Justice and equity are at the core of Jubilee Housing’s mission. They drive our work and animate our spirits. The concept of justice housing – deeply affordable and high-quality housing, with nearby supportive services, in thriving neighborhoods – is like the Biblical Jubilee Year. It is a call for generational redress, a righting of wrongs, a rebalancing of a lopsided system.
We know now more than ever that the pursuit of equity is critical for our nation’s future.
Unfortunately, and for too long, justice in housing has been absent in our society, rather than available in a preponderance. The effects of housing discrimination, a product of Jim Crow and other discriminatory laws and regulations, are salient and calcified in our communities today.
Stretching back to the 1930s, the legal practice of redlining decimated generations of black wealth. The establishment of the Federal Housing Administration in 1934 created a new lever of governmental power that barred potential black homeowners from receiving federally insured home loans while granting their white peers loans with favorable terms.
Programs created under the G.I. Bill of 1944 provided a path to home ownership for all veterans returning from World War II. However, redlining, combined with local racial covenants such as sundown laws, left few black veterans able to benefit from those programs. The door to home ownership, foundational to generational wealth creation, was slammed shut on black buyers.
Though the formal practice of racial discrimination in housing officially ended with the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, landlords, realtors and banks continued to marginalize black renters and homeowners. The practice of steering black families away from white communities and erecting onerous barriers to lending created a deeply segregated two-track trajectory – one for white people, who enjoyed substantial government support, a booming post-war economy and ample opportunities to build their “American Dream” and one for black people, who were disenfranchised, denied the helping hand of government and at the mercy of institutional racism.
The effects of redlining are clearly evident today in the yawning chasm of wealth disparity and the geographically separated neighborhoods that comprise our most populous communities. The wealth gap in the District of Columbia is a stark reminder of that chasm. According to the DC Fiscal Policy Institute, “while the poverty rate for white District residents is 7.9 percent, it is 27.9 percent – nearly four times higher – for Black residents, and 17.8 percent – more than twice as high – for the Latinx community. Moreover, Black families earn less than a third of their white counterparts, average 81 times less wealth than white families, and are significantly more likely to be in poverty.”
These stark contrasts have been widely researched by economist Raj Chetty, whose seminal work showed conclusively that the greatest single determinant of a person’s life-long opportunity is the zip code in which they were born.
The current administration’s recent abandonment of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, or AFFH, is another page in the long and sordid record of housing discrimination in the U.S. Though the Fair Housing Act of 1968 legally ended race-based housing discrimination, more subtle forms of discrimination maintained the unequal status quo that the law attempted to ameliorate. Additional tools were needed to achieve the goals of a non-discriminatory housing market.
The AFFH policy, introduced in 2015, finally provided the tools and the teeth needed to ensure that the goals of the Fair Housing Act could become a reality. The AFFH required communities receiving federal funds to both examine barriers to fair housing in their jurisdiction and to establish realistic plans to rectify those barriers. The AFFH rule also made available a raft of resources and tools to help local leaders track housing discrimination in a data-driven way. The goal was to help policymakers, experts and community members develop effective plans to address the housing disparities unique to their communities. The AFFH gave the Fair Housing Act an enforceable framework for protecting homebuyers and renters who faced discrimination.
In addition to rescinding a critical toolkit designed to rectify long-standing housing discrimination, critics of the policy have politicized its rollback using derogatory and racist terms that damage the debate around this important issue. As the housing crisis worsens amid the economic devastation of the pandemic, our leaders should be promoting affordable housing instead of scapegoating the people who need it.
The longitudinal nature of studying and discerning housing discrimination can take years. Creating and implementing a plan to address the issues can take years more. Measuring the change over time takes, again, years. Ending the AFFH rule after less than three years of implementation will stymie the progress made so far and will allow both intentional and nonintentional disparate impact to endure.
Jubilee Housing believes that policies such as the AFFH remain needed in our country, where racially discriminatory housing policies and practices continue to deny people of color access to affordable housing in thriving neighborhoods. Especially now, in the wake of COVID-19, we see clearly the formidable disparities that exist between black and white households due to systemic racism. Those disparities literally have created a matter of life and death. We need leaders who recognize the enormity of this moment and treat it with the solemnity it demands.
