Welcome to Fair Housing Month!
By Jess Schwalb, Fair Housing Outreach, Intake, and Testing Coordinator
This April, we’ll celebrate the organizers and advocates who fight housing discrimination and shine a light on the work still needed to desegregate our city and country. We’ll be spending the month talking about the history of fair housing protections, the work of our community partners to build a more racially and economically just Chicago and Illinois, and the tools that Chicago Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights uses to hold housing providers accountable for discrimination. We hope to end this month more informed about the policy and practice of fair housing, and fired up about all the ways we can fight racial discrimination and segregation - even in their subtlest forms.
Martin Luther King Jr. marches through Marquette Park to protest housing discrimination in 1966 (photo credit: Bernard Kleina).
The fair housing movement has deep ties to Chicago. In 1966, Martin Luther King Jr. moved to North Lawndale and joined with local advocates to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement, a historic campaign to improve housing conditions for Black Chicagoans and desegregate the city’s neighborhoods. Dr. King, alongside local organizers from Al Raby to Rabbi Robert Marx, sought to challenge white neighborhoods’ violent resistance to integration and to expose white lenders and real estate agents’ racist practices. Today, we often frame housing issues in terms of affordability; we are (justifiably) concerned about rising rents, gentrification, and displacement. But the truth is that racial discrimination remains a core problem. We know that segregation in Chicago is actually getting worse, not better, and that most housing discrimination has shifted from the overt to the more subtle. What use are affordable apartments if property managers rent them out only to white people and not to people of color? What can we do when landlords continue to violate fair housing laws by giving better rates to individuals without disabilities, or denying renters with housing choice vouchers the right to apply for a unit in the first place?
Housing disparities point to larger patterns of systemic and structural racism, from education to employment and healthcare. Where we live not only affects where we go to school, the quality of the air we breathe, and the availability of fresh produce in our area, but it also connects us to the communities around us and to the city officials who aim to represent us. Fair housing is the key to unlocking the still-widening gaps between white and Black homeownership, and therefore the racial wealth gap; it is a key tool of public health, protecting individuals from homelessness during a global pandemic; it is the issue that most directly asks whether our elected officials will actively challenge Chicago’s history of segregation or merely accept it as the status quo.
Chicago Lawyers’ Committee has been advocating and litigating for fair and equitable housing for decades. This month, we’ll use social media to share more about how we investigate the city’s fair housing landscape, what we’ve discovered about the prevalence of racial discrimination against voucher holders, and how a local campaign called the Just Housing Initiative successfully built power and expanded housing protections across Cook County. Join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.