{"id":344,"date":"2018-03-19T09:52:03","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T14:52:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fredmcghee.com\/?p=344"},"modified":"2018-04-21T09:52:11","modified_gmt":"2018-04-21T14:52:11","slug":"the-most-important-housing-law-passed-in-1968-wasnt-the-fair-housing-act","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fredmcghee.com\/?p=344","title":{"rendered":"The Most Important Housing Law Passed in 1968 Wasn’t the Fair Housing Act"},"content":{"rendered":"

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As we embark upon celebrations<\/span><\/a> commemorating the enactment of the Fair Housing Act, it may be useful to look more deeply into some of the details of American housing history from this period.\u00a0 <\/span>Fifty years on, it is important for us to take stock of what worked and what didn’t.<\/span><\/p>\n

On April 11, 1968, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968<\/span><\/a>, also known as the Fair Housing Act.\u00a0 <\/span>The law was a follow-up to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and also updated the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which–unbeknownst to many–also prohibited discrimination in housing after the Civil War.<\/span><\/p>\n

Passage of this law should be seen in historical perspective.\u00a0 <\/span>At the time that Johnson signed the bill, Martin Luther King, Jr. had just been assassinated a week earlier and the so-called King Riots<\/span><\/a> were still happening.\u00a0 <\/span>Photo and video of urban rioting and of the Vietnam War had become fixtures on the nightly news.\u00a0 <\/span>Much to Johnson’s chagrin, the Kerner Commission<\/span><\/a> had also just released its findings and recommendations on February 29, 1968.\u00a0 <\/span>The country–and the world<\/span><\/a>–were on fire.<\/span><\/p>\n

By 1968 it had become apparent<\/span><\/a>, especially to King, Whitney Young and other members of the “Big Six,” that solving the problem of racism in northern cities was going to prove a significantly more daunting challenge that could not be confronted as effectively by nonviolent direct action as in the South. \u00a0 <\/span>“I Have a Dream” and Selma had been superseded.\u00a0 <\/span>According to groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee<\/span><\/a> (SNCC) It was now about Black Power. <\/span><\/p>\n

The idea of anti-discrimination legislation in housing was not new.\u00a0 <\/span>It had been an objective of liberal African-American civil rights leaders since at least the 1930’s.\u00a0 <\/span>Robert Weaver, whom Johnson appointed as the first African-American cabinet secretary in 1965, had been fighting for fair housing since his days as a member of the short-lived United States Housing Authority (USHA) created by the 1937 Housing Act.\u00a0 <\/span>By the late 1940’s Weaver had become the nation’s foremost expert on housing discrimination with the publication<\/span><\/a> of his 1948 classic The Negro Ghetto, <\/i>which in its analysis and policy formations was something of an African-American liberal version of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma<\/i><\/span><\/a>, <\/i>which had been released four years prior.<\/span><\/p>\n

Has the Fair Housing Act Worked?<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

In a word:\u00a0 <\/span>No.<\/a><\/span>\u00a0 <\/span>Not only does racial discrimination in housing still exist (click here<\/a> for a recent example), class segregation has worsened.\u00a0 <\/span>Scholars have offered numerous explanations.<\/span><\/p>\n

One major explanation for this unfortunate state of affairs is that the law has no teeth.\u00a0 <\/span>Compliance with the Fair Housing Act has mostly become a paperwork exercise.\u00a0 <\/span>Over the act’s fifty year existence thousands of “Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” reports have sat on municipal shelves gathering dust, their findings and analyses unread and their recommendations unheeded.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Enforcement is another problem.\u00a0 <\/span>Proving discrimination in housing is notoriously difficult and expensive.\u00a0 <\/span>The HUD civil rights division’s record in investigating, much less prosecuting, Fair Housing Act complaints is spotty at best.\u00a0 <\/span>I found out about how difficult it can be to investigate Fair Housing Act violations while working as a fair housing tester for the Austin Tenants’ Council<\/span><\/a> in the late 1990’s; heroic levels of persistence are necessary.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps most importantly, this civil rights law failed because of its race and class neutrality, also a weakness of the predecessor civil rights laws enacted in 1964 and 1965.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>Perhaps the single most important lesson the past fifty years should have taught us by now is this:\u00a0 <\/span>we cannot fix discrimination in housing via an anti-discrimination framework.\u00a0 <\/span>Conscious<\/i> race and class measures are needed that tackle the inherent problems of American inequality at their root.<\/span><\/p>\n

Housing is a Human Right<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

All of the fair housing talk of the previous five decades has missed an obvious point:\u00a0 safe, decent and affordable housing is a human right<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>That right is ensconced in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights<\/span><\/a>, Article Twenty-Five, Section One.<\/span><\/p>\n

The United States once understood this:<\/span><\/p>\n

The general welfare and security of the Nation and the health and living standards of its people require housing production and related community development sufficient to remedy the serious housing shortage, the elimination of substandard and other inadequate housing through the clearance of slums and blighted areas, and the realization as soon as feasible of the goal of a decent home and suitable living environment for every American family.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Housing Act of 1949<\/span><\/p>\n

The Forgotten 1968 Housing Law<\/b><\/span><\/h3>\n

The most important housing law passed in 1968 was not the Fair Housing Act, it was the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968<\/a>.\u00a0 <\/span>But that is not how history has remembered it.\u00a0 <\/span>If you Google “Housing Act of 1968” nearly <\/span>every<\/span> result refers to the Fair Housing Act instead.\u00a0 This misremembering is not accidental–it reflects the race and class trajectory of America over the past five decades.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Housing Act of 1968 was the true capstone on Lyndon Johnson’s housing career, and had its promise been fulfilled, many of the problems beleaguering American cities today might have been avoided or at least mitigated.\u00a0 <\/span>Johnson did not just consider it one of the most important pieces of legislation he ever signed, he considered it one of the most important pieces of legislation in American history:
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“I have signed more than 500 major measures as a member of Congress, and perhaps in a century from now, ten of those measures will be remembered as outstanding.\u00a0 <\/span>If I were to look back upon the ten measures that I know that have been passed in the 188 years of our government, I would list the Housing Act of 1968 as one of the ten most important.”<\/span><\/p>\n

At the August 1, 1968 signing ceremony for the bill, President Johnson proclaimed “<\/span>Today, we are going to put on the books of American law what <\/span>I genuinely believe is the most farsighted, the most comprehensive, the most massive housing program in all American history.”\u00a0 <\/span>He was right.\u00a0 <\/span>The 1968 Housing Act was the biggest housing bill in the history of the United States by a considerable margin.\u00a0 It eclipsed the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965, a law that Johnson at the time also considered to be one of his most important accomplishments.*\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

*(The 1965 law created the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and Johnson reluctantly appointed Robert Weaver as the department’s first director, making him the first African-American cabinet secretary.)<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

The 1968 Housing Act included a smorgasbord of housing ideas:\u00a0 M<\/span>odel Cities (in Austin that included Austin Oaks and the Rebekah Baines Johnson Center), Section 235 homeownership subsidies, Section 236 rental assistance (which gave us the term “Fair Market Rent”), business insurance, and a robust increase in public housing construction.\u00a0 <\/span>The act declared that the goal “can be substantially achieved within the next decade by the construction or rehabilitation of 26 million housing units, six million of these for low and moderate income families.”<\/span><\/p>\n