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Friday, March 29, 2024
State Presents Workforce Diversity Presentation on April 17th
Monday, March 25, 2024
Study Confirms Maryland Has Shortage of Affordable Housing Units
The just-released The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes study by the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) has found that across Maryland, there is a shortage of rental homes affordable and available to extremely low income households, whose incomes are at or below the poverty guideline or 30% of their area median income. Many of these households are severely cost burdened, and spend over half of their income on housing. Severely cost burdened poor households are more likely than other renters to sacrifice other necessities like healthy food and healthcare to pay the rent, and to have unstable housing situations like evictions.
"Cost Burden" is defined as spending more than 30% of household income on housing costs. "Severe Cost Burden" is spending more than 50% of household income on housing costs.
According to the NLIHC study, historic drivers of housing inequity include:
- Decades of racial discrimination by real estate agents, banks, insurers, and the federal government have made homeownership difficult to obtain for people of color.
- Many factors kept people of color (POC) from being able to purchase homes through the 1950s: the pervasive refusal of whites to live in racially integrated neighborhoods, physical violence targeting POC who tried to integrate (which was often tolerated by police), restrictive covenants outlawing home sales to Black buyers to integrate neighborhoods, and federal housing policy that denied borrowers access to credit in minority neighborhoods (Massey & Denton, 1993; Coates, 2014; Rothstein, 2017).
- Being denied the ability to purchase homes meant that POC did not benefit from the appreciation in home value, a major driver of the racial wealth gap.
- While overt discrimination was outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, subtler forms of housing discrimination continue. HUD’s fair housing tests in 28 metropolitan areas found that Black homebuyers were shown 17.7% fewer homes than similar white homebuyers (HUD, 2013).
- More recent fair housing investigations show similar discrimination, including being shown fewer homes and not being given the same information as white buyers (Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, 2018; Choi, Herbert, Winslow, & Browne, 2019).
- Today’s credit scoring system and lending practices also are barriers to POC homeownership (Rice & Swesnik, 2012; Bartlett et al., 2019).
Other Key national findings of the NLIHC's study are:
• The shortage of affordable rental housing primarily impacts renters with extremely low incomes. Extremely low-income renters in the U.S. face a shortage of 7.3 million affordable, available rental homes, resulting in only 34 affordable, available homes for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.
• The shortage of affordable rental housing is more acute than before the pandemic. Between 2019 and 2022, the shortage of affordable and available rental homes for extremely low-income renters increased by more than 480,000.
• Black, Latino, and Indigenous households are disproportionately extremely low-income renters and disproportionately impacted by this shortage. Some 19% of Black non-Latino households, 16% of American Indian or Alaska Native households, and 13% of Latino households are extremely low-income renters, compared to only 6% of white non-Latino households.
• Extremely low-income renters are more likely than other renters to spend a large part of their income on rent. A total of 87% are cost-burdened with 74% are severely cost-burdened. Extremely low-income renters are almost a quarter of all renters, but 44% of all cost-burdened renters and 69% of severely cost-burdened renters.
Regarding Maryland:
- 197,310 or 26% of Maryland renter households are extremely low income.
- The state has a shortage of 134,192 rental homes affordable and available for extremely low income renters.
- $37,740 is the average income limit for 4-person extremely low income household.
- $64,642 is the annual household income needed to afford a two-bedroom rental home at HUD's Fair Market Rent.
- 73% of extremely low income renter households have a severe cost burden.
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Thursday, March 21, 2024
Maryland Fair Housing Forum is on April 18th
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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
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.
Monday, March 18, 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.
Friday, March 15, 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.
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