Fair housing

Housing discrimination is discrimination in which an individual or family is treated unequally when trying to buy, rent, lease, sell or finance a home based on certain characteristics, such as race, class, sex, religion, national origin, and familial status. This type of discrimination can lead to housing and spatial inequality and racial segregation which, in turn, can exacerbate wealth disparities between certain groups. In the United States, housing discrimination began after the abolition of slavery as part of a federally sponsored law, but has since been made illegal; however, studies show that housing discrimination still exists.

After the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, Jim Crow laws were introduced. These laws led to the discrimination of racial and ethnic minorities, especially African Americans. Fifteen state courts obeyed ordinances that enforced the denial of housing to African American and other minority groups in white-zoned areas. These ordinances were then made illegal in the 1917 Supreme Court case, Buchanan v. Warley. Following this decision, however, nineteen states legally supported “covenants,” or agreements, between property owners to not rent or sell any homes to racial or ethnic minorities. Although the covenants, too, were made illegal in 1948, they were still allowed to be present in private deeds. It was not until the Civil Rights Act of 1968, otherwise known as the Fair Housing Act, that the federal government made its first concrete steps to deem all types of housing discrimination unconstitutional. The act explicitly prohibits housing discrimination practices common at the time, including filtering information about a home’s availability, racial steering, blockbusting, and redlining.

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