Happy MLK Day
In honor of which, some fair housing news and resources:
A surprising number of "charitable" housing offers to hurricane victims are only for people fitting certain descriptions... The National Fair Housing Alliance notes high rates of discrimination against African-American hurricane evacuees... The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center files public housing complaints... The Tennessee-based National Fair Housing Advocate Online has been reporting on the national picture... The Urban Institute published five articles in 2005 on U.S. racial segregation problems... and here's the Brookings Institution "Metropolitan Policy" section, which seems to be mostly about hurricane recovery, racism, and housing.... If you've got the strength to keep reading, we noted a couple of weeks back that the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies has a report on "The Dual Mortgage Market: The Persistence of Discrimination in Mortgage Lending."
And some of the consequences of housing discrimination?
Well, it's hard to find current national statistics on who is homeless in the USA -- and most homelessness advocates will tell you the statistics are always wrong anyway -- but in the late '90s, HUDUSER reported that "black non-Hispanic" Americans made up 40% of all homeless people using assistance programs, though the "black non-Hispanic" label applied to only 11% of the whole population. The demographics are also pretty disproportionate on this 2005 city-by-city report from the Conference of Mayors, available via the National Alliance to End Homelessness... and the National Health Care for the Homeless Council recently released the unsurprising news that homelessness shortens people's lives.
A surprising number of "charitable" housing offers to hurricane victims are only for people fitting certain descriptions... The National Fair Housing Alliance notes high rates of discrimination against African-American hurricane evacuees... The Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center files public housing complaints... The Tennessee-based National Fair Housing Advocate Online has been reporting on the national picture... The Urban Institute published five articles in 2005 on U.S. racial segregation problems... and here's the Brookings Institution "Metropolitan Policy" section, which seems to be mostly about hurricane recovery, racism, and housing.... If you've got the strength to keep reading, we noted a couple of weeks back that the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies has a report on "The Dual Mortgage Market: The Persistence of Discrimination in Mortgage Lending."
And some of the consequences of housing discrimination?
Well, it's hard to find current national statistics on who is homeless in the USA -- and most homelessness advocates will tell you the statistics are always wrong anyway -- but in the late '90s, HUDUSER reported that "black non-Hispanic" Americans made up 40% of all homeless people using assistance programs, though the "black non-Hispanic" label applied to only 11% of the whole population. The demographics are also pretty disproportionate on this 2005 city-by-city report from the Conference of Mayors, available via the National Alliance to End Homelessness... and the National Health Care for the Homeless Council recently released the unsurprising news that homelessness shortens people's lives.
posted by Martha Bridegam at 11:15 AM
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