Written by MoveSmart.org co-founder and board president Rob Breymaier:

Over the past 40 years, the fair housing movement has certainly made important progress toward ensuring the rights of individuals in their search for housing. Most significantly, systemic victories against lending and insurance redlining have improved the access to these services for people of color and other protected persons. In addition, random and systemic audits of real estate companies have provided gradual improvement in the expansion of homeownership locations available to protected persons.

However, the first 40 years of fair housing advocacy has almost completely failed at improving the integration of metropolitan communities. Differing segregation measurements show that communities throughout the United States continue to suffer from high segregation [1]. In many regions, while change occurs it often creates short-term integration that is replaced in short order by re-segregation. Common examples include gentrifying neighborhoods in central cities and suburban municipalities that experience increases in minority population. In the vast majority of these cases, increased diversity is followed by re-segregation that is due to displacement or flight [2].

This continual changing structure of segregation is due in part to the fact that in 1968, when the Fair Housing Act passed, American cities were already segregated in a way that privileged whites over people of color in nearly every quality of life measurement. Moreover, the most significant systemic victories (or their remedies) did not begin to manifest until the 1980s [3].

In short, the federal government and the fair housing community have been most successful as responders to acts of discrimination. This has been a reactive strategy that fails to provide models of inclusion or leadership on affirmative measures. This is partly due to the language of the Fair Housing Act. However, it is also significantly the result of a lack of imagination and innovation in fair housing advocacy (an understandable situation given the diminutive and precarious funding and support for fair housing activities).

In cases where integration, opportunity, and inclusion come together, an intentional effort to be proactive has occurred and in some cases continues to occur. The best known of these programs are located in the Chicago region – the voucher-oriented Gautreaux program and the market-oriented Oak Park Regional Housing Center. Chicago continues to provide further innovation on this subject including a new start-up organization called MoveSmart.org a regional non-profit that aims to expand housing choices by reducing knowledge gaps that perpetuate segregation.

However, similar programs exist in other communities, such as the Inclusive Communities Project in the Dallas/Fort Worth region, the Heights Community Congress in Cleveland’s southeast suburbs, the Maplewood/South Orange Community Coalition in New Jersey.

Essentially, these programs inform housing seekers of their rights and opportunities from the beginning of their search process rather than after housing providers have denied them or discouraged them from quality housing options. These efforts create and sustain diverse, integrated communities of inclusion and harmony. They also create environments where discrimination is minimized and housing choices are expanded.

Prioritizing affirmative -- pro-integrative – measures will add a sorely missing component to fulfilling the rights of all persons guaranteed under the Fair Housing Act as well as promote a structure of equal opportunity in our metropolitan regions that will assist in ameliorating nearly all other metropolitan problems.

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[1] Isolation idicies and other examples
[2] Chicago neighborhood and suburb examples
[3] Gautreaux, Lending and Insurance cases