Chicago Area Fair Housing Alliance

Update 7/14/08: You can follow the Commission's Chicago hearing two ways - the Miami Valley Fair Housing Center is video streaming the day (click here for the ASL video stream) and Justin Massa is live blogging the day at MoveSmart.org.

The 40th Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act provides an excellent time to take stock of the status of fair housing and fair lending in the United States and look forward to what direction enforcement of the Fair Housing Act and other fair housing strategies should take in the future.  

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund (LCCREF), Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law (LCCRUL), the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (NAACPLDF), and the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) have created the National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity to conduct regional hearings across the country designed to examine the state of fair housing in America 40 years after the passage of the federal Fair Housing Act.  

The Commission will be chaired by former HUD Secretaries Jack Kemp and Henry Cisneros. Other Commissioners will include Okianer Christian Dark, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs at the Howard University College of Law; Gordon Quan, Houston, Texas City Councilmember; Myron Orfield of the Institute on Race and Poverty at the University of Minnesota; and Pat Combs, immediate past President of the National Association of Realtors.

The hearings will explore:

*The persistence of housing discrimination and segregation and its impact on our communities.
*The nexus between fair housing and other socio-economic factors such as education, access to credit, employment opportunities, environmental injustice, transportation issues, and access to quality health providers/outlets.
*The successes, failures and flaws of the federal fair housing enforcement mechanisms.
*Enforcement by state and local governments and in the private sector, including individuals and neighborhood organizations and private, non-profit fair housing centers.
*Strategies to break down residential segregation and provide households isolated in segregated areas the opportunity to find integrative alternatives.
*The shortage of affordable housing and strategies to increase the stock of affordable housing.
*Examination of the shortage of affordable housing in the country and strategies that will increase the stock of affordable housing.

The goal is to refocus the nation’s attention on fair housing/fair lending and develop a policy agenda to ensure strong enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, a commitment to integrated communities and an increase in the availability of affordable housing.

The hearing schedule is as follows:

July 15th        Chicago (Access Living, 115 W Chicago)
July 31st        Houston – Field Hearing
September 9th        Los Angeles
September 22nd    Boston
October 17th        Atlanta

Each hearing will consist of multiple panels looking at every aspect of enforcement, residential segregation and discrimination in housing.  The hearings will culminate with the release of a report in December, 2008 detailing the testimony provided at the hearings and outlining future recommendations.

The LCCREF, LCCRUL, NFHA and NAACP LDF are uniquely qualified to carry out this project.  All four organizations share a commitment to fair housing carried out over decades and have worked together collaboratively on several initiatives.  NFHA, LCCRUL and LDF serve on the executive committee of the LCCR, the sister organization to LCCREF, a coalition of nearly 200 national organizations.  The LCCRUL, whose mission is to involve the private bar in providing legal services to address racial discrimination, implemented a National Commission on Voting Rights in 2005 and staged nine hearings across the country providing the entire record to the US Congress.  LCCR/EF, LDF and LCCRUL worked in collaboration with several other organizations to implement a public education campaign about the ongoing need for stronger enforcement of voting rights.  NFHA, the leading voice for fair housing, is the only national organization dedicated solely to ending housing discrimination in the United States.  It is a consortium of more than 220 private, non-profit fair housing organizations, state and local civil rights agencies, and individuals from throughout the United States.

Please see the attached flyer for more information. RSVP to Kforsyth@rabengroup.com.