By Paul Wenske and Lynn Franey, The Kansas City Star, April 24, 2008
The joy Floyd May’s family felt moving into its first home in the 1950s didn’t last long.
“We were the first black family on the block near 22nd Street and Cleveland,” recalled May, managing director for the National Association of African Americans in Housing. “Within a couple months, for-sale signs cropped up. Overnight it became an all-black neighborhood.”
Blame blockbusting, the practice of real-estate agents encouraging white neighbors to sell quickly, at low prices, when a black family moved in.
Such overtly discriminatory real-estate practices largely are remnants of the past, thanks mostly to the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which banned discrimination in the sale and rental of houses.
But subtle forms persist.
National fair housing experts will gather today in Kansas City to mark the 40th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. Speakers will include May and the Rev. Jesse Jackson.
Next to the 1968 Civil Rights Act, which opened up public accommodations, perhaps nothing did as much as the Fair Housing Act to give minorities access to privileges white people had long enjoyed.
But continuing flaws in the system and a lack of will to enforce the act have prevented federal authorities from rooting out all discriminatory housing practices, some fair housing advocates say.
Nationally, discrimination complaints nearly doubled over the past decade, rising from 5,818 in 1998 to 10,154 last year. In an analysis of housing discrimination complaints, Gannett News Service found that Kansas and Missouri were second- and fourth-worst for the rate of complaints filed per 100,000 housing units.
And minorities were disproportionately steered to subprime loans and charged higher interest rates than whites, according to a study of Kansas City’s fifth City Council district by Washington-based Compliance Technologies.
“The full import of the act is still not being utilized,” May said.
Progress made
Forty years ago, blatant acts of discrimination went unchallenged. Even the government enforced restrictive covenants, keeping minorities out of certain neighborhoods.
But within 11 days of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act; it quickly was signed by President Johnson.
The sweeping bill ensured protection regardless of race, gender, disability or religion.
Still, it lacked teeth. Not until 1988, after complaints still mounted, did Congress increase regulatory enforcement.
One of the first big cases that followed was a 1989 lawsuit brought by Legal Aid of Western Missouri against Kansas City’s Housing Authority.
It alleged the city’s public housing was uninhabitable and that the city was funneling, almost entirely, minorities into the units.
A federal judge placed the city’s public housing in receivership in 1991, where it remains. It is the longest running such receivership in the nation.
The city’s public housing was completely renovated.
“Things are definitely better as a result of the case,” said Julie Levin, Legal Aid of Western Missouri’s managing attorney.
Government officials still receive about 28 complaints a day alleging unfair treatment based on someone’s race, sex, disability, national origin, color or the fact that that have children.
Most complaints are found to be without merit, or the complainant drops the matter. About 37 percent of complaints end with the two parties working out an agreement.
Less than 2 percent of cases result in legal action involving federal authorities.
Earlier this month, for example, Richmond, Mo., rental property company Calvert Properties Inc. agreed to pay $250,000 to settle a lawsuit alleging that its late president, octogenarian Harold Calvert, sexually harassed female tenants in violation of the Fair Housing Act.
Problems continue
In the recent mortgage meltdown, evidence has surfaced that mortgage brokers and nontraditional lenders disproportionately steered minorities into predatory loans.
Travis Newsome, a black real estate broker in the Brookside area, said it was not uncommon to find black home buyers with subprime loans — usually prescribed for applicants with weak credit — when in fact they would have qualified for a conventional loan.
Such deals often included adjustable-rate loans that rose so high the borrower had no way to pay them back. When the market collapsed, thousands of these loans fell into foreclosure, creating the current mess.
The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is trying to address the disproportionate effect of predatory lending through creation of its Fair Lending Division. HUD has found that it is difficult for victims to recognize racial discrimination by lenders because they don’t know what loan terms other borrowers with a similar background are receiving.
Maurice Jourdain-Earl, whose Compliance Technologies studied mortgages in Kansas City’s Fifth District, said, “It’s fair to say that we found that disparities still exist.”
But he said only a more thorough review could determine the extent of any violations.
Consumer advocates, though, question regulators’ will to conduct those investigations. They note a drop in the number of prosecutions and government-filed lawsuits claiming discrimination.
They also point to a lack of funding that has resulted in the closing of more than a dozen private fair housing centers, including in Kansas City, where people can take complaints.
The National Fair Housing Alliance estimates that as many as 4 million incidents of housing discrimination occur annually.
“The failure in the last 40 years has been the failure of serious federal enforcement,” said Shanna L. Smith, the alliance’s president and CEO.
But that may be changing because of the subprime crisis.
Proposed federal legislation would provide $52 million for enforcement and $20 million for investigations aimed at systemic changes.
•The Rev. Jesse Jackson will speak at 10 a.m., but attendance is open only to people who already have reservations.
•Free afternoon sessions are open to the public without a reservation. Three sessions run from 1:45 p.m. to 3 p.m.: How to avoid foreclosure; what to do if it’s too late (foreclosure-related); and predatory lending. A session on the role of real estate agents in complying with fair housing rules will run from 1:45 p.m. to 3:30 p.m. Two sessions will run from 3:10 to 4:15: Special housing issues/Hispanic community; and housing for persons with disabilities.
To reach Paul Wenske, call 816-234-4454 or send e-mail to pwenske@kcstar.com To reach Lynn Franey, call 816-234-4927 or send e-mail to lfraney@kcstar.com