Fair Housing in Connecticut
April 14th, 2007 categories: Central Connecticut News & Information
This post on fair housing is appropriate for the month of April for a few reasons:
- –April is Fair Housing Month
- –The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) recently released its 2006 annual report called “The State of Fair Housing.”
- –I just began reading Susan Eaton’s book, “The Children in Room E4.” The book is primarily about the state of public school education, focusing on a particular child at Simpson-Waverly school in Hartford, CT. However, Susan Eaton does a great job of laying the foundation for and explaining the reasons why a city like Hartford is so segregated - including pointing to the housing steering and redlining which drove many whites out of the city and kept blacks and Hispanics in the city. I thought her book would give some historical context to the topic of fair housing.
According to the HUD report, there were over 10,000 reports of housing discrimination in 2006, an increase over last year by 1,000 and almost a doubling of complaints since 1998 which had 5,880.
The two largest reasons for complaints were discrimination based on disability and race - 40% and 39% respectively. The complaints mostly had to do with different “terms, conditions, privileges, services, and facilities in the rental or sale of property.” This category includes things like different deposit amounts being required to rent or charging higher rent.
I have attended the required fair housing training and I’ll admit that fair housing is complicated. For example, there are different rules for owner-occupied rental housing versus non-owner-occupied. There is also a great deal of confusion about treatment of people with disabilities such as what is a disability and what steps landlords must take to make reasonable modifications or allow tenants to make modifications at their own cost.
Part of me is not surprised that renters face the kinds of challenges they do for fair housing because many landlords are novices when it comes to fair housing -they own a couple of properties and aren’t tied into a national group which requires training.
But there can be no excuse for discrimination by real estate agents, who are required to attend training (at least in Connecticut). But if you read Susan Eaton’s book, you will see that the real estate industry has a shameful past in Hartford -and by real estate I mean Realtors, mortgage lenders and insurance companies.
“…up to and after WWII, the National Association of Real Estate Officials openly acknowledged a policy that restricted African Americans (and other new arrivals) to a few outlined areas.”
“Through the 1970s, a Hartford-based research and advocacy group, Education/Instruccion (EI), investigated housing discrimination…Real estate agents made disparaging remarks about black and Puerto Ricans to the white researchers. They warned whites off racially mixed neighborhoods. And they steered blacks and Hispanics into developing ghetto neighborhoods and suburban enclaves populated by minorities.
EI’s taped transcripts caught agents describing racially transitioning Blue Hills section of Hartford to a white buyer as a ’slummy and high-crime area,’ ‘not safe,’ a bad investment,’ and ‘a depressed area.’” The Department of Justice did file suit against eight of the nine largest real estate brokerages in the Hartford area for these practices.
Mortgage lenders and insurance companies have been just as bad, with insurance companies refusing to insure homes in the North-end of Hartford or lend to borrowers who were buying houses in certain areas - called redlining.
If you’d like to read more about fair housing and predatory lending, visit my post called “Home Buying 101 - Step 4: Know Your Rights.”
