Fair Housing Act

 As we all look forward to graduating and moving to our new apartments all across the country we will likely hear about the Fair Housing Act. As I have been applying to different places this kept being brought up and in our reading by Margaret Crawford Little Boxes. So for this weeks blog id like to go a bit into the history of why its a thing in the first place. 

So in the 1950's and the beginning of suburbia it was not uncommon for neighborhoods to have rule against selling property to non white families. In 1968 after MLK was shot the fair housing act was passed making it illegal to discriminate when renting or selling a house base on race, religion, national origin, color, familial status, sex, and disability. However this new law wasn't really enforced in many cases. This is a large part of the reason there is a wealth disparity between white family and black families.

 This has even effected urban planning of cities with wealthier white parts of cities having more money going to their schools resulting in nicer schools vs low income neighborhoods having not great schools because of the property taxes of the areas being lower there. These same low income families are more likely to have unhealthy environments they are living in with factories and power plants being zoned near them and less likely to have grocery store within walking distance. 

 

There is a lot more to this but a great quick video I found talking about it can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O5FBJyqfoLM