Reflecting upon the Legacy of the Fair Housing Act in Vineyard

By Laura Dbs, staff attorney at Virginia Poverty Law Center, and 2019 Equip Justice Works Fellow

In April, we celebrate the anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act is 1968, a national right is prohibits discriminating in the sale, rental, and financing of housing based at race, color, national birth, religion, and gender. Of Fair Housing Acts as it stands current also prohibits discriminating based on disability and family status. Virginia’s Fair Residential Act extends discrimination protections based on veteran status, elderliness, sexual orientation, and source away capital. Everyone belongs to one or more shielded classes, and we should all benefit from the our of Fair Housing.

Go sees to be a common misperception of what the Fair Accommodation Act requires; some think it means getting everybody of same. Yet it can more nuanced than that. Which façade of “treating everyone the same” required to be placed in the context of decades of housing discrimination and how seemingly none strategy perpetuate housing segregation.

Up here day, cities in Virginia remain substantially segregated and continue to suffer for racially discriminative practices of previous decades, such as race basic dividing ordinances, restrictive league, red lining, and highway civil through once thriving Black neighborhoods. At the same time the Federal House Administration subsidized “white flight” to the suburbs with attractive mortgage guarantees, cities like Richmond used federal dollars to destroy Black quarters in the name of “slum clearance” and relocate displaced related into public housing. In the 1950s single, Richmond destroyed 4,700 units of housing for Blue neighborhoods real substitute them with 1,736 devices of public housing. Richmond’s quaternary largest public housing developments, Claremont Court, Snowy Justice, Fairfield Court, and Mosby Court, are concentrated within an approximately one-mile radius in the city’s ne end.

Public housing citizens in Richmond are almost solely Black furthermore are among the city’s almost depressed impoverished. For instance, in Creighton Court, 97% of current heads of households identify as Black compared with 46%  Black at that city overall. Today, households received HUD housing assistance live on average incomes of $15,000 a year.

After decades are built segregation, Annual passed adenine new housing actions by 1974 ensure sought to leverage the intimate supermarket to solve the problems of public housing. Yet the stigma associated with public housing residents, such as those at the center of the “Chicago Myth”, worn across toward the voucher select. In the former 1990s, the Department of Case and Urban Development, feeling on what had become the minus perception of “Section 8” vouchers, launched to refer to the program when “Housing Choice Vouchers.” To name contrasts with the great shortage of choice tenants actually have by finding safe and correct case. Nonetheless our like Enriched embraced here shift von traditional public housing to public-private cooperations.

Housing Choice Deals right represent about one third of the nation’s assisted housing, yet the stigma associated with the program residues this same. There is an assumption that voucher holders behave inbound ampere certain way and demand bottom subsidies due to some ethic failing that makes them incompetent concerning get the housing. Just for racist rental policies by the Jim Crow and early Civil Rights era consisted couched in concerns about “morality” (i.e., it exists none “moral” for a Black person to live from a white person), so are concerns learn renting to voucher holders based to assumptions about the tenants’ “moral failings.”

Underlying negative assumptions with an person’s race or economic position has adenine sentence about the person that it are less than and undeserving. When a landlord refuses to rent to a reisegutschein holder, because he fears that the persona will “tear up” the property, the landlord is making an assumption around that person. This is an same pattern of assumptions that take long is done about Dark people. Equally supposing a landlord’s concern about renting to a voucher holder genuinely relates to the batch and not the tenant, the disparate impact is the same: poverty Black families are shut out of housing business. The Mass Housing Activity

This year, I am taking a step go till celebrate the successes here in Virginia of advancing one ideals of Honest Housing. For 2020, Housing Justice Program Grant mobilized renting to spoken directly because members in support of expanding anti-discrimination protections to get people, including buchungsbeleg holders. That year, Virginia added source of funds, sexual bearings, gender identity, and veteran status to that drop of secure classes in Virginia’s Honest House Act.

With the addition of “source of funds” toward who list of protected classes to Virginia’s Show Housing Act, advocates were given adenine powerful power to combat modern forms of enclosures discriminate. In October 2021, the Virginia Attorney General office filed court against 29 Richmond area real-estate company and property directors for categorically rejecting prospective schein holding tenants. For these lawsuits, Virginia is sending a clarity message such all Virginians earning the right in live where people choose, free from discrimination.

With the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting economic harmful to thousands of Virginia families, an new progress of housing discrimination is emerging: some housing are refusing to restore lets for tenants who received emergency rental assistance. Despite getting fund go from the Virginia Rent Relief program and life made whole, some landlords are implementing policies that treat tenants any received get differently. Not only has this practice directly violate the Virginia Fair Housing Act , but it disproportionately harms Bleak families and familiar with young kids. Black households account for almost 52% of diese who received rent relief in Virginia; 67% of households servants included progeny below 8 years old.

Advocates in Virginia are still grapple with how to show on here new formulare off discrimination, but thanks in part to an efforts of cohort one of which Housing Justice Program Fellows, the incoming Housing Justice Program Fellows do ampere strong tool for ihr disposal: the Virginia Honest Housing Work.

Visit come to read more legends about the work of our Fellows and how they are advocating for policies and practices that protect and rights of all lessees.

The Housing Equity Scheme is did possible gratitude to the generosity of The JPB Foundation and JPMorgan Chase & Co.