Fair Housing Enforcement Research Articles

A Study of Discriminatory Practices in Rental Housing

The responsibility for uncovering rental discrimination falls on researchers and all stakeholders in the rental sector. The study examined discriminatory practices in Nigerian rental housing with a view to providing information that could expose the existence of discrimination. Questionnaires were administered on 417 renters and data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics and factor analysis. The study found disparate treatment of renters in the study area. Rental discriminatory practices found include “Landlord creating different terms or standards for certain tenants” which received a mean score of 3.9614; “I was told housing is not available for rental when it is, in fact, available” received a mean rating of 3.8410; “I was denied negotiation for a rental” (3.4892). The study also revealed that real estate agents discriminate, landlords and tenants also discriminate. Some rental discriminatory forms are subtle and this explain why rental discrimination has proved to be difficult to detect or eliminate. The study recommends for continued fair housing enforcement activities to ensure that all have equal opportunity to housing. Keywords : Discrimination, rental housing, landlords, renters DOI: 10.7176/JEES/11-12-04 Publication date: December 31 st 2021

Health Equity Through Housing: A Blueprint for Systematic Legal Action

This is the sixth and final report in a series of reports exploring the role of law in housing equity and innovative uses of law to improve health equity through housing. The reports are based on extensive literature scans and semi-structured interviews with people who are taking action in housing policy and practice. The full series includes: Report I: A Vision of Health Equity in Housing; Report II: Legal Levers for Health Equity in Housing: A Systems Approach; Report III: Health Equity in Housing: Evidence and Evidence Gaps; Report IV: Creative People and Places Building Health Equity in Housing; Report V: Governing Health Equity in Housing; and Report VI: Health Equity through Housing: A Blueprint for Systematic Legal Action. This report offers guidance for action based on our research. We propose one overarching recommendation, the adoption of a systematic policy experimentation approach to achieving health equity in housing. We explore this approach through a case study of lead poisoning prevention efforts in Rochester, NY. We then present six areas of housing law that are ideal for experimentation. They range in topics, including strengthening fair housing enforcement to reduce discrimination, and supporting residential stability. The report also contains an appendix with additional ideas for experiments that emerged through our research and interviews.

Cooperative Federalism 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.

Fair Housing Enforcement in the South and Non‐South*

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.

Evidence Matters Spring/Summer 2014

This issue examines fair housing and housing discrimination, particularly from an enforcement perspective. The lead article, “Expanding Opportunity Through Fair Housing Choice,” discusses the progress that has been made in reducing overt discrimination while recognizing the consequences of more persistent and subtle forms of discrimination as well as continuing segregation. “Paired Testing and the Housing Discrimination Studies,” our Research Spotlight article, focuses on the methodology of HUD’s Housing Discrimination Studies, which have for decades provided critical insight into the state of fair housing in the United States. Finally, our In Practice article, “Fair Housing Enforcement Organizations Use Testing To Expose Discrimination,” profiles three nonprofits working to prevent and expose discrimination and advocate for equal housing opportunities.

Housing Desegregation in the Era of Deregulation

This article examines federal housing–desegregation efforts during the four presidential administrations—the Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan administrations—that followed the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968. The Nixon and Carter presidencies receive the closest attention, as hopes for a vigorous fair-housing enforcement effort were highest during these two periods (1969–1974 and 1977–1980). Although both presidents were unenthusiastic about spending political capital on such controversial efforts, the secretaries of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) who served them—George Romney and Patricia Roberts Harris—worked to implement policies to encourage racial and economic desegregation in housing. Ultimately, however, neither succeeded in gaining sufficient traction to do so. This study analyzes federal attempts to increase housing options for low- and moderate-income families. The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA), enacted in 1975, and the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), enacted in 1977, provided some potential leverage to achieve this goal. However, in the face of the congressional push toward federal deregulation, declining federal revenues, and the continued reluctance of localities to house the poor, the results were underwhelming.In analyzing the significance of these policy trajectories, the article examines racial undercurrents in the political shift to lax enforcement of Civil Rights laws, disinvestment in cities, deregulation, and punitive crime policies. It concludes by discussing the possibilities for a reinvigorated fair-housing effort.

Presidential Rhetoric and Bureaucratic Enforcement

Do presidents exercise leadership through their public rhetoric and bureaucratic appointees? To address this question, we investigate fair housing policy and enforcement during the Clinton administration. President Clinton is often thought of as a civil rights advocate, and we expected to find that he provided leadership against housing discrimination, an important civil rights issue. To test this expectation, we examine two quantitative indicators of presidential leadership in fair housing: Clinton’s presidential statements and the degree of aggressive enforcement by HUD and DOJ under Clinton’s appointees. Our analysis, however, reveals few indications of leadership in Clinton’s public rhetoric and limited evidence of aggressive enforcement of fair housing policy by his appointees at HUD and DOJ. Our conclusions suggest possible explanations for these findings and our likely direction in the next stage of this research.

Administrative Law Judges in Fair Housing Enforcement: Attitudes, Case Facts, and Political Control

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.

The Four Horsemen of the Fair Housing Apocalypse: A Critique of Fair Housing Policy in the USA

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.

Civil Rights, Federalism, and the Administrative Process: Favorable Outcomes by Federal, State, and Local Agencies in Housing Discrimination Complaints

Some theorists argue that cooperative intergovernmental relations are critical to policy implementation in the United States. This assertion is explored in the context of fair housing enforcement by comparing favorable administrative outcomes in fair housing complaints at the federal, state, and local levels from 1989 to 2004. What conclusions can be drawn from this systematic comparison of intergovernmental enforcement in one policy area over an extended period of time? First, cooperative federalism works well in fair housing enforcement. Second, of special significance, state civil rights agencies resolve complaints in favor of complainants nearly as often as the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and localities sometimes do so even more frequently.

Federalism, Efficiency, and Civil Rights Enforcement

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.

Fragile rights within cities: government, housing, and fairness

Chapter 1 Introduction and Overview: Housing, Justice, and the Government Part 2 Discrimination in Housing: Research on the fair housing in Cities Chapter 3 An Overview of Key issues in the Field of Fair Housing Research Chapter 4 Housing Discrimination in Metropolitan America:Unequal Treatment of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans Chapter 5 Assessing Racial Discrimination: Methods and Measures Chapter 6 Paradoxes in the Fair Housing Attitudes of the American Public: 2001-2005 Part 7 Segregation and Integration Chapter 8 Racial and Ethnic Residential Segregation in the United States: 1980-2000 Chapter 9 How Integrated did we become in the decade of the 1990s? Part 10 Program Performance and Policy Options: Fair Housing Enforcement and Performance Issues Chapter 11 Implementing the Federal Fair Housing Act: The Adjudication of Complaints Chapter 12 Fair Housing Enforcement and Changes in Discrimination between 1989 and 2000: An Exploratory Study Chapter 13 National Fair Housing Policy and its (Perverse) Effects on Local Advocacy Chapter 14 Creating a Fair Housing System That Works for Latinos Chapter 15 The Effectiveness of Fair Housing Programs, and Policy Options

Shelling Redux: How Sociology Fails to Make Progress in Building and Empirically Testing Complex Causal Models Regarding Race1 and Residence

1These comments are emerge from several decades of work with segregation, discrimination, fair housing enforcement, and racial preference data as an academic researcher and as manager of research on fair housing issues at the research office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

By Words and Deeds: Racial Steering by Real Estate Agents in the U.S. in 2000

Although prohibited by the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, studies in the 1980s found that racial steering by real estate agents in the U.S. was still occurring. That legislation was strengthened in 1988, but throughout the 1990s, no study examined whether these tougher strictures helped eliminate steering. In 2000, HUD and the Urban Institute conducted the national Housing Discrimination Study in 20 U.S. metropolitan areas to replicate and extend that earlier work. In this article, we report the results of this latest study, which examined three types of steering and three steering mechanisms, all at three geographic scales. The results indicate that steering of all types is occurring when Black and White homebuyers are involved. In at least 12 to 15% of the cases, agents provided gratuitous commentary that gave more information to White homebuyers and encouraged them to choose homes in areas with more White and fewer poor households. Steering is less prevalent when Hispanic and White buyers are involved. We also found no evidence that steering declined over the last decade, despite the toughening of the federal legislation in 1988. We conclude by discussing the implications for interracial wealth differentials and new fair housing enforcement initiatives.

Housing Discrimination in U.S. Suburbs: A Bibliography

This bibliography identifies and describes social science literature published since 1970 on suburban racial housing discrimination in the United States, emphasizing materials published since 1990. Attempts by suburbs using zoning or other means to exclude affordable and/or public housing, and real estate and lending industry discrimination are covered, as are studies of the spatial mismatch hypothesis, or suburban jobs/housing imbalance. Included as well are studies of efforts to oppose discrimination, such as fair housing enforcement, fair share housing, and the open suburbs movement. The bibliography consists of 321 annotated entries in four groups: bibliographies and reference sources, monographs (pre-and post-1990), and journal articles, with author, geographic, and subject cross-references.

Moving Up the Residential Hierarchy: A New Remedy for an Old Injury Arising from Housing Discrimination

Congress passed the Fair Housing Act over thirty years ago, yet housing discrimination persists. One of the harshest consequences of discrimination in housing is that upwardly mobile members of protected groups lose access to desirable communities and the attendant benefits, ranging from safe streets and good schools to productive role models. Fair housing laws and related case law have neither recognized nor provided a remedy for the loss of intangible community benefits due to housing discrimination.In this article, I demonstrate that claims for lost access to desirable communities can be easily incorporated into an extant category of compensable injuries under the Fair Housing Act. I then introduce a method for assessing the value of this injury. In brief, the method compares the price of housing that a victim of discrimination obtained to the price of the housing the home-seeker sought and was unlawfully denied to approximate the value of living in the more desirable community. The virtue of the method is that it provides adjudicators with a concrete basis for calculating damages for lost access to a desirable community.In the first part of the article, I discuss the extent of housing discrimination in the United States, the role discrimination plays in limiting people's access to the bundle of goods and services that desirable communities provide, the fair housing laws, current remedies under the laws, and the failure of the laws to provide a remedy to people who are denied access to desirable communities as a result of discrimination. In Part II, I describe the method for calculating damages for lost access to a desirable community and discuss some of its complexities. In Part III, I discuss the potential impact of these new damage calculations on the fair housing enforcement scheme.

Housing discrimination is still worth worrying about

Several scholars claim that racial and ethnic discrimination in housing is now relatively infrequent and has little impact on the lives of black and Hispanic households. They conclude that money spent on fair housing enforcement will do little or nothing to help people in these groups. This article examines these claims. The article concludes that these claims are not consistent with the evidence, which shows that discrimination in housing is still a common experience for blacks and Hispanics and that the cost of discrimination is still high. Moreover, discrimination constrains the opportunities of people in these groups to go to good schools, to find jobs, and to accumulate home equity. Thus, improved enforcement of fair housing legislation not only promotes principles that are at the heart of our democracy but also attacks one pillar of the system that perpetuates large intergroup disparities in earnings and wealth.

Intergovernmental Relations and the Administrative Enforcement of Equal Employment Opportunity Laws

Equal employment opportunity has been an explicitly stated national goal since enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In furtherance of this goal, Congress authorized creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to enforce compliance with the act's provisions against discrimination in employment, and to work with state and local fair employment practices agencies in their enforcement of related antidiscrimination laws. These joint efforts have led to complex intergovernmental relations among national, state, and local governmental organizations. The impetus for this study lies in understanding the relationship between national and state administrative agencies charged with enforcing antidiscrimination statutes in the public and private workplace. Such understanding is important in refining current theory and practice regarding equal employment opportunity. Although extensive literatures exist in the areas of intergovernmental relations and civil rights, research is sparse regarding the linkage between equal employment opportunity as a public policy in a federal system and its implementation through intergovernmental means.[1] Three primary questions underlie this research. First, to what extent and in what ways does the presence of overlapping authority help or hinder administrative enforcement? Second, what variation exists in the degree of interdependence between the EEOC and state fair employment practices agencies, and what effect does the degree of interdependence have on enforcement? Third, what is the nature and extent of bargaining in the development of consensus between the national agency and state entities, and how does it affect the content of contracts between them? The Evolution of Employment Discrimination Policy Employment discrimination policy has developed within the context of a federal system of governance. Both the national government and individual states create and execute policies.[2] A division of responsibility between levels of government based on the nature of the program or service provided is part of the ongoing debate over proper allocation of authority among governmental levels (Rivlin, 1992). From early conflict over slavery to clashes over desegregation and voting rights, disagreement about the nature of federalism has often centered on issues related to states rights in a federal system (Nice, 1987). Traditional views about dual federalism, in which power and responsibility is divided between the national and state governments and each exercises authority in its respective jurisdiction, reinforced the perspective that states, when enacting segregation laws, were exercising authority in their own relatively autonomous sphere. The national government, however, exerted authority in a variety of areas, including fair employment, particularly during the New Deal and Great Society periods. When the national Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted, over 20 states had some type of fair employment law, and several states had laws requiring racially segregated employment.[3] The coordinated enforcement requirement in Title VII of the act, which indicated that the newly created EEOC was to work with subnational fair employment agencies, was reinforced by views about cooperative and creative federalism. Instead of separate spheres of authority, there were areas of overlap, with power and responsibility for certain policies shared between national and state governments to varying degrees. Growing federal involvement in the implementation of civil rights policy was challenged during the Reagan administration as part of an overall effort to shift many governmental responsibilities to the states (Amaker, 1988; Nathan and Doolittle, 1987). Devolution and decentralization varied by state and program (Lester, 1986; U.S. Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, 1993). Fair housing enforcement by states increased (Lamb, 1991) and fair employment enforcement showed a mixed approach (Wood, 1990). …

Presidential Leadership and Civil Rights Policy

Introductory Comments by James W. Riddlesperger, Jr., and Donald W. Jackson The Public, the President, and Civil Rights Presidents, Public Opinion, and Civil Rights: An Agenda-Setting Perspective by Jeffrey E. Cohen Presidential Rhetoric in Civil Rights Policymaking, 1953-1992 by Steven A. Shull and Albert C. Ringelstein Moving with the Grain of History: An Examination of Presidential Action in the Civil Rights Domain from 1892 to 1968 by Ronald E. Brown Institutions, the President, and Civil Rights Presidential Leadership Style and Civil Rights Legislation: The Civil Rights Act of 1957 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by James D. King and James W. Riddlesperger, Jr. Affirmative Action and Business Deregulation: On the Reagan Administration's Failure to Revise Executive Order No. 11246 by Robert R. Detlefsen A Transformed Triangle: Court, Congress and Presidency in Civil Rights by Stephen L. Wasby Policy Arenas, the President, and Civil Rights Presidential Decision-Making in Two Desegregation Crises: Little Rock Central High School and the University of Mississippi by Mark Stern John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Civil Rights by Donald W. Jackson and James W. Riddlesperger, Jr. Decentralizing Fair Housing Enforcement During the Reagan Presidency by Charles M. Lamb and Jim Twombly Modeling Presidential Influence in the Civil Rights Policymaking Process by Steven A. Shull and Dennis W. Gleiber Bibliography Index

Housing Problems and Prospects for Blacks in Houston

Houston was considered the premier Sunbelt city in the 1970s. Much of the growth during this boom period was fueled by the oil industry. The city led the nation in new jobs created and housing starts. The economic growth, however, was not uniformly distributed to all segments of the population—specifically, a large segment of the black community was passed over during the city's housing boom. Many of the housing problems facing black Houstonians can be traced to the city's anti-public housing sentiment, policies that create and perpetuate racial segregation, and the dismantling of the fair housing enforcement mechanism. Housing discrimination, residential segregation, and other institutional barriers all limit the mobility options for a sizable segment of the black Houston community.