Jim Crow North and Fair Housing Enforcement

ObjectiveWe investigate how three levels of government have enforced the Fair Housing Act as a cooperative federalism program.MethodsBased on data obtained from the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), we test a multivariate fixed effects logistic regression model.ResultsFirst, the Fair Housing Act's substantial equivalency requirement and HUD's Fair Housing Assistance Program have enabled state and local civil rights agencies to play an essential role in enforcing national fair housing policy. Second, there is little difference in the extent to which federal, state, and local agencies provide outcomes favorable to fair housing complainants. Third, local agencies have been most likely to provide favorable outcomes in recent years.ConclusionEncouraging state and particularly local agencies to participate more actively in fair housing enforcement would strengthen American federalism without significantly affecting complainants’ outcomes. Research involving effectiveness and efficiency in fair housing enforcement reinforces this argument.

ObjectiveWe compare outcomes in racial discrimination fair housing complaints processed by southern state and local civil rights agencies to those handled by state and local agencies outside the South and the federal agency, HUD (Department of Housing and Urban Development).MethodsBased on data obtained directly from HUD, we rely on a fixed effects logistic regression model with cluster‐correlated standard errors.ResultsFirst, southern local agencies are significantly more likely to provide outcomes favorable to complainants in racial discrimination fair housing cases than are local agencies outside the South. Second, state and local agencies in the Deep South provide favorable outcomes to the same extent as their nonsouthern counterparts. Third, southern local agencies are more likely to provide favorable outcomes than is HUD, whereas southern state agencies provide favorable outcomes at roughly the same rate as HUD. Variations within the South partially explain these findings.ConclusionWe find evidence of progressive changes in southern fair housing enforcement, although those changes occur in an uneven fashion depending on the state or locality.

ABSTRACTIn 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, arguably the most significant federal effort in a generation to address place-based disparities in access to opportunity and to advance fair housing. In 2018, HUD suspended the rule, it said in part because of the resources it was expending to implement it and in part because of the large share of municipal plans that HUD determined had failed to meet the rule’s requirements. In this article, we present the first analysis of the fair housing plans that HUD did not accept, examining how municipalities failed to meet the rule's requirements, what those failures imply about advancing fair housing, and the extent to which HUD’s enforcement strategy was working before the suspension. Our analysis shows that HUD engaged in detailed reviews of municipalities’ Assessments of Fair Housing and provided constructive feedback. The most common issue with which municipalities struggled was setting realistic goals that would actually advance fair housing and creating measurable metrics and milestones to gauge progress. Several municipalities neglected to conduct thorough regional analyses or analyses of all relevant disparities in access to opportunity. Both shortcomings reflect broader challenges municipalities face in advancing fair housing, particularly in identifying strategies that address interconnected causes of disparities in access to opportunity and in building regional support to address those causes.

ObjectiveThis study investigates the effect of attitudes, case facts, and political control on the fair housing decisions made by administrative law judges (ALJs) at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).MethodsBased on data obtained from HUD under a Freedom of Information Act request, we use Probit regression to model the outcomes of every housing discrimination case decided by the entire population of ALJs between 1989 and 2003.ResultsWe discover significant variation in the likelihood of a pro‐complainant outcome and the amount of actual damages awarded in fair housing disputes.ConclusionThe attitudinal model of judicial decision making appears to apply to ALJ behavior in housing discrimination cases. At the same time, case facts, bureaucratic oversight, and other legal factors constrain ALJs.

MariaKrysan and KyleCrowderCycle of Segregation: Social Processes and Residential StratificationNew York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2017. 288 p. $35.00

This article systematically compares the efficiency of federal, state, and local civil rights agencies in enforcing national fair housing policy over time, with special attention to the South. State and local agencies processed Fair Housing Act complaints more efficiently than the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), southern agencies outperformed HUD, and the probability that a racial discrimination complaint resulted in a favorable outcome for the alleged victim was the same for complaints originating within and outside the South. These findings suggest that the fair housing enforcement model may provide useful concepts for sharing power in other policy areas in the American federal system.

This article examines US fair housing policy from a critical perspective. We describe the impact of the expansion of neoliberal ideology on the fair housing assistance program (FHAP), the fair housing initiatives program (FHIP), and the scope of US Department of Justice activities. Prior findings from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and IRS Form 990 are summarized. We argue that neoliberalism has contributed to the underdevelopment, underfunding, and poor implementation of US fair housing policy. We offer three recommendations for fair housing reform. The first focuses on the need to remove fair housing activities from HUD and place them in an independent fair housing agency. The second focuses on the need for the federal government to mandate fair housing enforcement across all governmental programs and agencies. The third focuses on the need for increased lobbying, litigation, and activism by community-based advocacy organizations for reform.

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.

This article explores how “New Federalism” under President Ronald W. Reagan manifested itself in the implementation of fair housing policy. We examine the Fair Housing Assistance Program (FHAP) and how it led to state and local civil rights agencies playing an increasingly vital role in implementing the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Relying on data provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), we show that a significant number of fair housing complaints were shifted from HUD to state and local agencies.

With the 2015 issuance of the final rules for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), jurisdictions that receive funding from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) are now provided with data and tools necessary to conduct the analysis of fair housing issues specific to their area. They have been asked by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to assess their fair housing performance and generate fair housing goals based on their findings from using the tools and data. However, little guidance has been given regarding how a jurisdiction should actually develop quantitative measures or reasonable “metrics and milestones” in order to assess performance and set specific, measureable goals. We use the HUD-provided AFFH data for Gwinnett County, Georgia – a large suburban entitlement community in the Atlanta metropolitan area – to establish some generalizable methods for assessing one aspect of fair housing concern – the neighborhood distribution of affordable housing subsidies. The method can also be used to set fair housing goals in this area.

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.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Housing policies of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) emphasize the spatial dispersal of housing assistance to promote fair housing objectives. The Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program, the nation's largest affordable housing subsidy program, is not administered by HUD and therefore is not closely monitored for compliance with dispersal objectives. Using spatial point pattern analyses, I identify the geographic extent of LIHTC property clustering, characterize the local clustering of individual properties and explore the determinants of local clustering within the nation's largest metropolitan areas. In most metropolitan areas, LIHTC properties are more highly clustered than multifamily housing units, although the extent of clustering differs by metropolitan area. Clustered LIHTC properties tend to be located in more densely developed central-city locations that have higher poverty rates and higher minority concentrations. Takeaway for practice: To encourage more affordable housing construction within areas that offer greater economic and social opportunities to LHTC residents, policymakers should 1) provide incentives to locate LIHTC properties within high-opportunity areas, 2) eliminate current incentives to cluster housing in areas with inherently higher poverty and minority concentrations (Qualified Census Tracts and Difficult Development Areas), and 3) enhance coordination between HUD and the Department of the Treasury to implement federal fair housing goals.

ABSTRACTAs is true for most legislation, the Fair Housing Act (FHA) was a product of its time; the legislation’s content, and even passage, was formed by dominant issues in housing markets and the country at that time. The context shaped the goals of the FHA and the strategies and tools employed under its auspices. Fifty years after the passage of the FHA, much of that context has changed. This commentary argues that changes in the context not only raise new fair housing challenges and create new gaps in our knowledge, but also may necessitate a fresh look at fair housing strategies and tools if they are to be effective at achieving the goals of the act. This commentary begins with a brief background on the FHA itself, the social context at the time of its writing, and its main goals. Next it lays out a few key changes in housing markets relevant for fair housing, highlighting challenges they may create and where research could be of greatest value. It then considers challenges arising from threats to two specific U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) fair housing rules seen by many as critical fair housing tools. The commentary ends with two examples of a “refresh,” where current context has shaped, or reshaped, a strategy to address today’s fair housing challenges.

ABSTRACT
 ObjectivesThrough a collaborative agreement between the NCHS and HUD, the first linkage of two national population health surveys to HUD administrative records of housing assistance was recently completed. Based on this multi-year effort, this paper emphasizes key requirements for making progress in and between regulatory and legal environments; confidentiality and data security.
 BackgroundAs the principal health statistics agency in the United States, the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) collects and disseminates statistical information that guide actions and policies to improve the health of the American people. The mission of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is to create strong, sustainable, inclusive communities and quality affordable homes for all. Prior to the release of the NCHS-HUD linked file, there was no existing data source to reliably estimate the prevalence of health conditions and outcomes for households receiving HUD housing assistance. Rather than conducting its own health survey, costing millions of dollars, HUD leveraged the existing NCHS and Census knowledge base, the data linking expertise of NCHS and its Research Data Center (RDC) infrastructure. With the NCHS-HUD linked data files, analysts and researchers can now examine health conditions, health behaviors, access to health services and use of health services in relation to housing.
 ApproachWhile technical (e.g., temporal, spatial, definitional, linkage keys) challenges for linking national-level surveys and administrative data have been the subjects of many discussions, often the organizational, legal and behavioral issues are more daunting and usually determine success. To comply with regulations at NCHS and HUD, a memorandum of understanding clearly outlined the manner with which personally identifying information (PII) would be protected, and how data would be shared across agencies.
 Results and ConclusionThrough this extraordinary and innovative, no-cost, collaborative and strategic research partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/NCHS, HUD is learning more about the health of tenants receiving housing assistance. The data linkage project is a model for data sharing that aligns with U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB) directives for sharing data across federal agencies to reduce respondent burden and improve federal programs and as well as the health of American people.

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.