poverty that households remaining in HCV housing had.

"The exploratory findings suggest that when people move out of public housing, they are generally moving to new neighborhoods that have lower poverty rates than the neighborhood of the public housing. However, for voucher tenants leaving housing assistance, their unassisted units are generally in neighborhoods with a similar poverty rate to the neighborhood where they were receiving assistance. This is consistent with previous research showing public housing neighborhoods mostly to have higher poverty rates than voucher tenant neighborhoods.

The persistence of highly concentrated poverty surrounding public housing units speaks to the need for continued place-based investment in the neighborhoods where public housing projects are located, as well as ensuring that those investments do not lead to the displacement of existing residents. Although emphasis on mobility strategies has increased within HUD’s housing assistance programs, it is not realistic to assume that mobility strategies are feasible for every resident in a disinvested neighborhood, nor is it necessarily preferable for low-income people to move out of neighborhoods where they have long-term cultural connections and social ties.

It was also found that for both public housing and the Housing Choice Voucher program, participation in the HUD’s Family Self-Sufficiency (FSS) program boosted the likelihood of homeownership by approximately 25%. Overall, this research provides valuable insight into how households fare after exiting HUD-assisted housing.

The study examined exited HUD-assisted households with children in 14 U.S. counties, administrative data linked with annual residential address, and tenure data from Infogroup."

Source: HUD Office of Policy Research and Development. Examining the Housing and Neighborhood Trajectories for Former HUD-Assisted Households with Children. Prepared by Alex Ramiller & Carolina Reid, UC Berkeley. March 30, 2023.

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Read the February 22, 2024 HUD User article.