Pearl River      I was startled to pick up my copy of Poverty & Race, which is normally a pretty dry effort by largely academics sprinkled with some organizers from time to time that looks at policy in these areas produced quarterly by the Poverty & Race Research Action Council.  The lead article seemed of the same cloth as a normal newsletter with a headline saying, “The Fight for Fair Housing” and a forever long subtitle.  Somehow the first sentences caught my eye as something different.  It started by identifying the authors, Paul Osadebe and Palmer Heenan, as formerly lawyers within the general counsel’s office at the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and said they were whistleblowers.  Now that was something different, I thought, we’re not going to get policy recommendations, but the skinny page by page with forty footnotes, backing everyone of their arguments.  All of us are used to the horror at the topline of the headlines, but seeing the details of how people are hurt, the law is ignored, and devastated is much, much worse.

These lawyers started by explaining what is supposed to happen and how their jobs were critical in the process, but then the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s DOGE operation come to the forefront in an effort to “decimated HUD’s civil rights enforcement workforce.”  First, they fired many probationary workers involved in fair housing.  DOGE demanded that they “fire more than three-quarters” of fair housing workers.  With their jobs on the chopping block many took the voluntary retirement package rather than being fired, which eliminated “half of the investigative staff.”  HUD then issued reduction in force (RIF) notes to another 170 fair housing investigators.  Congress “nullified those RIF notices,” but that didn’t change HUD’s announced intention to greenlight any and all types of discrimination by gutting enforcement.

The Office of Fair Housing has only six staff attorneys now.  The National Fair Housing Alliance estimates that “Nationally, over 32,000 housing discrimination complaints are filed across all organizations annually, but HUD directly processes a much smaller fraction (roughly 5%). HUD directly handles administrative complaints, averaging between 1,500 and 2,100 filings per year.”  That’s a big caseload for the survivors of these purges, but it doesn’t end there.  HUD has “suddenly and without notice, terminated grants that the nonprofits that enforce fair housing laws have received from Congressionally-appropriated funds.…”  In short, nationally fair housing enforcement is sweated down to almost nothing, and nonprofit fair housing organizations at the state level have had their funds eliminated in many cases, leaving no recourse for tenants and home buyers to get relief for discrimination.

Furthermore, as the authors point out, the process of any settlements or remediation on fair housing complaints has been totally politicized by Trump’s appointed HUD administrators.  “…all settlements now require political approval, appointees alter already agreed-upon settlement terms, reject compensation for survivors of discrimination, and attempt to withdraw prior settlements.”  HUD’s political bosses have “told state and local agencies that enforce fair housing laws…that they cannot bring certain cases and any attempt to do so will result in removal from the program and the loss of funds.”  Add to all of these outrages, HUD has now dictated that everything from soup to nuts has to be in English crippling areas like Puerto Rico and creating barriers to correct discrimination in housing for Hispanic populations throughout the United States.

Yes, this is racism pure and simple.  Worse it’s not just in the Supreme Court making headlines across the country and the world, brining shame to the country, it’s in the belly of the governmental beast far from the headlines and public attention.  It might slip into a newsletter read by people committed to seeing  poverty alleviated and racism eliminated in the US, but that doesn’t mean that the public understands that of these more than 30,000 complaints a year, most are now sentenced to just pushing paper with a hope and a prayer and little to no hope of seeing justice, no matter how clear the law is, because it means nothing without enforcement.