The Fair Housing Act turned 50 this year. The Act prohibits housing discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, familial status, national origin, and disability. Designed to eliminate segregation in housing options, the FHA has opened up opportunities and eliminated many forms of overt discrimination. Nevertheless, the United States remains as segregated on the basis of race in residential housing as it has ever been. A half a century of Fair Housing enforcement is a cause for celebration and reflection. The FHA and its gains were only possible through the sacrifice of civil rights activists, organizers, and lawyers. Honoring their work can best be accomplished by renewing our commitment to ending segregation and finding new ways to create housing justice.
On April 20, leading practitioners, academics, housing advocates, attorneys, and students from around the country came together to commemorate the FHA’s 50th anniversary and explore the present-day challenges to achieving the Act’s promise. The symposium, “FHA@50: Renewing our Commitment to Housing Equity,” was hosted by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, the Equal Rights Center, University of the District of Columbia David A. Clarke School of Law, and UDC Law Review. The rich discussions generated during the program contributed to the evolving conversation on furthering housing equity and developing an agenda for achieving this goal.
The symposium opened with a reflection moderated by civil rights champion Wade Henderson that featured John Relman, a former Committee attorney and current Managing Partner of Relman, Dane & Colfax PLLC, Sameena Shina Majeed, Chief of the Housing and Civil Enforcement Section of Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, and author and Professor of Sociology, Gregory Squires. The panelists discussed the great progress achieved to date through the FHA while subsequent plenaries recognized that much work remains to make real the promise of equitable housing and meaningful housing choice.
With respect to areas where the promise of the FHA has fallen short, panelists and participants delved into the issue of racial segregation in housing that stems from a history of de jure segregation arising from racist government policies. Relatedly, a number of panels explored the mechanisms and policies undertaken by private housing providers that are intended to keep individuals with criminal records or who use subsidies out of their properties—policies that disproportionately affect people of color in the District and across the country. Committee attorney Catherine Cone moderated the panel on the intersection of the collateral consequences of a criminal record and fair housing that featured Plaintiff Maurice Alexander, who is currently pursuing an FHA case for having been denied housing due to his criminal history, and Equal Rights Center Deputy Director Kate Scott, among others.
This panel ran concurrently with other discussions which directed attention to complex, intersecting social contributors that to date have not been widely understood or embraced as part of the problem with housing in America. These included the relationship between housing and school segregation as well as between economic justice and fair housing.
As applied to the District of Columbia, the final panel of the symposium, moderated by the Committee’s Equal Justice Works Fellow Brook Hill, tackled the existence of a dual housing market—one for mainly wealthy whites and another for African Americans. Panelists included a Brookland Manor tenant leader, members of local government agencies, an Equal Rights Center staff member, and an affordable housing attorney. The panelists discussed the ways in which the dual housing market manifests itself, including through overt discrimination, discriminatory policies, displacement efforts resulting from planned redevelopments, as well as poor housing conditions. These advocates agreed that there are instances where litigation will fall short, and any effective strategy for ensuring fair housing will necessarily involve policy, litigation, and grassroots organizing.
By closing with a discussion on the tools needed to achieve meaningful housing choice, the symposium left participants with tangible ideas and tools they can use to make housing fairer and more equitable.