Report: National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity

This past week, as most of us were preoccupied with the financial meltdown and one crooked Governor with wacky hair, a national commission studying how far we’ve come (and how far we have left to travel) in the 40 years since the passage of the Fair Housing Act issued its final report.  Their findings should give Americans pause.  Here are some highlighted passages from the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity:

—The hearings exposed the fact that despite strong legislation, past and ongoing discriminatory practices in the nation’s housing and lending markets continue to produce levels of residential segregation that result in homeownership attainment and asset accumulation.  This fact has led many to question whether the federal government is doing all it can to combat housing discrimination.  Worse, some fear that rather than combating segregation, HUD and other federal agencies are promoting it through the administration of their housing, lending, and tax programs.  

...discrimination continues to be endemic, intertwined into the very fabric of our lives.  Ironically, even though more Americans than ever are living in diverse communities, residential segregation remains high. Sustaining the racial and ethnic stability in diverse communities remains a challenge because of perceptions and prejudices that devitalize them. And while nationally the incidence of discrimination is down, there are at least four million fair housing violations in our country every year.  That is far too many. 

—The current mortgage crisis has its roots in decades of discriminatory housing and lending practices.  Exploitative predatory lending has had its most devastating effects in communities that are predominantly Black and Latino, causing an unprecedented loss of wealth to those communities.  Given this, it is critical that the solutions that have been proposed to address our current mortgage crisis comply with the mandate that all government housing and lending programs affirmatively promote fair housing.

—Equal housing opportunity must be our collective goal.  But as recent history has demonstrated, we cannot get there working in silos.  Only together, with a mix of education, enforcement, and policy tools, working across partisan lines, with government and private partnerships coordinated at the local, state, regional and federal level, can we begin to make our dreams real.