Origins of Federal Fair Housing Law: Limited Political Support and Consequences

• In Event: Housing and American Political Development

Abstract

Fair housing has long been one of the weakest and least effective aspects of civil rights law, especially compared to voting rights and equal employment opportunity (Pedriana and Stryker 2017). Drawing on a broader project about the development of the civil rights legislative agenda in Congress during the period of party realignment, this paper sketches an argument that many of the limits of fair housing law are rooted in its early political development. I highlight how these limits emerged in three ways. First, I show that northern Democrats in national and state-level politics were much more reluctant to take meaningful action on fair housing legislation compared to voting rights and fair employment legislation. While northern Democrats in Congress spent decades pushing for action on fair employment and voting rights, they avoided fair housing until President Johnson's surprise decision to pursue a bill in 1966. The passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was the result of several contingent factors, especially the assassination of Martin Luther King. The lack of sustained support for fair housing legislation meant that the enacted statute lacked thorough support from a political party coalition during its implementation. Second, the timing of eventual action on fair housing was significant: state and federal laws were generally enacted after the heyday of federal government support for stable housing and homeownership, limiting the returns on access for non-white Americans after these laws' adoption. Third, the design of fair housing legislative proposals gradually changed from the 1940s to the 1960s: whereas the initial focus had been on challenging inequality in the redistributive actions of the federal government, the fair housing legislation enacted in the 1960s focused instead on regulating individual transactions—a form of anti-discrimination law which is both harder to enforce and tends to accrue benefits to the relatively advantaged among marginalized groups. Overall, the paper highlights how the limits of civil rights law were the result not only of conservative backlash after the racial realignment, but also of tensions and conflicts within the liberal coalition during the realignment.

Author

• Kumar Ramanathan, University of Illinois, Chicago