No Sting: Feds Won’t Go Undercover to Prove Pervasive Housing Discrimination

From [HERE] The four-bedroom house advertised on Craigslist sounded like just what Claire Rembis and her husband had been looking for. It sat on two verdant acres with plenty of room for their seven home-schooled children to run and play. And the $850 monthly rent was much cheaper than the prices for other homes they'd looked at.

Rembis loaded her family into their Dodge van and drove the 80 miles from Dearborn to Hudson, Mich. After the landlord's brother showed them the property, they called the landlord and told her they "loved it."

Three days later, Rembis got a call from the landlord saying she was dropping by to see how the family lived. It seemed strange, but Rembis really wanted the house, so she agreed. The landlord looked around, noted how tidy Rembis kept her home, and then asked to meet her children.

"I notice you are a woman of color," the landlord said. "Are you concerned about living in that area?" Hudson is about 96 percent white, according to the U.S. Census. Rembis is biracial; her husband is white.

When Rembis replied she expected she and her children would have no problems, the landlord clarified her question. "No, no, no, not your children," Rembis recalled her saying. "They are so beautiful, they are so fair."

The landlord told Rembis she'd get back to her. A few days later Rembis received an email saying the family could not rent the house because there were issues with their credit and they had too many small children.

By then, Rembis had already contacted the Fair Housing Center of Metropolitan Detroit, a non-profit group. The center arranged for black and white testers to ask to rent the house.

Four years later, Rembis still gets emotional when she talks about what the testers found. "This part is really hard," she said, her voice breaking. "This part is really hard. The black family and the white family had the same income, the same credit history, and the black family had the least number of kids. They wouldn't even let them see the house. They wouldn't return their phone calls."

The white family, the testing showed, was called back immediately and invited to see the house.

What happened to the Rembis family isn’t an isolated instance of a landlord flouting the 1968 Fair Housing Act. It’s a rare case of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development actually investigating and filing formal charges. Today, federal authorities filed a complaint against the owners of the property and proposed to settle the case with a $12,500 fine to be paid to the Rembis family, according to a Justice Department official. The proposed settlement also calls for Paula and David French to undergo training in following the fair housing law. Attempts to reach the Frenchs’ attorney were unsuccessful.

From [HERE] Few civil rights laws are more routinely defied than the ban on housing discrimination. HUD studies have found that African Americans and Latinos are discriminated against in one of every five home-buying encounters and one in every four attempts to rent an apartment.

Only a scant few of these incidents ever come to the attention of authorities.

In 2010, HUD and the National Fair Housing Alliance, reported that HUD, state, local and private groups received about 29,000 complaints from people alleging discrimination for a wide variety of reasons — including race, familial status, disability and national origin. About two-thirds were handled by private attorneys and non-profits which settled cases and, in some instances, filed civil law suits.

The remaining 10,000 went to state, local and federal agencies which together filed only 700 formal charges of discrimination in 2010. That year HUD found reasonable cause to believe discrimination based on race or national origin occurred in just 11 cases. The Department of Justice filed 29 cases — the lowest number since 2003.

The pervasive, unaddressed discrimination in the housing market has far-reaching effects. It is a significant factor in maintaining a segregated America four decades after Congress passed landmark legislation intended to integrate the nation's communities. It means that African Americans and Latinos who can afford to move to better neighborhoods are systematically blocked from doing so. They and their families are thus deprived of opportunities — from access to grocery stores with fresh vegetables to adequate health care to top-flight schools.

The negligible number of housing discrimination cases arises largely from fundamental choices by federal agencies.

Instead of actively searching for landlords and agents who discriminate, federal officials open investigations only after complaints are filed. But most victims have no idea they've been discriminated against, which means they never demand an inquiry.

Experts say undercover testing is the most effective way to catch landlords and real estate agents who conceal their intentions behind smiling faces and seemingly open, friendly attitudes.

Indeed, the handful of people who, like Rembis, realize what happened and are upset enough to pursue complaints find it difficult to prove their cases without evidence gathered through such testing.

Yet the federal government almost never uses this technique. HUD, the chief enforcement agency of the Fair Housing Act, runs no testing program of its own. Instead, it outsources the work to a patchwork of about 100 small, poorly funded private fair housing groups such as the Fair Housing Center of Metropolitan Detroit.

Nearly all focus on verifying individual complaints rather than systematically seeking out serial discriminators.

Civil rights advocates say it's no surprise that the current policies have had little impact on breaking apart the nation's segregated neighborhoods.

"It has been impossible to desegregate communities on a case-by-case basis," said Leslie Proll, director of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund's Washington, D.C., office. "It's as if we were trying to desegregate schools student by student. Nobody would think that would be an appropriate remedy."

HUD officials declined to be interviewed for this story. But a HUD spokesman released a statement saying the agency avoids conducting its own tests for racial bias so it can remain "neutral" when it receives complaints.

"For many years, HUD has held the position that it should not conduct a national testing program itself to make certain that it conducts neutral and impartial investigations of complaints under the Fair Housing Act," the statement said.

"Conducting its own testing program (on which complaints might be based) would compromise that objectivity...If HUD conducted its own testing, and then investigated cases based on that testing, HUD would be accused of losing that required neutrality."

That view seems out of step with the law, according to advocates and many legal experts. When Congress amended the act in 1988, it gave HUD the authority to initiate housing investigations on its own and to file what the law describes as "Secretary Initiated Complaints."

"Testing doesn't assume facts; it is done to find out what the facts are. It is nothing more or less than an investigation," said Elizabeth Julian, a former HUD assistant secretary who is now president of a non-profit fair housing group called the Inclusive Communities Project. HUD's statement, she said, doesn't explain "why they don't do systemic testing that would lead to secretary initiated complaints."

Fred Freiberg founded a national testing program at the Justice Department in 1991 to ferret out cases of discrimination. HUD's position, he said, "is absurd."

"So what they are saying is the Department of Justice is compromising its objectivity because it runs a testing program and brings cases based on that testing?" he asked. "Is an investigation of a drug dealer at an elementary school compromised when an agent goes undercover?"

The Short Arm of the Law

The Fair Housing Act was the last piece of landmark civil rights legislation in the 1960s. Passed in the tumultuous days after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the long-stalled measure was intended to address the root causes of riots that had set aflame more than 100 cities. It called on the federal government to do everything possible to "affirmatively further" fair housing, and it outlawed discrimination in the sale and rental of homes and apartments.

The law was the first civil rights legislation to address practices commonplace in both the North and South.

Earlier bills, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, succeeded in ending Jim Crow-discrimination in polling places, buses, hotels, restaurants and employment.

But the Fair Housing Act, intended to strike at the heart of what the 1968 Kerner Commission called two disparate nations, one black and one white, has produced astoundingly limited results.

"It is the third leg of the civil rights movement," said Brian Gilmore, director of Michigan State University's Housing Clinic. "This is the one that has been the complete failure."

The original draft of the bill gave HUD broad new powers, including the authority to hold hearings, impose fines, and order property owners to change their behavior. But to win support from Northern lawmakers who feared legislation that dealt with racial issues so close to home, its sponsors gutted the enforcement provisions. The law that ultimately passed was, as Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy later put it, "a toothless tiger."

The agency could not initiate investigations and could only respond to complaints. It could not impose fines or even bar violators from continuing illegal practices. All HUD was permitted to do was organize meetings in which the parties would attempt to voluntarily resolve their differences.

When landlords or real estate agents denied the charges, HUD had no choice but to close cases and inform those involved of their right to file a private lawsuit. But hardly anyone went to court partly because the law limited damages to $1,000 and did not provide for attorney's fees.

Just a few years after the law went into effect, Patricia Roberts Harris, HUD secretary under President Jimmy Carter, called filing complaints a "useless task."

The law did give the Justice Department authority to prosecute cases in which investigators could establish large-scale "patterns and practice" of discriminatory behavior. But the agency assigned fewer than two dozen attorneys to enforce all the nation's civil rights laws, not just the Fair Housing Act, and brought few housing cases.

Former Senator (and later Vice President) Walter Mondale, a Minnesota Democrat who co-authored the act, said in a recent interview that he and others had intended to address the law's weaknesses in subsequent Congresses. But the nation's willingness to address racial inequality quickly dissipated.

Republican Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, relying in part on a "Southern strategy" that built a coalition of formerly Democratic Southerners and white Northern suburbanites with promises to roll back integration efforts. The Congresses elected in the years that followed had little appetite to revisit the housing law.

The result, Mondale said, was a law with a "ragged history" that did not accomplish its fundamental goals. The Fair Housing Act was "intended to change discrimination and patterns of racial separation," he said. "It wasn't designed to duck it; it was designed to deal with it."

One arm of government did aggressively search for housing discrimination: the Department of Defense. The military had long played a leading role in the fight for integration, beginning with President Harry Truman's 1948 Executive Order banning segregation in the armed forces. Military officials launched the nation's first national testing program shortly after the housing act passed, when it started sending white soldiers to test whether landlords were discriminating against black soldiers seeking off-base housing.

The commercial consequences were potentially ruinous. When the Defense Department found a landlord was discriminating, it banned all military personnel — on pain of court martial — from signing a lease with that person.

In the civilian world, non-profit fair housing groups operating on shoestring budgets struggled to fill that role. They sent out testers to investigate claims and help victims bring civil suits. Often, they sued under the recently passed Fair Housing Act and the 1866 Civil Rights Act. The 1866 Act, along with granting black Americans the full rights of citizenship, barred racial discrimination and, unlike the Fair Housing Act, did not limit damages.

The non-profit groups scored some notable successes, revealing discriminatory practices in real estate, insurance and lending. Still, without the weight of the federal government, the impact was limited. Federal studies conducted in the 1970s and 1980s show the rate of discrimination remained steady. Housing patterns stayed as segregated as before the housing act passed.

In 1988, President Ronald Reagan responded to mounting criticism of his civil rights record by helping push through the Fair Housing Amendments Act. Signing the bill, Reagan declared that "discrimination is particularly tragic when it means a family is refused housing near good schools, a good job, or simply in a better neighborhood to raise children."

The bill, he said, repaired a significant "defect": Lack of enforcement. For the first time, it gave HUD authority to initiate systemic investigations of housing bias. Officials could haul landlords and real estate agents before administrative law judges who had the power to fine them up $50,000. It also lifted the $1,000 cap on civil damages and expanded the authority of the U.S. Department of Justice to initiate cases.

The U.S. Department of Justice swiftly took advantage of its new powers. In 1991, two years after the law went into effect, the department recruited Freiberg to launch its national testing program.

Freiberg sent investigators to dozens of cities with suspect racial patterns, leading to about 70 lawsuits against property owners in cities from Newark to Miami to Rapid City, S.D.

Freiberg left the Justice Department in 1999, and since then the department has brought an average of fewer than two cases a year. It is unclear exactly why the cases have declined as the DOJ did not respond to repeated requests for interviews.

HUD never created a testing program. Instead, officials continued to wait for people to file complaints. [MORE]