A Legacy of Discrimination: The Fair Housing Act and the Trump Administration

A map of redlined neighborhoods from a mid-1930s map of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (Source)

In 1973, Trump Management, the company of current President Donald Trump and his father, Fred Trump, was sued by the Department of Justice for barring black people from renting its properties. Stanley Leibowitz, a rental agent who helped Maxine Brown fill out a “beautiful application” to rent a property owned by Trump Management, described Fred Trump’s reaction to her application: “I asked him what to do and he says, ‘Take the application and put it in a drawer and leave it there.’” Continued behavior of this nature led to the lawsuit. The Trumps, in response, counter-sued, claiming defamation. The battle ended with a consent decree, where neither party admitted fault. To this day, Donald Trump denies any discrimination, and has yet to apologize for the practices undertaken by his company.

This discrimination was not isolated to the Trumps. The United States has a poor history of ensuring fair housing access to minority groups, especially African-Americans. The lack of real estate access for minority groups perpetuates the wealth gap between minority and white American families (the average African-American family has one-tenth the wealth of the average white one). When minority groups are barred from amassing generational wealth, even if one generation makes the difficult ascent out of poverty, there is no guarantee for the success of future generations, and a lack of any monetary cushion. Buying a house and investing in real estate is a key way to build wealth, but minorities have been blocked from buying houses for decades and relegated to renting low-value properties in increasingly poor neighborhoods after being barred from securing loans.

Minorities were not confined to urban “ghettos,” wracked by poverty and violence, by accident. Speculators and real estate agents used calculated tactics to profit from discrimination. Redlining, in which banks selectively grant loans based on race and utilize restrictive covenants that prohibit those of certain races from buying homes, carved out these ghettos. Even if a black family was able to secure a loan or pay for a home in a white neighborhood, speculators drove white families out with threats that the value of their home would decrease as more black people moved in, a process known as “blockbusting.” Speculators would then turn around and sell that same house to a black family through a contract where black families paid much more than the value of the house, most of which went into the speculators’ pockets.

The Fair Housing Act (FHA), passed in 1968 as a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, was supposed to ensure the right to own a home and outlaw these discriminatory practices. After extensive debate in Congress—including testimony from the first popularly-elected black senator, Edward Brooke, about the barriers he experienced to buying a house for his family upon his return from fighting in World War II—the FHA was passed the day after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination rocked the nation, and reminded Congress of the dangerous racism that still prevailed. The FHA “prohibits discrimination by direct providers of housing… because of: race or color, religion, sex, national origin, familial status, or disability” and outlaws redlining and restrictive covenants. The success of the FHA was dubious, as black populations in urban areas continued to grow while white families move to the suburbs where minorities are not welcome. Regardless, the FHA was an important step forward in the fight for civil rights in America.  

Recently, however, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Trump appointee Ben Carson, has been working diligently to strip away protections against discrimination ensured in the FHA. One protection, the “disparate impact” standard, which outlaws discriminatory policies even if there is no proof of explicit racist intent, has been attacked profusely. According to Shaun Donovan, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Barack Obama, this protection means that “if white couples are regularly approved for mortgages but black couples with the same qualifications are rejected, the bank must fix their loan process, even if its employees didn’t have racist intentions,” because “it’s the results that matter.” Carson has proposed a revision of the disparate impact standard that would set essentially impossible standards of proof for those claiming to be victims of disparate impact in court. 

Furthermore, Carson has also accelerated efforts to suspend the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which requires governments to provide opportunities for integration and access to new housing along with simply preventing discrimination. He has criticized the rule as a “failed socialist experiment” that “[disrupts] local decision making.” This is not new for Carson. In fact, it is consistent with a pattern of blatantly discriminatory steps HUD has taken under his leadership, as he considered removing the anti-discrimination references out of the HUD’s mission statement and allowed the city of Houston, after being accused of perpetuating segregation, off with a weak and difficult-to-enforce settlement.

These efforts are not to be taken lightly. Housing discrimination is just one aspect of the institutionalized racism that continues to plague the U.S., despite acts such as the FHA. Institutionalized racism often works under the surface, continuing to drag minorities to the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder while boosting white Americans to the top. This allows Americans to proudly pronounce that racism died with the Civil Rights Act, because they judge racism on a purely individual level: racial slurs are (mostly) anathema in American society, and less black people are hanging from trees, so therefore there is “less racism.” But racism is, in fact, alive and well in our country’s institutions, and the Trump administration has not been shy in stoking its flame. Our President, who made his fortune in part by discriminating against black people and perpetuating institutionalized racism, continues to do so from the Oval Office, with support from his cabinet members and little to no resistance from members of the Republican party. 

The Donald Trump that was sued for discrimination in 1973 is the same one who has described himself as ”the least racist person on earth.” He has made his priorities clear; it is now our job, as a country—and as voters—to tell him whether we approve of them.