The NCCRC celebrates Fair Housing Month

April is National Fair Housing Month, and 2024 marks the 56th anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act, which forbids discrimination in housing based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex (including gender identity and sexual orientation), disability, and familial status.  While there is still work to do to make the FHA stronger, a recent study found that the FHA has led to more than half a million complaints being filed and “close to $1 billion in compensation to victims of mortgage lending discrimination and for investment in communities.”

Here at the NCCRC, our team is dedicated to advancing the right to counsel for tenants in cases that impact tenant housing stability, accessibility, and affordability, including evictions and administrative cases that strip people of their housing subsidies or tenancies.  We see this work as a key way to advance fair housing, in no small part because of the well-established data that the vast majority of tenants facing eviction are disproportionately people of color and most disproportionately Black women.  This work is a part of making the promise of the Fair Housing Act real. The ACLU of North Dakota recently highlighted the history and importance of the Fair Housing Act, and focused on how the right to counsel for tenants is a crucial step in advancing due process and preventing unjust eviction.

The right to counsel for tenants aims to reduce the impact of eviction-related harms, often outlined in the findings section (“the why”) of the legislation. The harms seem endless – implicating individual and family mental and physical health, children’s education, employment, and much more. And a recent Eviction Lab study, underscoring what we’ve known anecdotal for decades, has firmed up the evidence proving evictions to be not only harmful but potentially fatal:

If paying an excess amount for rent can increase your chances of dying early, an eviction can be a fatal blow. We used the records of millions of eviction court cases filed between 2000 and 2016 to understand the impact of such events on renters’ health. Simply being threatened with an eviction – even when that case did not result in an eviction judgment – was associated with a 19% increase in mortality. Receiving an eviction judgment was associated with a 40% increase in the risk of death.

We know that the right to counsel for tenants is an essential piece of the puzzle that is the eviction epidemic. But as we live through the 56th Anniversary of the passage of the Fair Housing Act, we have to also take a moment to think of the ways in which only a right to counsel can help us uphold the promises set out by that crucial legislation. We are seeing the benefits of right to counsel laws spill out beyond the courtrooms, and beyond defenses to eviction. Places like Philadelphia already extend the right to counsel to affirmative cases including any judicial or administrative proceeding to remedy a violation of the Philadelphia Fair Housing Ordinance. Our team is working to help more and more jurisdictions not only equitably and effectively pass the right to counsel for tenants facing eviction but to think bigger and pass laws that guarantee counsel when tenants need to address violations of existing landlord-tenant and housing law, including anti-discrimination laws.