Housing Discrimination

Housing quality, stability, and affordability have a direct relationship to socioemotional and physical health. Both city planning and public health have long recognized the role of housing in health, but the complexity of this relationship in regard to infant and maternal health is less understood. Focusing on literature specifically relevant to U.S. metropolitan areas, I conduct a multidisciplinary literature review to understand the influence of housing factors and interventions that impact infant and maternal health. The paper seeks to achieve three primary goals. First, to identify the primary “pathways” by which housing influences infant and maternal health. Second, the review focuses on the role and influence of historical housing discrimination on maternal health outcomes. Third, the review identifies emergent practice-based housing interventions in planning and public health practice to support infant and maternal health. The literature suggests that the impact of housing on infant health is complex, multifaceted, and intergenerational. Historical housing discrimination also directly impacts contemporary infant and maternal health outcomes. Policy interventions to support infant health through housing are just emerging but demonstrate promising outcomes. Structural barriers to housing affordability in the United States will require new resources to foster greater collaboration between the housing and the health sectors.

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Images of Race, Class, and Markets: Rethinking the Origin of U.S. Fair Housing Policy

Journal of Policy History ◽

10.1353/jph.2001.0006 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 13 (2) ◽

pp. 181-214 ◽

Cited By ~ 10

Author(s):

Mara S. Sidney

Keyword(s):

Civil Rights ◽

Presidential Campaign ◽

Executive Order ◽

Fair Housing ◽

Housing Discrimination ◽

The North ◽

American Values ◽

Fair Housing Act ◽

Housing Professionals ◽

The 1960S

As the first national law to address racial discrimination in housing, the 1968 Fair Housing Act was truly a landmark piece of legislation. It prohibited homeowners, real-estate agents, lenders, and other housing professionals from engaging in a range of practices they had commonly used to keep neighborhoods racially segregated, such as refusing to sell or rent to a person because of his or her race, lying about the availability of a dwelling, or blockbusting (inducing white owners to sell by telling them that blacks were moving into the neighborhood). The last of the 1960s-era civil rights laws, the Fair Housing Act tackled the arena long felt to be the most sensitive to whites. Intense controversy, demonstrations, and violence over fair housing issues had occurred in many cities and states since at least the 1940s. Although John F. Kennedy promised during his presidential campaign to end housing discrimination “with the stroke of a pen,” once elected, he waited two years to sign a limited executive order. In 1966, a fair housing bill supported by President Johnson failed in Congress. Unlike other civil rights bills, the issue of housing evoked opposition not just from the South but also from the North. Opponents claimed that it challenged basic American values such as “a man's home is his castle”; to supporters, the symbolism of homeownership as “the American Dream” only underscored the importance of ensuring that housing was available to all Americans, regardless of race.

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Civil Rights and the Private School Movement in Mississippi, 1964–1971

History of Education Quarterly ◽

10.1111/j.1748-5959.2002.tb00105.x ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 42 (2) ◽

pp. 159-180 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Michael W. Fuquay

Keyword(s):

Public Schools ◽

Civil Rights ◽

Civil Rights Movement ◽

Private School ◽

Black Children ◽

Board Of Education ◽

Voting Rights Act ◽

Massive Resistance ◽

Housing Discrimination ◽

Civil Rights Act

The signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was heralded as a tremendous victory for the civil rights movement, the fulfillment of a decade-long struggle to enforce the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Along with measures against job and housing discrimination, the Civil Rights Act included provisions specifically designed to overcome the white South's massive resistance campaign and enforce school desegregation. Despite the continued intransigence of segregationists, these measures proved successful and white public schools across the South opened their doors to black children. With segregationists in retreat and the Voting Rights Act on the horizon, this was a time of celebration for civil rights activists. But this was not the end of the story.

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The Uncertain Future of the Fair Housing Act: HUD’s Recent Changes to Disparate Impact Standard

SMU Law Review Forum ◽

10.25172/slrf.74.1.2 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 74 (1) ◽

pp. 29-54

Author(s):

Leah Powers

Keyword(s):

Negative Consequences ◽

Disparate Impact ◽

Supreme Court Ruling ◽

Fair Housing ◽

Housing Discrimination ◽

Fair Housing Act ◽

Final Rule ◽

Standard Set ◽

Uncertain Future ◽

Core Mission

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.

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Patterns of othering minority groups in telephone gatekeeping encounters in the Sheffield property market

Journal of Language and Discrimination ◽

10.1558/jld.39978 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 3 (2) ◽

pp. 120-149

Author(s):

Nicole Baumgarten ◽

Inke Du Bois ◽

Victoria Gill

Keyword(s):

Minority Groups ◽

Differential Treatment ◽

Equitable Access ◽

Property Market ◽

Personal Names ◽

Housing Discrimination ◽

Accented Speech ◽

The United Kingdom ◽

Rapport Building

Research into housing discrimination has pointed out the pivotal role of estate agents as gatekeepers to the housing market. Telephone mystery shopping experiments were carried out with British estate agents to investigate how different British majority and minority groups – indexed by accented speech and ethnic personal names – are treated in those housing gatekeeping encounters. While there was little evidence for overt discrimination, linguistic micro-analyses of the data revealed differential treatment of ethnic majority and minority groups during the call procedure. The differential treatment was found in the estate agents’ call handling behaviours and related to the degree of personalisation of the service encounter in the form of either giving or withholding opportunities for rapport building with the caller. The findings show that ethnolinguistic discrimination in estate agents’ service provision affects the gatekeeping process independently of its outcome, with implications for the notion of equitable access to services and community participation in the United Kingdom.

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