A SOCIAL PROBLEM and
Policy Exploration of Housing Discrimination BY CHANNEL L. LOWERY ABSTRACT This policy exploration looks at the historical, political, and societal cultural factors that have contributed to the issue of housing discrimination in the United States of America. By reviewing changes in policies over the 20th century and the shift in the social climate of the United States, reasons why housing discrimination continues to persist can be better understood. Keywords: Housing discrimination, policy.
INTRODUCTION Food, water, shelter, and clothing have long been described as basic needs of humans. In the United States, all individuals having equal access to fair and affordable housing is something that has been debated for decades. Housing discrimination is not something that is necessarily looked at as specifically as a social problem in the same way the former mentioned items have been, but it can be link to other social problems such as homelessness, access to quality education, unemployment, crime and poverty. This paper will explore and analyze housing discrimination as a social problem from a historical policy standpoint while also investigating how this problem has been constructed by our society. Important policies will be discussed as well as informal attempts to address this issue in society to gain a clearer understanding of this social issue.
THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF HOUSING DISCRIMINATION Housing discrimination is when someone is prevented or discouraged from buying or renting housing based on their race, religion, color, sexual orientation, national origin, sex, family status or disability (HUD, 2020). One of the most significant legislative attempts to deal with this issue has been the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Along with many other civil rights legislations that were passed at that time, it was used to formally ban the action discrimination. In a report that was released in 2008 by the National Commission on Housing and Equal
8 M U s ings | T H E G R A D UAT E J O U R N A L
Opportunity entitled The Future of Fair Housing, it is clear that housing discrimination is still a large issue in this country, as the report points out that there are more than 4 million fair housing violations each year (p.7). This issue has its roots in a complex web of decisions that were made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in order to control certain groups within the population. An excerpt below highlights some important findings: “…some local governments have used the zoning power delegated by state governments to indirectly control who may live within their boundaries. There has been a consistent pattern of exclusionary zoning and land use decisions that have been barriers to the building of affordable housing in predominantly White neighborhoods…thus effectively excluding African Americans and Latinos from living in certain neighborhoods or even entire communities.” (p. 10) Being prevented from obtaining housing has been a practice happening in the United States for some time dating back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During this time in history several significant events were taking place that lead to the persistence of discriminatory housing practices. Trattner (1999) points out in his work that between 1860 and 1900 almost fourteen million immigrants came to the United States. Urbanization was taking place in major cities in the US and more people were moving into major cities. By the year 1920, one half of American’s lived in cities (Trattner, 1999). During this time, most of the immigrant population was also living in cities doing unskilled labor jobs and living in crowded and deplorable conditions. As unskilled workers, most immigrants could barely afford their housing based on the low wages they were being paid. Restrictive covenants-agreements between whites that they would only sell or rent to other whites that were in verbal and or written-also restricted the ability of immigrants to live in certain places and made metropolitan areas very segregated by racial and cultural groups (Molina, 2017).
