Fifty years ago today, Congress passed one of the crowning achievements of the civil rights era: the Fair Housing Act. As a civil rights organization with the mission to eliminate race-based discrimination, the NAACP was intimately involved in the passing of this legislation and worked to eradicate housing inequality.
Enacted just seven days after Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, the Fair Housing Act outlawed racial discrimination in real estate and required that government “affirmatively further fair housing” by proactively integrating neighborhoods. This landmark achievement ushered in a much-needed federal effort to address the deeply entrenched residential segregation that, in large part, the federal government created and often sustains to this day.
In the years before his death, King was working towards affordable, safe homes in integrated communities. He urged us to “march on segregated housing until every ghetto of social and economic depression dissolves and Negroes and whites live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing.” But by nearly every metric, America today remains a deeply segregated society with a growing shortage of affordable homes.
Nationally, for every 100 of the lowest income families, there are just 35 homes affordable and available to them, leaving millions on the cusp of eviction and possible homelessness. Today, 14 million people live in high poverty communities, and the numbers are rising, nearly doubling since 2000. The devastating effects are felt most profoundly within communities of color. One in every four poor Black families and one in every seven poor Latino families live in concentrated poverty; only one in every 13 white families do.
Cities from Ferguson to Flint to Milwaukee highlight the decades of federal, state, and local housing policies that created and sustain communities of deep poverty, geographically cut off from opportunity and suffering the consequences of inaction. Some 50 years later, the conditions and forces that made the Fair Housing Act necessary still exist.
Research confirms that where we live has a profound impact on the opportunities we have in life. Of all the determinants that affect our ability to climb the economic ladder, few are more important than the homes and communities in which we are raised. And every year matters — each year a child spends living in a high poverty and often segregated neighborhood can further cement lifelong consequences, impacting everything from educational attainment to lifetime earnings to life expectancy.
King, whose death catalyzed the passage of the Fair Housing Act, believed in an energetic government effort to create more inclusive communities in which people from all walks of life have access to safe, decent, and affordable housing. After many decades of lackluster enforcement of the act, significant progress was made in 2015 when the Obama administration provided communities with new tools to rigorously analyze segregation patterns and submit plans to HUD to overcome them as a condition of receiving federal dollars.
But over the past year, the Trump administration has taken a series of harmful steps which threaten to dismantle recent progress. In August 2017, the Housing and Urban Development Department sought to delay a proven and successful program which enables low-income families to live in higher cost neighborhoods with higher-performing schools, lower crime, and greater resources and amenities – a key strategy to promote integration and break the cycles of generational poverty. In January 2018, HUD delayed the Obama-era rule which gave guidance and teeth to the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” provision of the act. And, just a month ago, HUD Secretary Ben Carson proposed removing anti-discrimination language and the term “inclusive communities” from HUD’s mission statement – two critical components reflecting King’s vision and the founding principles of HUD.
We cannot and will not tolerate these steps backwards. There is too much at stake for our communities and our country. King knew, as our country now knows, that we cannot address poverty and racial inequities without addressing housing. Economically and racially diverse neighborhoods pave the way for progress in many sectors of life, from education to healthcare to civil rights to economic prosperity.
The NAACP and the National Low Income Housing Coalition understand the intersection of housing and civil rights and are therefore working, as we have for decades, to realize King’s vision of racially diverse neighborhoods. More recently, we have joined forces with other leaders in the health, education, anti-poverty, anti-hunger, civil rights, and faith-based communities to launch the Opportunity Starts at Home campaign. Together, we are building a broad movement that generates widespread support for federal housing policies that ensure that all families, regardless of income, race, or ethnicity, have access to safe, decent, affordable homes in neighborhoods where everyone has equal opportunities to thrive.
The 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act is an opportunity to reflect upon and re-energize for the work we have ahead. It is not enough to celebrate occasions and then settle back into the complacencies which have allowed housing inequities to persist and to injure the hopes of millions of promising lives. Honoring the legacy of King and the Fair Housing Act demands relentless advocacy and the courage to act. As King reminds us, “We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now.”
The future of our nation and the strength and stability of our communities are at stake. It’s time to get to work.
Derrick Johnson (@DerrickNAACP) is president and CEO of the NAACP. Diane Yentel (@dianeyentel) is president and CEO of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
