In this comment, CLASP identifies administrative burdens faced by people trying to access rental assistance programs and offer strategies to mitigate them.
Two U.S. cities—Santa Monica, CA and Evanston, IL—recently achieved important milestones in their plans to compensate Black residents whose ancestors were directly harmed by racist housing and land use policies.
More members of Congress must raise homeownership disparities and community reinvestment as a priority in the Build Back Better agenda, displaying their support for programs that acknowledge and strive to dismantle racist housing and land use policies or eliminate their lasting, discriminatory effects.
To help tenants stay in their homes, local and federal policymakers must advance effective solutions like right-to-counsel programs, which ERAP funds can support. Such programs help tenants secure representation to fight evictions, a step toward equity that many local governments have shown can reduce housing…
Standardized enforcement of the Fair Housing Act’s (FHA) long-held discriminatory effects liability is necessary to uncover policies and practices that have an unjustified discriminatory effect—regardless of intent—and legally require that the practice be replaced.
CLASP commends the Biden Administration and HUD's decision to effectively restore all definitions associated with affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH) that were codified in the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and subsequent court decisions.
The Treasury Department recently published guidance that calls on ERA administrators to reevaluate their programs, signaling an opportunity for advocates to influence how programs in their jurisdiction adapt to the stronger requirements.