Trump Is Trying to Make Discrimation Legal Again With Housing

The Trump administration is moving to weaken the civil rights-era Fair Housing Act — making information technology much harder to bring lawsuits alleging discrimination in housing, according to housing advocates. But conservative groups applaud the movement and say information technology would stop frivolous lawsuits.

A draft of the Department of Housing and Urban Development rule, obtained by NPR, would target a powerful weapon that's used in discrimination cases. It'southward called "disparate impact." That means that to evidence discrimination in a lawsuit, plaintiffs don't have to bear witness, for case, that a bank employee is refusing to brand loans to people of color. They only take to bear witness that a company has a business practice that, on its confront, may non purposefully discriminate simply has a discriminatory outcome.

Wanda Onafuwa says a house next door to her in Baltimore roughshod into disrepair afterward Bank of America foreclosed on the property. Courtesy of Wanda Onafuwa hide caption

toggle explanation

Courtesy of Wanda Onafuwa

Wanda Onafuwa says a house next door to her in Baltimore fell into disrepair after Bank of America foreclosed on the property.

Courtesy of Wanda Onafuwa

"It's important because it allows us to actually go at discrimination that's not intentional," says Nikitra Bailey, a lawyer with the nonprofit Center for Responsible Lending. She says the Trump administration's new rule would severely restrict this very important tool for fighting discrimination in housing.

"It'due south huge," Bailey says, because it allows off-white housing lawsuits to obtain remedies for big numbers of people "without having to demonstrate each individual action of bigotry."

The proposal, which is not yet public, is expected to be released in August.

In ane current case, a fair housing group is suing Bank of America, alleging that when the bank foreclosed on homes in contempo years, it treated the vacant houses very differently in white neighborhoods than information technology did minority neighborhoods.

Wanda Onafuwa lives next to i of these houses in Baltimore'southward Tremont neighborhood. She works in accounting, owns her business firm and raised her kids in that location. She says information technology's a squeamish, quiet street. But so Depository financial institution of America foreclosed on the house side by side door, and information technology brutal into worse and worse busted.

"The grass wasn't being mowed, in that location were no windows upstairs," Onafuwa says. "So yous have a bad rainstorm, and I don't know what was going on with the roof, water would get in."

She says water would fill the basement then spill over into her basement. "At that place were rats running around."

Onafuwa says she called the metropolis and the bank repeatedly, simply non much changed. Then, she says, a squatter started living in the vacant house — "a guy going in and out." That's fifty-fifty though, she says, there was no electricity hooked upwardly. "Information technology only looked pitch-blackness," she says.

Lisa Rice, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, which is bringing the lawsuit, says her grouping looked at foreclosed properties in more than than lxx communities across the land with comparable levels of owner-occupied homes and other similarities.

"In the white communities that we looked at, the story was completely different," she says. "The grass was mowed, the doors were secure, the windows were not cleaved, we didn't see trash and droppings."

Bank of America said in a statement that it denies the claims in the lawsuit. "Our delivery to sustainable homeownership for low- to moderate-income and multicultural clients and communities has always been a hallmark of Bank of America," it said.

Simply in a disparate impact lawsuit, you don't have to show that a company meant to discriminate. The company might have had the best of intentions merely still have adopted a policy that has an unequal outcome with a discriminatory effect.

Rice says these types of Off-white Housing Act cases get back more than 40 years. In 2015, the Supreme Court upheld the use of disparate impact while imposing some limitations. But many corporations and conservatives don't like this legal approach.

"In that location are always going to be racially disproportionate results for any policy," says Roger Clegg, president of the Middle for Equal Opportunity, a conservative think tank that focuses on civil rights issues. Clegg, who worked in the Justice Department in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, says these disparate bear upon cases are often unfair to defendants because the cases find discrimination where it's not actually happening.

"If you accept a landlord who says, 'I'm not going to rent to people with a history of tearing crime,' " he says. "The fact that that has a racially disproportionate result does not brand it discrimination."

So he says this disparate impact arroyo results in a lot of unfair lawsuits. And he says the Trump administration's new rule volition provide clarity about the limits under the 2015 Supreme Court determination.

But Bailey, of the Middle for Responsible Lending, says the proposed dominion goes way across that. "It really makes it more difficult to bring disparate bear on cases, and and then it limits the damages for discrimination," she says.

Bailey says with African American homeownership rates at their lowest level in 50 years, this could set up more than roadblocks.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development says information technology can't comment on the proposed rule yet. But in an earlier statement, HUD Secretary Ben Carson said the department "remains committed to making sure housing-related policies and practices treat people fairly."

But civil rights advocates say they're worried. They say that beyond this proposed housing rule, the Trump assistants is looking to coil back civil rights protections in education and in terms of which groups of people deserve protection from discrimination.

greenwellthensted.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.npr.org/2019/07/31/747006108/a-new-trump-rule-could-weaken-a-civil-rights-era-housing-discrimination-law

Share this post