The Fair Housing Act was meant to do two things: outlaw individual acts of housing discrimination and foster integration. It was the first time that Congress declared it illegal for private individuals to discriminate on the basis of race in the sale or rental of housing. This was no small thing. An early civil-rights statute, adopted in 1866, said that all citizens “shall have the same right .?.?. as is enjoyed by white citizens thereof to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property,” but this protection was treated as addressing only government action. Before 1968, it was assumed to be perfectly legal for owners to refuse to sell homes to black families, or for a private bank to deny a potential black homebuyer a loan, or for a broker to lie and say that no homes were available.
The law successfully made these individual acts of explicit racial discrimination in housing transactions illegal, and residential segregation by race has since declined. But the Fair Housing Act has never fully delivered on its promise to promote and further integration.
Walter Mondale, one of the statute’s principal sponsors, said that the Fair Housing Act was intended to replace ghettos “by truly integrated and balanced living patterns.” But in 1968 residential segregation was stratospherically high. Whites were deeply committed to it. They used all legal and illegal means, including cross burnings, arson, and physical attacks, to keep blacks out of their neighborhoods. They formed thousands of homeowner organizations, complete with block captains, with the express purpose of keeping blacks out of white neighborhoods. And when these methods failed, they simply moved to suburbs.
It would have taken a remarkably strong federal statute, loaded with every enforcement measure in the book, to combat a social problem of that magnitude. And those measures are exactly what the Fair Housing Act didn’t have. The final bill included significant compromises that limited the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s enforcement capabilities. It also put the burden of enforcement on the victims, requiring them to either file a formal complaint with hud or sue in federal court to vindicate their rights.
Had its goal of promoting integration been implemented, the Fair Housing Act would have had the potential to be an extraordinary anti-segregation weapon. Instead, it was obstructed from the very beginning.