NATIONAL FAIR HOUSING ALLIANCE

National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) leads the fair housing movement and works to ensure equitable housing opportunities for all people and communities through its education and outreach, member services, public policy, advocacy, housing and community development, tech equity, enforcement, and consulting and compliance programs.

Where You Live Matters

The location of one’s home determines access, or lack of access, to critical resources necessary to live a healthy and economically prosperous life. Nationwide, communities of color generally have less access to key neighborhood amenities than predominantly white communities. The disparities reflect the ongoing challenge of ensuring equal opportunity across racial lines when the basic building blocks of those opportunities remain exceptionally unequal. NFHA’s priority is to Advance a Blueprint for Equity, by developing and promoting strategies for not only eliminating bias in our society but increasing equity and creating healthy, vibrant well-resourced neighborhoods where people can thrive.

NFHA continues to work with a range of stakeholders to dismantle existing policies and systems that perpetuate discrimination and housing inequality as well as develop and implement policies that promote equitable housing outcomes. As part of a year-long effort to commemorate the 55th anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, NFHA deepened its work on appraisal bias by co-hosting an event with Brookings Institution with a screening and panel discussion of the documentary, Lowballed: Our America. Last year NFHA led the charge to urge the Senate to confirm fair housing allies to federal positions, advocated for the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) to make targeted pricing changes to the GSEs pricing framework, encouraged FHFA to expand fair access to credit, and submitted testimony on numerous pieces of federal legislation.

In early 2022, the tireless work of NFHA’s legal team yielded one of the largest settlements in the history of the Fair Housing Act. NFHA and 20 fair housing organizations throughout the country reached a landmark settlement agreement with Fannie Mae. Through its Inclusive Communities Fund Grant Program, NFHA is investing $8.3 million in community relief funds from the settlement through grants to 48 nonprofit organizations in 16 cities to promote homeownership, neighborhood stabilization, access to credit, property rehabilitation, and residential housing development.

Narrowing Homeownership Gaps And Advancing Tech Equity

NFHA continues to forge ahead under its two newest initiatives, diving deep to overcome racial disparities in housing. The Tech Equity Initiative (TEI), a multi-faceted effort designed to eliminate tech bias and create a fair housing and lending marketplace, created a comprehensive framework for auditing systems like credit scoring, insurance scoring, automated underwriting, risk-based pricing, digital advertising, and tenant screening tools. This framework, called Purpose, Process, and Monitoring (PPM), has received unprecedented attention and is currently in use by the Ohio State government and the Urban Institute. TEI has also led novel research to evaluate popular debiasing tools to test their effectiveness and built a wide-reaching data management and research platform to enhance these efforts.

NFHA’s Keys Unlock Dreams Initiative (KUDI) is a national, multi-city initiative designed to reduce racial homeownership and wealth gaps by ensuring that underserved communities impacted by redlining, disinvestment, and negative impacts of the dual credit market, have access to quality, affordable credit, and fair housing opportunities. The Special Purpose Credit Program (SPCP) online toolkit, created in partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association, has been the foundation of dozens of presentations and outreach efforts. There are close to 2,000 site visitors per month. The site is being redesigned and will include an open-source data toolkit to help lenders demonstrate the foundational need for an SPCP.