Why does it matter for the nation’s public schools that the Trump administration is working hard to limit enforcement of the 1968 Fair Housing Act?

Richard Rothstein addressed that question in his 2017 book, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America: “(S)chools are more segregated today than they were forty years ago, but this is mostly because the neighborhoods in which schools are located are so segregated.  In 1970, the typical African American student attended a school in which 32 percent of the students were white. By 2010, this exposure had fallen to 29 percent.  It is because of neighborhood segregation that African American students are more segregated in schools in states like New York and Illinois than they are anywhere else. Throughout the country not just in the South, busing of school children was almost the only tool available to create integrated schools—because few children lived near enough to opposite-race peers for any other approach to be feasible. Were housing segregation not pervasive, school desegregation would have been more successful.” (The Color of Law, p. 179)

The Fair Housing Act protects the right of any person or family to buy or rent housing in a neighborhood of choice.  The law prohibits real estate agents or apartment house managers from turning people away due to their race, ethnicity or disability, and it has enabled nonprofit agencies across the country to send testers to ensure that families are not steered by real estate brokers to some neighborhoods and shown no housing in others. It also prohibits agents and apartment owners from treating renters or home seekers with what is known as disparate treatment.

Perhaps it is unsurprising that President Trump’s administration would weaken enforcement of the Fair Housing Act.  In 1973, his father’s Trump Management company was sued under the Fair Housing Act for failing to rent apartments to Black homeseekers.  Donald Trump had recently joined the company, which eventually settled after Trump Management tried to countersue.

The problem of housing discrimination has not gone away.  This week, the NY Times‘ Debra Kamin  reports that the Trump administration has cut the staff in the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD’s) Fair Housing Office. Current staff complain: “Trump’s political appointees (have) made it nearly impossible for them to do their jobs, which involve investigating and prosecuting landlords, real estate agents, lenders, and others who discriminate based on race, religion, gender, family status, or disability. Several lawyers said they had been blocked from communicating with clients without approval from a Trump appointee, and had been barred from citing some past housing civil rights cases when researching legal precedent for possible new prosecutions.”

Cuts by DOGE began to hit the department last winter: “Within the Office of Fair Housing, the reduction was 65 percent… By Oct. 5, when the latest rounds of reductions will take place, there will be six of those lawyers remaining…. More concerning than the vacant desks, the current and former employees said, were the hundreds of cases that had been halted or dropped…. The slowdown can be traced, at least in part, to new procedures that stripped career officials of the authority to approve settlements or issue charges, said Ms. (Jacy) Gaige, a career employee for the past 13 years.  Instead only a small number of Trump appointees now have that authority… In addition, hundreds of pending fair housing cases were frozen, and some settlements revoked even when accusations of discrimination had been substantiated… Ms. Gaige… quit in July… after firing off an email to Senator Elizabeth Warren, the ranking Democrat on the Senate committee responsible for overseeing HUD: ‘The nation’s fair housing laws were no longer being enforced,’ she wrote.”

Kamin reports that a Trump appointee has blocked cases involving what he (the appointee) called “tenuous theories of discrimination”: “They included appraisal bias, which typically involves undervaluing homes owned by Black families; zoning restrictions used to block housing that might be occupied by Black and Latino families; and gender or gender expression cases…. The memos also described previous approaches to redlining and reverse redlining as ‘legally unsound.’  The two racist practices involve denying mortgages to minorities and those in minority neighborhoods, and other predatory and discriminatory lending practices.”

In a report for ProPublica last May, Jesse Coburn puts the cutbacks at HUD in the context of broader Trump administration policy: “The apparent retreat in fair housing enforcement extends beyond HUD. At the Department of Justice, which prosecutes many fair housing cases, staffers received a draft of the housing section’s new mission statement, which omitted any mention of the Fair Housing Act… The federal government’s fair housing efforts are supported by a broad ecosystem of local nonprofits. They too have been destabilized. In February, HUD and DOGE canceled 78 grants to local fair housing organizations.”  These are the local agencies which have for years been sending testers to track the neighborhoods where real estate agents’ show Black and white home seekers, and to be sure that apartment managers show the same apartments in their complexes to all prospective renters.

Coburn adds, however, that the Trump administration’s retreat from fair housing enforcement is not because the need for scrutiny has diminished: “In recent years, segregation has been on the rise…. One study found that most major metropolitan areas were more segregated in 2019 than they had been in 1990. Another found that the Black homeownership rate is lower now than it was at the passage of the Fair Housing Act. And more housing discrimination complaints were filed in 2023 than in any other year since the National Fair Housing Alliance began tracking the figures three decades ago. Some advocates fear that a four-year federal retreat from the issue could send the country sliding back toward the pre-civil rights era, when landlords and mortgage lenders could freely reject applicants because of their race, and when federal agencies, local governments and real estate brokers could maintain policies that perpetuated extreme levels of segregation. HUD officials interviewed by ProPublica echoed those concerns, foreseeing a growing national underclass of poor renters suffering discrimination with little hope of redress.”

In “Housing and the Justification of School Segregation,” a 1995 article in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review, the Civil Rights Project at UCLA’s expert on school desegregation, Gary Orfield reflects on the importance of the protection of fair access for families to the housing of their choice as the only long-term strategy for the desegregation of the nation’s public schools.  While busing for school desegregation has been shown to pose major long-term challenges, communities with integrated housing can become a natural setting for children to learn together:

“The segregated schools that dominate metropolitan America in the 1990s are primarily a reflection of persistent housing segregation… Concentration of three-fourths of the nation’s residents and more than eighty percent of minority students in metropolitan areas, fragmentation of most of those areas into many school districts, and concentration of the African-American and Latino students in a small number of those districts produce and maintain segregation… Recognizing the linkages between schools and housing, and working on their positive potentials will move us toward the goal of successfully integrated communities with naturally integrated and equitable schools—and will begin to mobilize many kinds of policies toward that goal. We need policies, for example, to recognize and support stably integrated neighborhoods and to reward them with excellent ‘naturally integrated’ neighborhood schools.”

Thirty years after that article was published, the education topic today is the danger of school privatization as a new threat to communities and their public schools.  The protection of fair access to housing, however, remains an essential tool for ensuring that families can find housing and public schools where their children will be welcome.