Civil Rights and Fair Housing Today

The United States today is a more just country than it was 50 years ago. As a consequence of a largely successful civil rights revolution that attracted public attention in the 1960s, discrimination is illegal in education, employment, housing, voting, public accommodations and access to all federal programs.

On the other hand, incidents of community tension, discrimination and hate remain a part of American life. Efforts constantly are underway to undermine civil rights gains made over the past decades.

For example:

Affirmative action, which has extended equal opportunities to qualified women and people of color for more than 25 years, is in jeopardy. Recent court decisions are effectively chipping away at it.
"It is most frustrating to see the very means by which the evils of the past have been remedied being cast aside," said Hon. Nathaniel Jones, Chairman of the CommUNITY 2000 Advisory Board. "Any remedy, such as affirmative action, which takes race into account is being called "reverse discrimination."
Recent successful efforts to encourage law enforcement agencies and retail establishments to end institutionalized racial profiling have been undermined by the federal government's sanctioned racial profiling in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. Hundreds of people with perceived ethnic similarities to the suspected terrorists have been taken into custody. The Bush Administration is backing measures to try these people by means of secretive military tribunals.
In the last five years alone, the headlines contained numerous reports of hate crimes. An African American man in a small Texas town was tied to a truck and pulled to pieces by two white men, for no other reason than the color of his skin. A Wyoming college student was beaten and crucified on a fence because he was gay. A young member of an Illinois white power group went on a deadly shooting spree across two states, taking aim from his moving car at minorities and Jews.
In 1988 people with disabilities finally were added to the Fair Housing Act as a protected class. Congress declared the amendment a "clear pronouncement of a national commitment to end the unnecessary exclusion of persons with [disabilities] from the American mainstream." Yet today more than two million disabled people live in institutions, according to a 1998 report commissioned by Disability Rights Advocates Inc. Many of these are forced to do so because of a shortage of accessible, affordable housing nationwide. For example, the Illinois Office of Long Term Care reported in 1999 that 4000 people with developmental disabilities were waiting to receive home and community based services that would allow them to live independently.

What Census 2000 Reveals

Against this backdrop of gains won and lost, figures from the 2000 Census indicate that we are a more diverse nation than we were 10 years ago.

These figures also indicate that we are not a more integrated nation — racially, ethnically or economically.

The number of Americans who identified themselves as white declined in 10 years, to 68 percent of the population from 75 percent. While the number of black Americans remained the same at 12 percent, the country's Latino population increased to 13 percent from 9 percent. The Asian American population increased to 4 percent from 3 percent. The 2000 census also included a new option that allowed citizens to identify themselves as belonging to two or more races. Data indicate that 2 percent of the population did so.

Despite an increasingly diverse citizenry, most still live in areas that are largely segregated. For example, 2000 census data on the near and outlying suburbs of Boston show populations that remain largely segregated. Of 10 Boston suburbs, only three — Lawrence, Lowell and Lynn — somewhat reflect the diversity of the U.S. population at large. Approximately 34.10 percent of Lawrence's population is white, 59.7 percent Latino, with the rest of the population are black, Asian or multiracial. Lowell's population is approximately 62.5 percent white, 3.5 percent black, 16.5 percent Asian, 2.9 percent multiracial and 14 percent Latino. About 62.5 percent of Lynn's population is white, with the remaining population 9.2 percent black, 6.4 percent Asian, 3 percent multiracial and 18.4 percent Latino. The remaining seven suburbs are overwhelmingly white.

As for economic diversity, initial Census 2000 data on housing tenure (owner occupied vs. renter occupied housing units) can be used to approximate relative economic status of racial and ethnic groups. Renters generally are assumed to have lower incomes than owners. In the Chicago suburbs, for example, the vast majority of owner-occupied homes have white householders. In Cook County, about 60 percent of occupied homes are owned, while 40 percent are rented. Nearly three-quarters (72 percent) of owner-occupied homes have white householders, while less than one-fifth (18 percent) have African American householders. In contrast, only half of renter-occupied homes have white householders. One third (33 percent) of renter-occupied homes have African American householders. Asian householders are about as likely to own as to rent their homes. More African American, Latino, Asian and multiracial householders rent than own their homes in Cook County, while roughly twice as many white householders own their homes than rent. While Census 2000 data are not available on the housing tenure of people with disabilities, employment statistics from a Harris 2000 Survey of Americans with Disabilities show that only 32 percent of non-institutionalized people with disabilities (including group home residents) are employed. The survey also revealed that people with disabilities are more likely to live in poverty, with household incomes of $15,000 or less, than the general population (29 percent versus 10 percent).

As the current climate indicates and the data demonstrate, we have made great strides in the last 50 years toward fulfilling the promise of U.S. democracy, which guarantees the civil rights of everyone living in this country. But we have not yet succeeded.

One of these treasured rights is the freedom to choose where and with whom we want to live.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 and its subsequent amendments make it illegal to discriminate in housing related transactions because of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability or familial status (the presence in the home of children under the age of 18). Nonetheless, housing-related discrimination remains rampant.

Because of a long legacy of housing discrimination in the United States, many Americans have been raised in segregated communities, allowing them to nurture prejudices and fears. Often, when people who are different move into historically homogenous communities, their new neighbors automatically assume the worst. They worry their property values will decline or that crime rates will rise. This can create an environment in which community leaders feel free to circumvent the law, knowing the bulk of the population tacitly endorses them. Politicians pass ordinances limiting the number of people per home; landlords tell the "wrong" sort that a vacant apartment has been rented; and bankers practice predatory lending.

An environment where landlords, realtors, lenders, appraisers, politicians and neighbors disregard fair housing laws — or adhere to the letter of the law, but not its spirit — usually is fraught with tension, or the potential for violence. Sometimes it erupts when a vulnerable individual or group exercises their right to fair and affordable housing. Sometimes tension is a constant, always lurking just below the surface and taken for granted.

Unfortunately, tensions left simmering and unchecked can lead to hate crimes.

According to the FBI's most recent Hate Crimes Statistics Report, 8,063 bias-motivated incidents were reported in 2000, compared to 7,876 in 1999 and 7,775 in 1998. Of the total reported incidents, 4,337 were motivated by racial bias, 1,472 by religious bias, 1,299 by sexual orientation bias and 911 by ethnicity/national origin bias. There were also 36 crimes reported against disabled persons.

The number of hate crimes committed in 2000 represents a small number of crimes committed overall. But even one is too many. Hate crimes are acts of violence against the American ideal: that we can make one nation out of many different people. Horrific examples come to mind when people think of hate crimes, for example, the deaths of James Byrd in Texas and Matthew Shepard in Wyoming.

However, unpublicized hate crimes are committed and prosecuted in the United States every day, and too many occur near the place where individuals deserve to feel most secure — their homes. The FBI designated four categories to describe the leading locations where the 8,063 hate crimes committed in 2000 took place. They are: highway/road/ally/street (about 15 percent); parking lot/garage (about 5 percent); school/college (about 9 percent); and residence/home (the largest location at about 30 percent). These crimes occurred outside people's houses, on their streets, in their neighborhoods.

Those who work in the civil rights and fair housing fields also believe that incidents of housing-related hate crime are underreported, primarily for two reasons. First, law enforcement officials often mistakenly report housing-related hate incidents as vandalism or property crimes. Second, many of the victims either are too frightened or too unaware of their legal rights to protest.

Lea Rios and Hui Cai are examples of this second reason.

Lea is a tenant in the Old Colony housing project of South Boston, which was a whites only project until 1989. In the almost eight years that she has lived in Old Colony and been an advocate for minority tenants there, her car has been smashed and vandalized innumerable times by white youths. She knew her property was being damaged because she was an unwelcome minority, but it never occurred to her to report each incident by its real name — hate crime.

Cai and her family moved into a middle-class neighborhood in San Diego County in December 2000. From the beginning, they consistently were harassed and intimidated by a next door neighbor, who made clear that he did not like Chinese people. He even went so far as to file suit against the family because he was offended by the smell of Chinese food. Cai was loath to notify authorities for many months because the man frightened her.

These examples do not describe the norm in most U.S. neighborhoods. Hate incidents in housing are the exception rather than the rule. In many communities, integrative moves by minorities are met quietly with a spectrum of responses ranging from no reaction to warm welcome. What Lia and Cai's stories illustrate, however, is that beyond protecting victims and effectively enforcing fair housing laws, local leaders, civil rights advocates, law enforcement officials and all people of good will must work to change the environments of America's neighborhoods so that tensions do not fester.

CommUNITY 2000 is a national project specifically designed to prevent and respond to community tensions that arise when people exercise their rights under the Fair Housing Act. It was created to help insure that people like Lea Rios and Hui Cai can live in peace wherever they choose.

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