Images of Race, Class, and Markets: Rethinking the Origin of U.S. Fair Housing Policy

2001 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-214 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mara S. Sidney
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Presidential Campaign ◽  
Executive Order ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
The North ◽  
American Values ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Housing Professionals ◽  
The 1960S

As the first national law to address racial discrimination in housing, the 1968 Fair Housing Act was truly a landmark piece of legislation. It prohibited homeowners, real-estate agents, lenders, and other housing professionals from engaging in a range of practices they had commonly used to keep neighborhoods racially segregated, such as refusing to sell or rent to a person because of his or her race, lying about the availability of a dwelling, or blockbusting (inducing white owners to sell by telling them that blacks were moving into the neighborhood). The last of the 1960s-era civil rights laws, the Fair Housing Act tackled the arena long felt to be the most sensitive to whites. Intense controversy, demonstrations, and violence over fair housing issues had occurred in many cities and states since at least the 1940s. Although John F. Kennedy promised during his presidential campaign to end housing discrimination “with the stroke of a pen,” once elected, he waited two years to sign a limited executive order. In 1966, a fair housing bill supported by President Johnson failed in Congress. Unlike other civil rights bills, the issue of housing evoked opposition not just from the South but also from the North. Opponents claimed that it challenged basic American values such as “a man's home is his castle”; to supporters, the symbolism of homeownership as “the American Dream” only underscored the importance of ensuring that housing was available to all Americans, regardless of race.

The Surprising Career of Federal Fair Housing Law

2000 ◽  
Vol 12 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hugh Davis Graham
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Educational Opportunity ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
National Policy ◽  
Marshall Plan ◽  
Voting Rights Act ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Open Housing

Unlike the breakthrough civil rights legislation of 1964–65, which dismantled the South's Jim Crow system and led to rapid advances in job access and educational opportunity for minorities throughout the nation, the federal fair housing legislation of the 1960s produced little substantive change. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 quickly became case studies in the dominant tradition of presidential leadership in legislative reform, joining such modern classics as Social Security and the Marshall Plan. The Open Housing Act of 1968, however, belongs to a different era of national policy development.

scholarly journals The Uncertain Future of the Fair Housing Act: HUD’s Recent Changes to Disparate Impact Standard

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54
Author(s):  
Leah Powers
Keyword(s):  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Disparate Impact ◽  
Supreme Court Ruling ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Housing Discrimination ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Final Rule ◽  
Standard Set ◽  
Uncertain Future ◽  
Core Mission

In 2013, the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published its Disparate Impact Final Rule in which it sought to formalize its longstanding interpretation of disparate impact liability under the Fair Housing Act (FHA) by setting forth a three-part burden-shifting framework. HUD subsequently revisited its disparate impact standard following the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Inclusive Communities and published a Proposed Rule on August 19, 2019. On September 24, 2020, HUD published a new Final Rule substantially altering the disparate impact standard laid out by the 2013 Rule. This Comment will analyze the similarities and differences between the disparate impact standard in the 2013 Rule and the standard set forth in the current, 2020 Rule. Additionally, given that the 2020 Rule was drafted in response to Inclusive Communities, this Comment will examine whether, and to what extent, the 2020 Rule is consistent with the Court’s ruling. Finally, this Comment will address the criticism leveled at the 2020 Rule by fair housing advocates and explore potential consequences of the new standard. Ultimately, this Comment will argue that, although the 2020 Rule finds some textual support in Inclusive Communities for several elements of its new framework, given the broad remedial purpose of the FHA, the core mission of HUD to eradicate housing discrimination, the potential, negative consequences of the new standard, and President Biden’s recent memorandum on housing discrimination, HUD should abandon the 2020 Rule and readopt the 2013 Rule.

The “Hollow Prospect” of Integration

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward G. Goetz
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Community Development ◽  
Black Power ◽  
The Other ◽  
African American Community ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The One ◽  
The U.S

This chapter describes the tension between integration and community development from the 1940s through the end of the 1960s. It describes the conflict within the African-American community between efforts to achieve integration on the one hand and building power and capacity within the community on the other. It describes the emergence and evolution of the fair housing movement in the U.S. Finally, the ways in which this conflict played out during the civil rights and Black Power eras is highlighted.

Segregation by Design: Race, Architecture, and the Enclosure of the Atlanta Apartment

2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1222-1260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Gordon Lasner
Keyword(s):  
Jim Crow ◽  
Racial Segregation ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Racial Tension ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
Site Planning ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Apartment Complexes

This article explores the ways in which architecture, landscape design, and site planning helped maintain racial segregation in housing in Atlanta, Georgia, between the 1960s and 1990s. Under Jim Crow, apartment complexes in Atlanta hewed to national design norms. By the late 1960s, however, racial tension, rioting, and passage of the Fair Housing Act led to proliferation of the architecture of enclosure: design that helped code communities as white through pastoral symbolism and heavy, obscuring landscaping. The concept, which appeared to a lesser degree in other U.S. housing markets, was introduced to Atlanta at Riverbend (1966-1972), a swinging-singles complex developed in part by Dallas’s Trammell Crow with a site plan by California’s Lawrence Halprin & Associates. The practice was generalized in the 1970s and 1980s by Post Properties, which became one of the region’s largest builders.

The Political Economy of State Fair Housing Laws before 1968

2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Collins
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Housing Markets ◽  
The Political ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
African American Population ◽  
Political Forces ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
The Great Migration ◽  
Historical Accounts

The combined influence of the Great Migration of African Americans and the civil rights movement propelled the drive for fair housing legislation, which attempted to curb overt discrimination in housing markets. This drive culminated in the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968. By that time, 57 percent of the U.S. population and 41 percent of the African American population already resided in states with a fair housing law. This article uses hazard models to analyze the diffusion of state fair housing legislation and to shed new light on the combination of economic and political forces that facilitated the laws' adoption. Outside the South, states with larger union memberships, more Jewish residents, and more NAACP members passed fair housing laws sooner than others. Including controls for a variety of competing factors does not undermine the estimates, and historical accounts of the legislative campaigns support the article's interpretation.

Bureaucratic Effectiveness and Civil Rights Enforcement

2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles S. Bullock ◽  
Eric M. Wilk ◽  
Charles M. Lamb
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
State And Local ◽  
Dollar Amount ◽  
Local Agencies ◽  
The U.S

This article compares federal, state, and local civil rights agencies’ effectiveness in enforcing the Fair Housing Act. Two factors primarily define effective enforcement: whether agencies’ conciliation efforts are more likely to lead to agreements between the parties involved in complaints and whether agencies are more likely to provide remedies to complainants in cases in which there is cause to believe discrimination occurred. The analysis shows that state and local agencies are generally more effective than the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) both at conciliating complaints and at providing remedies. HUD does appear to be more effective than state and local agencies in terms of the dollar amount of monetary relief awarded when successful conciliations occur, but HUD’s remedial effectiveness disappears after controlling for the likelihood of successful conciliations.

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing and the Inclusive Communities Project Case

2018 ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Philip D. Tegeler
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Urban Development ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Fair Housing ◽  
Obama Administration ◽  
Economic Segregation ◽  
The Us ◽  
Fair Housing Act ◽  
State And Local

The Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) provisions of the 1968 Fair Housing Act require affirmative steps by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and its grantees to promote residential integration. By the beginning of the Obama administration, compliance with this provision had become an empty bureaucratic ritual for many jurisdictions and was identified as a key civil rights reform for the new HUD secretary. The final AFFH rule, issued in 2015, represents an important modernization of the Fair Housing Act’s AFFH provision and also signals a new kind of partnership among federal, state, and local governments to address racial and economic segregation.

scholarly journals Popular culture as a tool for critical information literacy and social justice education: Hip hop and Get Out on campus

2018 ◽  
Vol 79 (5) ◽  
pp. 234
Author(s):  
Kai Alexis Smith
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Hip Hop ◽  
Social Justice Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Slave Owner ◽  
Dred Scott ◽  
The North ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
Civil Rights Movements ◽  
The 1960S

We live in a politically polarizing climate and at a time when there is great economic and social unrest in the United States. Our current moment brings to my mind other periods in our nation’s history. First, the 1857 Dred Scott decision, when the Supreme Court decided that slaves were not U.S. citizens and could not sue for their freedom. So that even if a slave escaped to the North, he or she was still considered the property of the slave owner and must be returned.1 The second is in the 1960s, when the antiwar and civil rights movements occurred.2,3

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