Housing

Homeownership has long been a key path to financial security in the U.S. But as home prices soar to record highs, the benefits of rising housing wealth aren’t reaching everyone equally. In fact, the hot real estate market is a major cause of rising racial wealth inequality over the past four…

 The U.S. Justice Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau penalized Fairway Independent Mortgage Corporation for alleged redlining in Black neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama, the agencies said on Tuesday, which the company denies. The mortgage lender will pay a $1.9…

A link to a report that uncovers evidence on the impact of redlining.  Redlining was one of several practices and policies which were instrumental in the creation of existing patterns of residential segregation.  

KEY TAKEAWAYS: Black households had the largest percentage increase of any group in median net worth from 2019 to 2022, up 60% to $44,900. Black wealth gains did not, however, narrow the racial wealth divide to any meaningful degree: A three percentage-point contraction in the Black-White…

From vagrancy laws and the workhouses of pre-industrial England to legal segregation, sundown towns, and anti-Okie laws in the U.S., ordinances regulating the use of public space have long been used to exclude marginalized persons based on race, gender identity, national origin, disability, age, and…

It turns out that while Wall Street firms control just a sliver of the single-family rental market nationally, they can have much more influence at the local level. In the Atlanta metro area, these firms own nearly one-third of all single-family rental properties. They’re even more…

A long history of discriminatory policies in the United States has created disparities in neighborhood resources that shape ethnoracial health inequities today. To quantify these differences, we organized publicly available data on forty-two variables at the census tract level within nine domains…

Over the last few years, as public attention has focused on disparities caused by structural racism embedded in policy and practice throughout United States history, redlining has emerged as an  illustrative policy of structural barriers to homeownership and wealth-building…

This Article argues that because of the many ways in which summary eviction proceedings privilege landlords and disadvantage tenants, their very structure is patently unfair. Moreover, because of the racialized nature of landlord-tenant relations, the summary eviction process perpetuates a…

Three social change leaders discuss how to move the narrative about housing away from a focus on individual actions toward values, racial justice, and the well-being of all.

According to a 2022 analysis of federal census data by Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, nearly a third of homeowners who earn less than US$32,000 – about 4.8 million people – spent nothing on maintenance or improvements. I have noticed worrying trends in the…

The first and second rounds of the Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program provided over $46 billion USD in funding to states, territories, Tribal governments, counties, and cities (“grantees”) to prevent eviction and housing instability in the wake of the pandemic. Overseen by the…

In discussing why homelessness is more prevalent in some cities, Colburn and Aldern make a helpful distinction between “precipitating events” and “root causes.” Despite public perception that individual vulnerabilities like behavioral and mental health status are major…

LISC’s research report offers rigorous evidence that large landlords have reaped the greatest profits in communities of color, and that this speculation drives evictions and poor housing maintenance quality. But there’s good news too: affordable housing investments create…

Interactive map showing the spread of racially restrictive deeds across of Hennepin County.

Environmental racism is a term coined by activists in the environmental justice movement. The term describes how policies and practices surrounding environmental hazards disproportionately burden Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities while privileging White and wealthier…

In the largest study of its kind to date, researchers created fictitious renters with names more often associated with White, African American or Hispanic identities. They then tracked more than 25,000 interactions between those people and 8,476 property managers in 50 of the largest U.S.…

Co-Sponsors: Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies; BC Black Law Students Association (BLSA) Sara Bronin, Professor of Planning and Law at Cornell University Amy Dain, Consultant, Amy Dain Research; Participatory Moderator Lydia Edwards, Boston City Councilor, District One Harley Etienne,…

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the disproportionate housing stability challenges faced by Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people, and its health and economic effects made those disparities even worse. State and local governments are now distributing the almost $47 billion in emergency rental…

From the introduction to the report: This report outlines the ways that housing policy, the COVID-19 pandemic, and other realities intersect to harm communities of color, and especially Black women living in those communities. The report also explores the ways these groups are “locked out…

From the introduction to the Guide: This Fair Housing Training Guide was produced by the Fair Housing Justice Center (FHJC) to be used in conjunction with FHJC’s Fair Housing Training Program. The FHJC is a regional civil rights organization dedicated to eliminating housing discrimination;…

Part of the Understanding Boston series, this field study offers further evidence of the entrenchment of discrimination and the unequal application of rights, with its close examination of Boston’s rental housing practices.

Article on the experiences of a Black female attorney in housing court.  

A large number of Blacks and Hispanics were displaced following gentrification. Gentrification has led to the displacement of 20,000 Black residents in Washington, DC.

From the article: In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase — and segregate — America's housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a…

This article provides a case study of how Systems Thinking was applied by the authors with a community brought together by the Battle Creek Homeless Coalition to address the chronic homelessness in surrounding Calhoun County. Through this collaboration involving broad multi-sector representation,…

The use of a narrative in advocacy.  MLRI's "storytelling project" that led to an advocacy tool that public housing resident leaders used at the statehouse to shine a light on the good work that public housing residents do in their communities which goes mostly unseen. 

Explore timeline and resources on housing policies that created housing segregation.   Racial discrimination was once an explicit part of housing laws, regulations, and practices, creating unequal access to opportunity. While the laws have changed, the impact of decades of…