See the full pdf of this issue of Poverty & Race Journal here.
This past spring, as part of its ongoing observation of the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act, PRRAC assembled a distinguished and varied group of panelists to discuss the wide-ranging impact of the Act in the context of “Fair Housing Intersections.” Recent developments could have cast a shadow over the discussion: the Department of Housing and Urban Development has taken actions to retreat from its mandates of combatting discrimination and promoting fair housing and integration – most notably, the suspension of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Regulation. In spite of these ever present and oftentimes growing threats, the Intersections panel powerfully emphasized the continued vitality of the Fair Housing Act and the need to pursue its goals in new and innovative ways.
Appropriately, given the conversation’s focus on intersectional issues relating to housing, each of the panelists viewed questions about the impact of the Fair Housing Act from a different perspective. The environmental justice leader Vernice Miller- Travis emphasized the issues of environmental justice that attend issues of housing segregation. Demetria McCain, President of the Inclusive Communities Project (and a PRRAC board member) called upon her experience creating racially diverse and economically thriving communities to highlight the vital role that fair housing plays in assuring equality and opportunity. Former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Education John B. King recounted the barriers that persistent housing segregation poses in attempts to assure equal education opportunity. Former Secretary of the Department of Transportation Anthony Foxx outlined the ways that segregation in housing and lack of equal access to transportation have worked together to deprive people of opportunity in every aspect of their lives. Each panelist agreed that these issues represented only some of the ways that housing is central to a hub of intersecting structures, which can either guarantee full inclusion in society’s benefits or relegate individuals and communities to conditions of deprivation and disadvantage.
Each of the panelists acknowledged the considerable challenges facing those who rely on the Fair Housing Act to end the dramatic differences in access to opportunity which the Act was intended to address. But instead of dwelling on past and present failures, each speaker emphasized the need to persevere, sometimes at the individual, local and federal levels combined, in efforts to realize the goals of the Fair Housing Act. They left us with examples of ways that we can continue to use the Fair Housing Act as a lever to achieve meaningful social change: by accepting the moral responsibility of acting to take on the difficult issues of denial of access to fair and adequate housing; incorporating intersectional principles into grantmaking, such as providing transportation to medical appointments for pregnant women living in medically underserved areas in order to combat high infant mortality rates; and pressuring localities to take the requirements of affirmatively furthering fair housing seriously, even when the federal government declines to do so.
And so an event which might have been a “wake” for the Fair Housing Act instead was a motivating discussion of how we may infuse the Act with renewed utility in the ongoing struggle for equality.
Dennis Parker (dparker@aclu.org) is Director of the Racial Justice Program at the ACLU. He is a member of PRRAC’s Board of Directors, and moderated the March 22 “Fair Housing Intersections” panel discussion.
