Story at a glance
- A new report from the National Fair Housing Alliance found an 8 percent increase in fair housing cases and a 14.7 percent increase in housing-related hate crimes from 2017 to 2018.
- Americans with disabilities accounted for 51 percent of the legal complaints filed last year.
- The NFHA linked these increases to actions taken by the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
- Facebook has also dealt with legal battles over providing the tools that have allowed advertisers to discriminate.
A new report by the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) shows an increase in complaints of housing discrimination from 2017 to 2018, continuing a trend that has many worried.
The Fair Housing Act was established in 1968 and prohibits discrimination on the basis of characteristics like race, religion, disability and national origin, among others. It’s enforced by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), though the NFHA alleges that currently HUD is working against the Fair Housing Act.
The NFHA found an 8 percent increase in fair housing cases compared to last year, and a nearly 15 percent increase in housing-related hate crime offenses, Curbed reports. The increase is the largest since NFHA began keeping track in 1995. The number of cases was steadily declining since the 2000’s, but began increasing again in 2016, according to the report. Over half of the complaints are related to discrimination against people with disabilities, but also 17 percent were based on race and 7 percent based on national origin.
NFHA suggests that the increase in housing discrimination may be linked to actions taken by the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson. One action they highlighted was the repeal of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule, which was aimed at reducing segregation. Another was to roll back regulations on disparate impacts, which addresses unintentional discrimination. Legal action has also been taken against Facebook, which was providing landlords with tools to target their ads at extremely specific groups of people and keeping the ads hidden from others.
Secretary Carson has called the rule “social engineering” and says that getting rid of exclusionary zoning laws will accomplish the same goal with less regulatory burden. The NFHA disagrees.
“It’s not going to be one change that gets us out of the conundrum we’re in, it’s going to take a multifaceted approach,” Lisa Rice, President and CEO of NFHA, told Curbed. “We lulled [ourselves] into a belief that we were a more fair society, but at least there is more awareness today that there’s more work to do.”
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