The Fair Housing Act 50 Years Later – Still a Work in Progress

By Fletcher Word
Sojourner’s Truth Editor

According to the Federal Reserve, white families today in America have nearly 10 times the net worth of black families and more than eight times that of Latino families.  The disparity isn’t shrinking and the cause for the vast difference in wealth among communities is due to a decades-long pattern of housing discrimination established initially through a joint effort of government and the banking industry and maintained over the years by the same banking industry’s discriminatory practices abetted by government inaction and collusion.
 

 Lisa Rice

“Homeownership is the number-one method of accumulating wealth,” said John Taylor, president and CEO of National Community Reinvestment Coalition, a consumer advocacy group. In the United States, “wealth and financial stability are inextricably linked to housing opportunity and homeownership,” said Lisa Rice, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, an advocacy group. Rice is the former president of the Toledo Fair Housing Center and her thoughts are echoed by her successor here in Toledo and the current president, Michael Marsh.

In the past, Marsh notes, housing discrimination “increased the wealth of whites at the expense of African Americans and created opportunities for them that excluded African Americans, those opportunities are tied to zip codes.”

That past included the practice of redlining – a practice that the Center for Investigative Reporting said in February of this year persists in metro areas – extensively in 61 such areas – even when taking into account the applicants’ income, loan amount and neighborhood.

The practice of redlining began in the 1930s when government surveyors graded neighborhoods in 239 cities and color-coded them from green (“best), to blue (“still desirable”) to yellow (“definitely declining”) to  red (“hazardous”). The redlining of certain neighborhoods was due to the residents’ racial and ethnic demographics – African American neighborhoods most certainly, but also, in the 1930s, Catholic and Jewish neighborhoods and those comprised of immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe. After World War II, Jews, Irish Catholics, Italians and the rest of the previously undesirable white immigrants started to become upwardly mobile as the end of the Depression and the post war boom leveled the playing field for Caucasians in general. Black Americans remained in the red-lined neighborhoods since they did not have the option to flee to the suburbs or to nicer city neighborhoods.
 

“Zip codes can be more important than genetic codes in predicting our outcomes,” says Marsh.

Government-sanctioned redlining continued through the 1950s and 1960s. As other notable pieces of his domestic social legislation were passed in the 1960s, such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson found himself stymied on the issue of providing equal opportunities in attaining homeownership. It wasn’t until the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr, on April 4, 1968 and the ensuing civil disturbances that LBJ was able to piece together the votes in Congress to enact the Fair Housing law he wanted. The bill was signed on April 11. The law would forbid discrimination. The mission statement would read, in part, “to build inclusive and sustainable communities free from discrimination.”
 

Michael Marsh

Fifty years after the enactment of the law, a new secretary of HUD, Ben Carson, would amend the mission statement and omit the word “discrimination.” Given the act’s ineffectiveness over five decades and the decision to pretend that discrimination in housing doesn’t exist, the 50-year celebration seems bittersweet. The new mission statement reads: “to ensure Americans have access to fair, affordable housing and opportunities to achieve self-sufficiency.” The new statement ignores the fact that discrimination has existed and still exists.

Whether racial discrimination exists or not, the fact is that the homeownership gap, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting, had been shrinking since the 1970s but has increased dramatically since the housing bust and is now wider than it has been since the Jim Crow era.

According to the report, the most disturbing “pattern of troubling denials for people of color across the country,” exists in 61 major metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia, St. Louis and San Antonio. The analysis shows that black applicants were denied access to loans at much higher rates than whites in 48 cities, Latinos in 25 cities, Asians in nine and Native Americans in three. In Washington, D.C, ironically enough, all four groups were denied at a significantly higher rate.

Toledo is not on the list of the 61 most troubled cities.

If government and elected officials have been reluctant over the past 50 years to enforce the Fair Housing Act, and they certainly have been starting with the obstructionism of the government under President Richard Nixon, LBJ’s immediate successor, (“the United States government has been a major impediment to meeting the goals of the Fair Housing Act,” says Marsh), non-profit agencies have helped to continue the struggle even if they have not had the clout to fully eliminate the homeownership gap or discrimination. Perhaps there is no better example of this activism than in Toledo.

Shanna Smith headed the local Fair Housing Center for 15 years and during that time she gained a reputation for her fearlessness in trying to uphold the tenets of the Fair Housing Act and ending discrimination in housing and eliminating segregated living patterns.

Smith would leave Toledo 26 years ago to found the National Fair Housing Alliance and Lisa Rice would succeed her in Toledo until being called herself to join Smith at the NFHA. Smith retired as CEO in the last several weeks and Rice has been named CEO. Following this stellar line up of local presidents is Michael Marsh who has led the agency for the past five years. During his time at FHC – he first joined the agency in 1996 as a volunteer and was hired a year later – he has led the agency to take on the big insurance companies and has seen a “change in the way homeowners insurance has been underwritten,” he says. The agency has reached a $3.3 million settlement with KeyBank to correct their lending patterns and has reached a settlement with Wells Fargo when “we found them doing a poor job of maintaining and marketing homes in poor neighborhoods after doing a great job in white neighborhoods [after the housing bust]” says Marsh.

The $1.4 million Wells Fargo settlement has created funding for the Lucas County Land Bank’s roof replacement program, chair lifts for the disabled, and a foreclosure prevention program.

Such successes are not easily attained. Funding is an ongoing issue for the non-profit agency. Public funding has decreased, causing the agency to drop its staff from a high of 16 to its current 10 members. Raising private funds, says March, a certified fundraiser himself, is difficult for such an abstract, policy cause.

The demographics of discrimination have shifted, says Marsh. “Disability has replaced race as the largest number of complaints as baby boomers age,” he says. The agency is preparing to file a case in federal court involving disability discrimination and is involved in a good deal of education and outreach on the subject.

And testing, of course. Shanna Smith demonstrated 45 years ago the effectiveness of testing – getting out into the community, taking a proactive approach in talking to people and uncovering examples of discrimination is an important follow-up to the calls and inquiries the agency receives. “We do testing to ferret out complaints,” says Marsh. “We are the only group that does testing.”

Copyright © 2018 by [The Sojourner's Truth]. All rights reserved.
Revised: 08/16/18 14:12:12 -0700.

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