- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Foreword
- Introduction
- I. Voting Rights
- II. Education
- III. Employment Discrimination
- IV.Fair Housing
- V. Public Accommodations
- VI. Policing the Police and Prosecuting the Klan
- Recommendations
- A. De-Politicize the Civil Rights Division
- B. Promote Access to Voting
- C. Enforce Fair Housing Laws
- D. Ensure Compliance with the Americans with Disability Act (ADA)
- E. Combat Employment Discrimination
- F. Promote and Maintain Integrated, High Quality Schools
- G. Prosecute Police Misconduct and Hate Crimes
- Conclusion
Enforce Fair Housing Laws
The United States Department of Justice's Housing and Civil Enforcement Section has the powerful authority to bring cases involving a pattern or practice of discrimination that violates the Fair Housing Act to federal court. In recent years that authority has been used infrequently to address significant patterns of discrimination based on race and national origin, and almost never to challenge deeply entrenched residential segregation.
Fresh attention is being paid to racial and ethnic segregation in housing because of the recent Supreme Court decision that refused to permit race conscious school assignment policies in Louisville and Seattle. Although the Court has, over the years, pointed to ending housing segregation as a key way to avoid racially and ethnically segregated schools, the Justice Department has been turning a blind eye. The federal government's chief fair housing litigation agency has repeatedly failed to challenge discriminatory housing practices that potentially or actually segregate neighborhoods, as well as other types of discriminatory practices that affect many people of color. Discrimination in real estate sales and racial steering, discrimination in lending that destroys neighborhoods, and discrimination in zoning and land use practices that exclude people of color or limit their housing opportunities all continue virtually unchecked by today's Justice Department.
The Division should develop, on its own or in conjunction with advocates and enforcers, cases that focus directly on the key causes and perpetuators of residential segregation: real estate sales discrimination, lending discrimination including discriminatory steering and predatory practices by lenders, homeowners and renters' insurance discrimination, and zoning and land use practices. Its testing program should expand to examine discrimination in sales and lending. Its pattern and practice authority should be used broadly to address segregative practices that cut across communities in the same way that its early cases, like its case against Black Jack, did.
The Civil Rights Division's Housing and Civil Enforcement Section has also suffered from the loss of many career employees over the past six years and has experienced internal turmoil similar to that which has made headlines in the Division's Voting Rights Section. Hiring choices should focus on the fair housing expertise of applicants and the need to build capacity to take on the more challenging and important task of addressing systemic discrimination in our communities and providing meaningful enforcement of all of protections that the Fair Housing Act offers.
