“Housing should be a human right. We need housing to be affordable and free from discrimination.”

Dear America: Your rights are on the line

I work in civil rights because I do not like bullies; I don’t like when the strong pick on the weak, or when people are excluded for no good reason.

Can we all agree that there’s something wrong if a person using a wheelchair is stuck in a 4th floor apartment with no elevator and has to be carried up or crawl up the stairs? Or your landlord is sexually harassing you, and then evicts you? Or you’re a veteran with PTSD who lives in their car because you have a service dog and everywhere has a “no pet” policy? Or you can’t use a homeless shelter because they only serve Christians? Or you can’t buy a house in Florida because you’re a specific ethnicity?

Take how difficult it is to find a decent apartment, and compound that with a landlord who doesn’t want to rent to families with children, or won’t rent to someone who doesn’t look like them in faith or race or language. America’s history of housing discrimination and segregation is why we have ethnic enclaves like Chinatowns and Little Italy, and why “The Southside” and “the wrong side of the railroad tracks” heavily imply the characteristics of people who live there.

Housing should be a human right. We need housing to be affordable and free from discrimination. This administration is destroying programs, rescinding guidance, and weaponizing civil rights laws to go after “reverse discrimination” and target states and populations they don’t like. They’ve impounded money set aside to serve homeless people because they don’t want “woke” cities to receive federal funds they’re entitled to. They’ve illegally withheld money for disaster areas for California wildfires and shared data on immigrant families with DHS to send ICE. They literally Ctrl+F’d DEI terms to find things to target, including stopping funding to free legal assistance organizations and state agencies that investigate discrimination. They’ve intimidated and demoralized a federal workforce that is dedicated to serving the American people and attempted to destroy the entire professional field of civil rights at the federal, state, and local level.

The Fair Housing Act and other civil rights laws are not just nice to have; they are essential for leveling the playing field for the American dream and to protecting the most vulnerable during tough times. I can’t do my job to protect these people and our rights without you. Please tell your member of Congress to restore fair housing at HUD.

—A civil servant