“…more than 4 million incidents of housing discrimination occur each year in the U.S.”

The federal government’s oversight of fair housing practices throughout the U.S. is in such disarray that a new independent enforcement agency is needed “to restore credibility” to the government’s anti-discrimination mandate.

That was the primary recommendation of a report issued this week by the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity.

The bipartisan study group spent the last six months hearing testimony and conducting research on the quality of fair housing enforcement in the U.S. Its report, “The Future of Fair Housing,” depicts  the current fair housing effort, now the responsibility of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Justice, as strikingly inept. It said the two agencies’ fair housing bureaus are woefully understaffed and driven by bureaucratic neglect and infighting. As a result, the government’s ability to investigate and prosecute instances of housing discrimination and expand the implementation of fair-housing practices has virtually been at a standstill.

According to the report, more than 4 million incidents of housing discrimination occur each year in the U.S. But fewer than 30,000 complaints a year are filed with the federal agency. The reason for the extraordinary gap, the report said, is that HUD’s glaring lack of oversight is so widely know that most individuals who feel they’ve been discriminated against don’t bother to file a complaint.

Henry G. Cisneros, the Commission’s co-chairman who served as Secretary of HUD during the Clinton administration, said during a Tuesday news conference that the testimony they heard during their study had a common refrain. “In each of the [five] cities we visited, we heard the same thing: the system is broken. The Fair Housing Act – the law that prohibits discrimination in housing under Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act – is not being systematically, effectively and rigorously enforced.”

Jack Kemp, the other Commission co-chairman, who was HUD Secretary under President George H.W. Bush, said only an independent fair-housing agency, separate from the broader concerns of the giant housing department, can best marshal the resources and attention to effective enforce fair-housing laws.

The Commission report is intended to underscore the continued need for the anti-discrimination measures in this the 40th anniversary year of the landmark act.
The Commission was sponsored by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF), the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRUL), and the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA).
Other recommendations of the study include:

• Revive the President’s Fair Housing Council, which was originally established
  to monitor the fair-housing effort across all federal agencies.
• Actively support efforts to use other federal housing programs, such as the
  Section 8 rental assistance program and the Low Income Housing Tax Credit,
  to promote wider housing choices for individuals and families.
• Improve efforts to insure that state and local recipients of federal housing funds comply with federal fair-housing rules.and
• Ensure that fair housing principles are made integral parts of solving the
  current mortgage and financial crises.

–The Editors