Description/Abstract
The last few years have witnessed a quantum leap in the enforcement of fair housing and fair lending legislation. The 1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act gave new enforcement powers to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the Department of Justice. For example, HUD can how initiate complaints against housing agents who discriminate. Moreover, several events, including release of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, which show wide disparities in loan acceptance rates between whites on the one hand and blacks and Hispanics on the other, have led financial regulatory agencies such as the Federal Reserve Board and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to increase their anti-discrimination enforcement. These commendable enforcement efforts may fall short of the mark, however, because they are likely to have little impact on one of the principal sources of discrimination by real estate brokers and landlords, namely residential segregation. This policy brief argues that: (1) residential segregation, the physical separation of racial or ethnic groups, is a principal cause of continuing discrimination in housing; (2) enforcement efforts directed toward people who commit discriminatory acts are unlikely to have much effect on segregation; and (3) the federal government needs programs to attack segregation directly, that is, to support integration, as part of its anti-discrimination arsenal. The brief concludes by proposing the Stable Neighborhood Initiatives Program (SNIP), a nondiscriminatory federal program to support community integration efforts, which is designed to fill the current policy void.
Document Type
Policy Brief
Date
1995
Keywords
1988 Fair Housing Amendments Act, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, demographic economics, mortgages, economics of minorities and races, non-labor discrimination
Language
English
Series
Reports Series
Disciplines
Housing Law
Recommended Citation
Yinger, John, "Opening Doors: How to Cut Discrimination by Supporting Neighborhood Integration" (1995). Center for Policy Research. 40.
https://surface.syr.edu/cpr/40
Source
Metedata from RePec
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Additional Information
Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs Center for Policy Research. No 3/1995