Fact: the Fair Housing Initiative Program (FHIP) provides funding to nonprofit fair housing organizations that enables them to more effectively enforce fair housing and to educate. This program was officially funded at $20 million in FY 2005, the lowest level since 1998.
Fact: $2 million of this funding has been earmarked for other purposes than the funding of local fair housing organizations.
Fact: The Administration has proposed cutting FHIP by 20% for the FY 2006.
These facts must mean that fair housing initiatives are working and that housing discrimination is on the decline, right? Wrong. According to the 2005 National Fair Housing Alliance Fair Housing Trends Report, housing discrimination complaints rose nationally from 25,148 in 2003 to 27,319 in 2004. The reporting trends and the funding trends over the last two years seem to imply that as FHIP funding continues to decrease housing discrimination will undoubtedly continue to increase.
Bear in mind that the reported incidents represent a tiny proportion of the actual cases of housing discrimination. Based on a long term study that compared treatment of White and minority homeseekers, the 2004 Trends Report estimates that at minimum 3.7 million instances of housing discrimination occur each year.
The Fair Housing Act forbids discrimination on the basis of disability, familial status, national origin, sex, religion race and color. According to the data from 2004, 31% of the complaints received were related to disability, 26% related to race, and 13% were familial status complaints (discrimination based on the presence of children in the household). Local statistics reflect the national trend: of the 236 reports of discrimination HOME received last year, 99 of 236, the plurality related to racial bias, familial status was the second most frequently reported, and disability was in third place. Since 1996, the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) has collected housing discrimination complaint data compiled from NFHA member agencies, including HOME, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and other state and local government offices.
The report identifies that most housing discrimination complaints are reported against apartment owners and managers. There were 13,804 reported complaints in the rental market in 2004 based on race, disability, family status and national origin.
This discrimination occurred in various ways including the denial of available units, refusal to make reasonable accommodations for disabled persons, higher rents or security deposits for members of a protected class, and the segregation of minorities or families with children.
The second largest number of complaints filed was discrimination taking place during a home sales transaction. These 1,061 complaints included those against real estate professionals who denied African Americans opportunities to view housing, steered minorities to minority neighborhoods, and refused to negotiate the prices of homes with African-Americans while negotiating with White buyers who made similar or less than favorable offers.
The report also reveals that 467 mortgage lending complaints and 195 homeowner’s insurance complaints were filed.
The report concluded that although the population of the United States may be growing more diverse, the communities are extremely segregated by race. Studies consistently find that race most often determines where people will live, not economics. According to the Trends Report, “The average White person in metropolitan America lives in a neighborhood that is 80% White and only 7% Black.”
Among the major cities of upstate New York, Buffalo is the most segregated. The lack of FHIP funding for HOME makes our mission-- to end the housing discrimination that keeps us among the most segregated cities in the nation-- even more difficult.
