Putting More Teeth Into Enforcement of Fair Housing Laws

Rich Rodgers

Portland City Commissioner Nick Fish has been in the news quite a bit recently in his role as the city's commissioner-in-charge of the Portland Housing Bureau, which gives Commissioner Fish the lead in coordinating the City's enforcement of Federal Fair Housing Laws.

On Friday, June 10th, alongside assistant HUD Secretary John Trasviña and Oregon's Bureau of Labor and Industry Commissioner Brad Avakian, Commissioner Fish released the Portland Housing Bureau's Fair Housing Action Plan, which was billed at the city's first comprehensive fair housing plan. I encourage you to take a look at the plan. It's well conceived, and supported by a great deal of community input as well as policy and technical work.

The U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) requires each state and local government to submit proof that it is in compliance with federal fair housing laws. The requirements include an "analysis of impediments to fair housing choice", recommendations and actions to address and overcome the effects of these impediments, and record keeping showing what was done. The City of Portland's 2011 Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice report builds upon the 2005 Fair Housing Plan and the 1996 Fair Housing Plan. Included for the first time in the most recent effort was a city-funded Fair Housing Audit, performed by the Fair Housing Council of Oregon. The audit found that landlords and leasing agents discriminated against African American or Latino renters in 64 percent of 50 tests across the city, making it clear that racial discrimination is still a fundamental characteristic of the housing market in Portland.

Fish and the Fair Housing Council have come under fire for allegedly lacking a plan to pursue enforcement against landlords until prompted by media coverage, while Fish has insisted that he "always intended to pursue enforcement against select landlords in the audit process."

BOLI is the enforcement arm for Fair Housing complaints in Oregon. Traditionally, the process has been complaint-driven. 2010 was the first time that the City of Portland funded its own audit, and it seems that there was some ambiguity at the onset as to what would be done with the audit results. Moloy Good, the director of the Fair Housing Council--the government-funded non-profit organization that conducted the audit--recommended before the testing that the results be used solely as a part of fact-finding for the Analysis of Impediments described above, rather than turned over to BOLI investigators for enforcement.

This discussion of who intended what, when, will continue, but I think it is critical that we focus on the overall state of fair housing compliance in Portland and throughout Oregon. Fish's action plan includes some new, constructive elements. Fish calls for taking steps to make it easier for renters to understand their rights, and to know the process for filing a complaint if they feel they are the victims of discrimination. He calls for annual audits, with results released to the public. Fish also includes, importantly, specific language committing the city to the development and preservation of more affordable family-sized units. A lack of larger affordable units has played a critical role in the displacement of more than 10,000 people of color from inner Portland neighborhoods between 2000 and 2010, on top of many thousands displaced in the 1990s.

Commissioner Fish's plan strengthens the city's overall effort, relative to past years. However, to really put the full power of the city and state of Oregon behind Fair Housing efforts, we should directly tie Fair Housing compliance to eligibility for hundreds of millions of dollars in affordable housing subsidies and property tax abatements. In Portland, affordable housing subsidies primarily come from resources like the Federal CDBG block grant, PDC urban renewal spending, and low income tax credits from the state. These dollars are awarded as gap-financing in what is typically a highly competitive process, to close the gap between what rents can provide and what is necessary to make a project viable. Typically, property tax abatements are included as well, and in a high percentage of cases, systems development charges (SDCs) waivers and/or transit oriented development (TOD) waivers play a role, too.

The state of Oregon and its local governments should include Fair Housing compliance in the scoring of these applications for competitive housing dollars, along with more aggressive criteria to link housing funding to school enrollment and other important community factors. The process should also be far more transparent, and open to public review and comment. Much like the state's approach to the Construction Contractors Board, citizens should be able to easily review the compliance records of developers, landlords and property management firms.

Similarly, because of the preponderance of problems with some landlords failing to provide safe, decent rental housing in spite of frequent tenant complaints, the track record of owners and property management firms in complying with building codes should be a meaningful factor in considering the awarding or continuation of various forms of public subsidy. This information should also be easily available to the public.

These tools to strongly link compliance with eligibility to access public funding should be part of a spectrum of efforts that includes education, partnership, and enforcement--with emphasis on adequate funding for fielding complaints at the local level and for the state's investigative unit at BOLI. Not every landlord tries to access these funds, but plenty do, and enough money is at stake that it will get their attention and better ensure everyone is guaranteed basic fairness and protection under the law.

By Rich Rodgers June 13, 2011