New Orleans       Passage of the Fair Housing Act was a seminal accomplishment of the civil right era.  Landlords and home sellers were barred from discrimination for race, color, and creed.  That doesn’t mean that discrimination ended, far from it.  It did mean that there were recourses for the victims of that discrimination. Fast-forward almost 60 years, and that’s not working now.

Complaints are up over 20% over the last decade.  More than 8000 were filed with HUD along with state and local governments.  Some resulted in findings of discrimination.  A little less than a quarter resulted in some kind of settlement or resolution.  Another 24,000 complaints were filed with local nonprofit fair housing organizations, but there are no figures on the results.

Like I said, discrimination didn’t end.  What seems to be ending is the ability of victims to get justice.  The Trump administration has gutted one program after another that ameliorated these situations.  The Special Purpose Credit Program at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mae that facilitated lenders to offer down payment and closing assistance to lower income and minority homeseekers was ended.  The administration also canceled $30 million in federal money to the state and local nonprofit fair housing organizations, “which handled three-quarters of the complaints the National Fair Housing Alliance recorded for 2024.”  HUD also faced staffing cuts from Musk’s DOGE, as so many federal agencies did, which particularly hit this enforcement of fair housing mandates.  HUD claims that they still completed more than 6000 investigations in 2025, but who knows the results?

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of complaints are from tenants, rather than wannabe homeowners, which speaks to the overall housing crisis throughout the US now.  It is impossible not to believe that these are lowball figures.  Many tenants assume discrimination based on their income, prior evictions, family size, and other issues that pyramid on top of race, gender, disability and other specific, protected categories, but this also means that these tenants don’t bother to make complaints.

There are also more subtle and sophisticated ways for landlords to discriminate.  Classified newspaper ads are passe.  Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, and other internet-based semi-private forums sometimes seem to specialize in codes that steer tenants in or out of their units.  These cases are harder to prove, and cutting resources to fair housing groups means fewer cases are going to the courts.  Thinking that the Justice Department would jump on such cases is tragically laughable.

Affordability is an issue overlaid on the housing market, which implicitly discriminates on those with less income.  Trump issued an order that may or may not stand blocking private equity and similar companies from continuing to buy up single family homes.  That’s a good thing, but the cows are long gone from the barn.  Single family homes are largely not the housing market for lower income families either.  Some are touting build-first solutions, but the models, similar to what’s happening in Jersey City, are not only fast tracking construction but triggering displacement through “demovictions,” which have been huge campaigns for ACORN in other hot markets in British Columbia and Ontario.

Looking for a place to live and facing discrimination means that a family is facing the law of the jungle, not fair housing law, and the doors to complain are being locked and eliminated.