Image credit: Yarek Waszul, New York Times
As you may have heard through other networks, on July 29 the Trump Administration proposed a drastic change to the regulations implementing the federal Fair Housing Act (Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968), gutting the Disparate Impact Rule.
Please submit a public comment opposing this change to Fair Housing Regulations by midnight Friday, October 18. Help fight this discriminatory and harmful proposal by joining VAHC in publicly opposing this change. Commenting is easy and won’t take a lot of your time!
BACKGROUND: The Disparate Impact Rule allows people to show that a housing policy or practice had a negative impact on them because they belong to a protected class – even if it appears on its face to apply to everyone equally. Landlords, realtors and banks know better than to discriminate openly, so many of them indirectly discriminate with their policies or practices. Without the Disparate Impact Rule, there will be no way to hold them accountable.
The proposed change would make it far more difficult for people experiencing
housing discrimination to prove that unlawful and unethical policies or practices are, in fact, discriminatory. Without the Disparate Impact Rule, banks, governments, realtors, and landlords will be able to legally discriminate against people in protected classes, as long as they don’t do it overtly.
In addition, this disastrous policy would sidestep Congress, which enacted the Civil Rights Act in 1968 as a response to the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the Supreme Court, which upheld the law in 2015.
For more information about the importance of disparate impact nationwide and sample comment letters, visit the National Low Income Housing Coalition and Defend Civil Rights. Read the VAHC’s comment letter here.
Your comments need not be lengthy or involved. This is a situation where quantity matters. Regulators are required to read and respond to all comments received. Another disastrous administration proposal last winter received hundreds of thousands of comments, which delayed implementation for many months.
Together, we must stand up for our neighbors by defending the long-standing Civil Rights Act. The deadline to submit comments is midnight Friday, October 18th.
Thank You!