Los Angeles Times, August 24, 2019: The Trump administration is trying to make it harder to fight housing discrimination
With each passing week, it seems there is another attempt by the Trump administration to whittle down someone’s civil rights protections.
The latest effort is a proposed rule from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that would make it considerably harder — if not impossible — to enforce fair housing laws designed to protect vulnerable groups from covert or unintentional discrimination.
HUD wants to rewrite and weaken an Obama-era regulation governing “disparate impact” lawsuits, which use housing statistics to demonstrate that a neutral-sounding policy or method employed by a landlord, bank, insurer or local government ends up discriminating against racial minorities, seniors, the disabled, families with children or other protected groups. While conservatives have long disputed the idea that violations of the 1968 Fair Housing Act can be proved through statistics even when there’s no evidence of intent to discriminate, a divided Supreme Court ruled in 2015 that disparate impact claims were valid as long as plaintiffs could show that the discriminatory results were caused by the defendant’s policies.
