From the event announcement:
In celebration of National Fair Housing Month, the Illinois Department of Human Rights will host a panel: “CommUNITY: Immigrant Communities Respond to the Housing Crisis.” The event will focus on how communities are coming together to address the escalating housing crisis, which has disproportionately affected communities of color with regards to housing. It will also include recommendations on strategies for community integration.
1:38pm: Rocco Claps, Director of the Illinois Department of Human Rights, welcomes a mostly full (and continuing to fill-up) room to the program. He highlights that IDHR has an order form community groups can use to get bulk IDHR materials to distribute in their neighborhoods.
1:43pm: Maury McGough, Director of the Chicago Program Center, Midwest HUB Office of Fair Housing & Equal Opportunity at HUD, opens with a reference to Gladwell's “tipping point”, arguing that the US is approaching or has reached a tipping point when it comes to illegal housing discrimination. He rightly clarifies that there are two goals of the Fair Housing Act – to make discrimination illegal and to integrate communities – and while great progress has been made on the first there's been almost no impact on the second. He references the “enforcement infrastructure” that has been built over the last 20 years – a bulwark of HUD's fair housing enforcement office, state and local enforcement agencies, and private fair housing enforcement organizations. Citing the newly published Family Properties, McGough notes that it provides perspective on the progress made in enforcing the law.
1:51pm: Citing Kathleen Parker's recent (and absolutely awful and actually incorrect) opinion piece on the supposed coercive nature of advancing integration, McGough notes that there are many challenges for the next forty years of fair housing and fulfilling the second promise of the Fair Housing Act.
