Trump’s Slumlord Administration Is Gutting the Fair Housing Act

In 1973, Donald Trump and his slumlord father were sued by the Department of Justice for racial discrimination, in violation of the Fair Housing Act. The suit was based^[3] on evidence from civil rights testers working for the New York City Human Rights Division. Essentially, Black people were told that there were no units available to rent in Trump-owned buildings, while white people were offered them. Trump countersued the DOJ (establishing a pattern he uses to this day), and eventually settled the case with no admission of guilt from the Trump family.

Given Trump’s formative run-ins with the Fair Housing Act, I expected that piece of landmark legislation to be one of the first on his executive-order chopping block. I’ve been waiting for the poorly worded declaration that “miscegenation of housing units” violates the “purity” of American habitation arrangements and offends a white Jesus who was never required to share his birthing manger with an immigrant kid named Jesús.

It hasn’t come, but now I know why. An explosive report^[4] from The New York Times reveals that the Trump administration has been quietly gutting enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. Whistleblowers from the Department of Housing and Urban Development report that Trump’s political appointees have made it “nearly impossible for them to do their jobs” of investigating violations of the FHA, and prosecuting racists.

The numbers back up the whistleblowers’ claims. The Times reports that HUD has seen a 65 percent reduction in staff since Trump retook office. Lawyers have been cut from 22 to six. And charges of discrimination coming from HUD, which used to average around 35 per year, are down to four.

I suppose you don’t need to order your administration to ignore the Fair Housing Act if all your hatchet men already know what to do.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 is less heralded than the other two big civil rights laws passed in the 1960s—the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—but it’s no less important. Housing rights are the third leg of the stool that makes social equality real, and their omission from even the vaunted Reconstruction Amendments shows that 19th century whites just weren’t ready to make this country “more perfect.” It is instructive to note that after securing civil and political rights, the very next thing the civil rights movement of the 1960s focused on was housing rights. There could be no “desegregation” without ending racial discrimination in housing.

Where people of color are allowed to live crosses over into every other aspect of American social, political, and economic life. It determines where we vote, where we work, where we go to school and how we fund those schools. It determines whether we live in a food oasis or a food desert, whether we have access to public transportation, how clean the air is around us, and if there is a hospital nearby. It’s not an accident that the word “apartheid” literally means “setting apart.” Preventing Black people from living wherever they want to is the key starting point of every system of white supremacy and oppression.

The Fair Housing Act never achieved its lofty title or ideals. It did not end discrimination in housing; it just forced white landowners interested in discriminating to come up with new ways to get it done. It’s never been enforced to the full level of what the law allows. We are still a segregated nation, and every time a brother tries to “move on up” there is a white, doorman building that has outsourced its discrimination to Equifax. For working-class folks, housing discrimination keeps people locked in a “ghetto,” neighborhoods with poor services and high crime that exist largely because white people set them up that way by cutting off funding to the only areas non-white people were allowed to live.

Still, the Fair Housing Act has teeth. I wrote about my own experience with housing discrimination in my latest book^[5]. I explained that while the FHA didn’t stop the discrimination that robbed me of the house I attempted to buy, it provided me the opportunity to do the next best thing: buy a different house in the same neighborhood. Before the FHA, whites here could discriminate as openly as whites in apartheid South Africa. Now, if you can prove discrimination (to the satisfaction of white people), you can sue. More important, the Department of Justice can sue a white landlord or homeowner who has run afoul of the FHA. While there are still many whites who will not sell or rent to Black or non-white families, there are plenty of others who don’t want to risk a lawsuit and all of that smoke.

It’s not surprising that Trump and his white supremacist government wants to functionally end enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. What’s surprising is that Trump hasn’t (yet) made a frontal assault on the law. Instead of Trump, the bad guy who emerges from the Times story is John Gibbs, Trump’s principal deputy assistant secretary for fair housing. The Times reports that Gibbs has sent two memos that essentially amount to orders to not enforce the FHA: “In previous administrations, he wrote, fair housing offices ‘leveraged the Fair Housing Act’ against mortgage providers, appraisers and others ‘in an ideological matter,’ but that would now change.… Cases involving ‘tenuous theories of discrimination’ would ‘no longer be prioritized,’ he wrote.”

Gibbs singled out racially biased home appraisals as one of these “tenuous theories” his office would no longer attend to. But bigoted home appraisals are one of the key ways that wealth is stolen from the Black community. Every Black homeowner I know who goes through the appraisal process knows their home will be undervalued by white appraisers. We all have different ways and tricks to try to avoid this racist redistribution of our wealth. Some families make sure to take down all their blackity-black “art,” including pictures of their kids. I’ve even known people to go the whole way and get a white friend to stand in as the “homeowner” when the appraiser comes. I’ve already secured the commitment of a white friend to do this for me should I ever need to sell my home.

These tricks can work only if you happen to be a Black homeowner in a white neighborhood. If you’re a Black homeowner in a Black neighborhood, you are already screwed. In 2022, the Brookings Institute found that homes in Black neighborhoods are undervalued^[6] by around 20 percent. They estimated that the cost of this systemic undervaluing costs the Black community $162 billion in unrealized wealth. White homeowners in predominately Black, Latino, or Asian neighborhoods “do not experience home price devaluation,” putting paid to the lie that whites are rational or merely economically self-interested when trying to keep non-whites out of their neighborhoods.

Given the Trump administration’s antipathy to the LGBTQ community, it almost goes without saying that Gibbs’s memos essentially promised non-enforcement of laws prohibiting gender and gender-expression discrimination, including new protections added by the Biden administration. The LGBTQ community has been just as historically discriminated against when it comes to housing as the Black community, often forcing gay people to “pass” as straight in order to secure housing. (As a side note: Something that always pissed my parents off about the sitcom Three’s Company was the conceit that Jack Tripper had to pretend to be gay in order to be allowed to live with two women roommates, when in reality it would be far more likely for him to have to pretend to be straight in order to keep his prudish landlord, Mr. Roper, off his case.)

Senator Elizabeth Warren, who sits on the committee for Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs, has called for an investigation^[8] into the whistleblower revelations. Congressional groups—including the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, the Congressional Black Caucus, and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus—wrote a letter^[9] to House Speaker Mike Johnson urging him to protect the enforcement of fair housing regulations. Given everything we’ve already seen from Speaker Johnson and Congressional Republicans, I do not believe an investigation will be forthcoming. If there are still people who believe in the utility of a strongly worded letter, please send them to me so I can outfit them with a dunce cap.

And the dunce cap is me being nice. The first person who comes to me suggesting that people sue to force the Republican Supreme Court to uphold the Fair Housing Act should be forced to attend remedial law and laundering school at Trump University. The current Supreme Court is more likely to rule the entire Fair Housing Act an unconstitutional violation of white landowners’ freedom of association than it is to enforce its regulations.

The Times report should remind people that for every unconstitutional, illegal, blatantly racist thing Trump does publicly, there are tons of other unconstitutional, illegal, and racist things he and his administration are doing behind the scenes to empower white supremacist forces across the country. Trump revels in using the bully pulpit and loud power to accomplish his bigoted goals, but he and his ghouls are not above using every stitch of his soft power to do the same work. His henchmen do not need to be told what to do from on high, as they are perfectly capable of fighting their own brutish battles against equality.

I’d like to think that liberals and progressives will someday have the strength to do what South Africans did over 30 years ago and add housing rights to the Constitution. The South African Constitution not only (somewhat obviously) outlaws racial discrimination in housing; it also creates a positive right to “adequate” housing. Such an amendment here could not only create radical new opportunities for non-white home ownership, but it could also be an important step towards forcing the government to address homelessness. And it will become even more necessary as we face the consequences of our self-imposed environmental disasters, because climate change and pollution increasingly make any number of homes inadequate.

But a future where America recognizes the right to housing and habitability is still a long way off. It’s one that may never come to pass, what with the white people running this joint trying to take us back to the 19th century instead of trying to propel us into the 22nd.

Housing discrimination is the linchpin to all other kinds of social and economic discrimination, and it’s one whites won’t let go. They didn’t let it go after the Civil War they lost! They’re certainly not about to let it go while they’re winning the sequel. 

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