Who you are shouldn’t determine where you can live.[link removed] [[link removed]]
Dear John,

Donald Trump is no stranger to housing discrimination. In the 1970s, the Department of Justice sued Trump and his father for denying housing to people of color in the apartments they owned in New York City. A court-enforced settlement agreement put an end to it.
But now Donald Trump is running the executive branch — and he’s seeking to make it easier for mortgage lenders, landlords, and governments to get away with discriminatory housing policies.

Tell the Trump Administration: Housing Discrimination Has No Home Here.
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The Department of Housing and Urban Development is considering gutting a long-standing civil rights protection—disparate impact theory—to make it easier to discriminate in housing.

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Trump’s Department of Housing and Urban Development recently proposed a rule that would gut a long-standing civil rights protection called “disparate impact theory” that has offered recourse for countless people experiencing housing discrimination and segregation.

Disparate impact theory sounds complicated, but the idea behind it is simple: Not all racial (or gender, or xenophobic, etc.) discrimination looks racist (or sexist or xenophobic, etc.) on its face. Sometimes a policy can appear neutral in theory but in practice, disproportionately and adversely affects a particular group of people. In other words, the policy has a disparate impact on a group of people. That kind of discrimination—a more covert, but no less dangerous kind—is what the disparate impact theory, available under the Fair Housing Act, seeks to protect people against.

And Trump is trying to gut it.

Who you are shouldn’t determine where you can live. Where we live profoundly impacts every other aspect of our lives: our access to good jobs, good schools, the transportation we need, our community, our future economic success, and more. But by seeking to dismantle the disparate impact theory of the Fair Housing Act, this administration is trading away the importance of safe, affordable housing in people’s lives to give a free pass to landlords, banks, and more to discriminate against tenants and homebuyers because of the color of their skin, their gender, and more.

Here are some policies that could be harder to challenge under Trump’s proposal:
• A landlord evicts domestic violence survivors, the majority of whom are women, who have called the police more than once to seek protection from their abuser.
• A bank charges excessive fees or rates to certain groups, such as people of color or people with disabilities, seeking home mortgage loans. This would force the people affected to choose between taking on a risky loan and giving up their dream of owning a home because they cannot access financing.
• An apartment complex restricts occupancy to one person per bedroom, meaning families with children could be barred from renting and forced to rent a more expensive multi-bedroom apartment or be homeless if they can’t afford a multi-bedroom apartment.

The list goes on.

Unfortunately, John, this attack is just the start. Disparate impact theory is integral to the Fair Housing Act, but it’s also a critical part of many other civil rights laws. If the Trump administration succeeds in its rollback of this key civil rights protection, it will likely feel emboldened to gut it in other areas, from education and employment to transportation and health care.
Donald Trump’s disgusting, prejudiced efforts to discriminate in housing were stopped once before. This time it’s our turn to be the ones to stop him. Submit a comment today against this bigoted proposal.
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Sincerely,

Melissa Boteach
Vice President of Income Security, Child Care, and Early Learning
National Women's Law Center

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