WASHINGTON, DC–Today, the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) released its 2015 Fair Housing Trends Report, “Where You Live Matters.” The report features the importance of fair housing in ensuring access to a quality education, transit options, health care, job opportunities and healthy food. The report also discusses the state of fair housing from a national perspective, with chapters exploring the latest data on housing discrimination, highlights of recent enforcement actions, current public policy shaping access to housing opportunity and recommendations for advancing fair housing nationwide.
According to the report, fair housing complaints numbered 27,528 in 2014, consistent with the number of complaints filed in recent years. However, housing discrimination is significantly underreported, mostly because it can be difficult to discern. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the number of reported complaints represents less than one percent of the four million instances of housing discrimination that are estimated to occur each year.
“Where we live determines quite a lot about how we live, and this fact makes housing discrimination an especially harmful problem in our society,” said Shanna L. Smith, President and CEO of NFHA. “The schools children attend; the quality of the air we breathe and water we drink; our access to jobs and reliable transportation; and the chance to build wealth through homeownership are important factors that vary widely depending on place. Inequality persists in all of these areas along racial and ethnic lines which means that we need an all-out strategy to build up neighborhoods and provide a range of safe and affordable housing options for all Americans.”
Several major policy issues related to fair housing took the spotlight in 2014. For more than 40 years, the legal theory of “disparate impact” has been widely used and accepted by federal courts. It ensures that banks, landlords and other housing providers use policies that do not result in harmful outcomes, even if unintended, for groups of people protected under the law, such as families with children or persons with disabilities. In January, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case on the use of disparate impact under the Fair Housing Act and will soon decide whether to uphold this important legal protection. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is also poised to release a long-awaited fair housing rule that will better enable cities and states to fulfill their decades-long obligation to align their federally-funded housing and community development programs with the goals of the Fair Housing Act.
HIGHLIGHTS OF THE REPORT:
- Access to mortgage credit is at an historic low, especially for people of color, which affects the personal accumulation of wealth and the ability of neighborhoods to recover from the foreclosure crisis.
- Persistent housing discrimination limits opportunities in other areas, such as quality schools and employment, for people of color, persons with disabilities, and families with children.
- There is a strong correlation between place and opportunity, and segregated communities of color have been the targets of disinvestment, predatory schemes, redlining and harmful zoning policies that all work to destabilize these areas.
- Nonprofit fair housing groups investigated the majority (69 percent) of housing discrimination complaints, more than twice as many as all government agencies combined.
- Discrimination against people with disabilities made up the majority (51.8 percent) of all complaints with 14,272 instances reported. Housing discrimination based on disability is typically easier to detect as it is ordinarily blatant or obvious.
- Discrimination on the basis of race was the second most reported basis, with 6,044 complaints.
“I am astonished by how much we have left to do. Much of our nation’s housing stock remains out of reach for people with disabilities, families with children, borrowers of color and others protected by federal, state, and local laws,” said Smith. “We must do everything we can to expand housing choice and opportunities in all neighborhoods.”
To read NFHA’s 2015 Trends Report, please visit http://bit.ly/nfhatrends2015.
_______________________________________________________________________
About the National Fair Housing Alliance (www.nationalfairhousing.org)
Founded in 1988 and headquartered in Washington, DC, the National Fair Housing Alliance is a consortium of more than 220 private, nonprofit fair housing organizations, state and local civil rights agencies and individuals from throughout the United States. Through comprehensive education, advocacy and enforcement programs, NFHA protects and promotes residential integration and equal access to apartments, houses, mortgage loans and insurance policies for all residents of the nation.
###