“People of all faiths, skin colors, and political parties should stand for this principle.”
Dear America:
I believe that every person in America must have the chance to seek justice and to be made whole when their civil rights are violated. Otherwise, they’re just a piece of paper. This is why I chose to serve in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s fair housing offices. By law, HUD’s office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is the one place where every person who believes that they have experienced housing related discrimination can file a simple complaint, without needing an attorney, and HUD’s local office or one of our grantee fair housing agencies must by law conduct an investigation. HUD’s uniquely objective role means that we also must try to negotiate mutually agreeable resolutions between the parties, that make victims whole, without subjecting housing providers to expensive litigation or one-size-fits-all terms. And in EVERY investigation where HUD finds that discrimination likely occurred, and conciliation is not possible, we must bring legal action—on behalf of the complainant (plaintiff) and the public, seeking compensation for victims, changes to policies and procedures, and training so housing providers understand their obligations going forward.
The landmark civil rights cases you read about in the news and history books—Obergefell v. Hodges, Loving v. Virginia—are brought by organizations like ACLU and big law firms that have to sift through dozens of thousands of meritorious complaints to find the “perfect plaintiffs” needed to win the case. But life is complicated. And very few people who face discrimination are the perfect plaintiffs. For example, a veteran experiencing PTSD and forced to sleep in their car after their landlord denied their reasonable accommodation request for their assistance animal and evicted them, may reasonably struggle to manage their emotions. These wrinkles shouldn’t bar people from exercising their rights. For almost six decades, over 10 presidential administrations, dedicated HUD staff have given all investigations, even those that aren’t a slam dunk, a full and fair investigation, based on the law, not politics.
Until now. This administration has ground fair housing enforcement to a halt. Worse, they’re picking and choosing which protected classes count. Through interference with investigations, unrelenting threats and intimidation to fair housing staff, and sweeping unclear policy directives weaponizing civil rights laws, we’re no longer serving the most vulnerable classes that the Civil Rights Act was enacted to protect. LGBTQ+ parents whose rental applications are turned down. Elderly families who speak limited English who signed away their homes after local officials came to their doors with unintelligible legal agreements while their adult children were at work. Black homeowners whose neighbors hurl violent racial slurs at them in their driveways trying to push them out. A housing authority’s policy to deny voucher assistance to applicants with an arrest record, in a town with a known pattern of overpolicing Black and Brown communities. These are illustrations because I cannot divulge case information. But many, many real stories follow me home each day.
It’s impossible to tell you how demoralizing and shattering it has felt to be a part of this dramatic betrayal of our sacred and legal duty to protect people from the lasting scars of housing discrimination, creating intergenerational trauma, economic disparity, and ingrained social biases.
The Fair Housing Act’s mandate that civil rights investigations and enforcement be a public service for all is critical, especially since it was the federal government itself that created and entrenched the prevailing patterns of unequal access to safe affordable housing that have caused downstream harms to every social determinant of health.
There can be no justice when everyday Americans cannot make the laws that protect us real for themselves. People of all faiths, skin colors, and political parties should stand for this principle. Please, before it is too late, tell your members of congress to stop the attacks on civil rights offices at HUD and agencies across the federal government.
Yours truly,
A federal civil rights worker
