01Personal
Look up your neighborhood on a 1930s redlining map
Open Mapping Inequality from the University of Richmond, search your city and click your neighborhood. Read the grade and the appraiser’s original notes on who lived there.
An Anti-Racism Daily GuideNo. 07
Housing Justice
How government policy built housing segregation, where eviction, displacement and homelessness stand in 2026 and what you can do about it this week.
Where things stand
Overview
Housing justice is the effort to undo racial discrimination in where people can live, whether they can own a home and whether they can stay in it. Segregation in the United States came from law and policy. Cities passed racial zoning ordinances (Wikipedia). Deeds carried covenants that barred Black buyers (Wikipedia). In the 1930s, the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation drew maps that marked Black neighborhoods in red as “hazardous” for lending (Wikipedia).
Those policies shaped who could build wealth through a home. In the second quarter of 2026, 74.5 percent of non-Hispanic white households owned their homes, compared with 45.4 percent of Black households (Census Bureau). In 2022, the typical white family held $285,000 in wealth and the typical Black family held $44,900 (Federal Reserve). A home is the largest asset for many families, so the ownership gap feeds the wealth gap.
Renters face a different set of risks. Eviction Lab tracked about 1.23 million eviction filings in 2025 across the places it monitors (Eviction Lab). Black renters were 28 percent of renters in those places and 39 percent of the people facing eviction (Eviction Lab). On one night in January 2025, about 745,652 people were homeless, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) (National Low Income Housing Coalition). Black people are 14 percent of the US population and 33 percent of people experiencing homelessness (National Low Income Housing Coalition). A study by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition counted 261,000 fewer Black residents in gentrifying, majority-Black neighborhoods between 1980 and 2020 (NCRC).
Federal policy shifted in 2025 and 2026. In February 2025, HUD ended the 2021 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) rule and let local governments self-certify that they further fair housing (NAHB). In January 2026, HUD proposed removing its rule on disparate impact, the legal standard for policies that harm protected groups without proof of intent (Federal Register). In August 2026, it proposed a similar change to its Title VI rules, with comments due Oct. 9, 2026 (Federal Register). After the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, more than 350 cities and 14 states adopted tougher laws on sleeping or camping in public (Stateline). At the same time, 28 cities, counties and states now guarantee some tenants a lawyer in eviction court, up from zero in 2016 (National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel).
What you can do
Take Action
10 actions — for yourself, your community and the country. Start with one.
02Personal
Check your deed for a racial covenant
Search the Mapping Prejudice tool to see whether researchers found a covenant on your property, or pull your deed from the county recorder. If your city takes part in Just Deeds, it offers free legal help to add a statement to your title that rejects the covenant. Covenants cannot be enforced, but many are still in the records.
03Local
Find the eviction numbers where you live
Search your county on the Eviction Lab map, or check its Eviction Tracking System if your city is one of the 48 places it monitors. Write down the yearly filing count so you can cite it when you contact local officials.
04Local
Speak at a zoning or planning meeting
Find your city’s planning commission calendar and sign up for public comment on the next housing item. Sample wording: “My name is ___ and I live in ___. I support allowing more homes, including apartments and duplexes, in my neighborhood. Rules that only allow single-family houses on large lots keep out renters and families with lower incomes. Please vote yes.” Just Action by Leah and Richard Rothstein lists local policies worth pushing for.
05Local
Join a tenant union
If you rent, ask neighbors in your building whether a tenant union already exists, and check the Tenant Union Federation, a national network of local unions founded in 2024. If none exists, its Union School trains people who want to start one.
06Local
Email your council member about a right to counsel
Check the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel to see whether your city or state has a right to counsel for tenants or a campaign underway. Then send this email:
“I live in your district. Most tenants go to eviction court without a lawyer. I am asking you to support a right to counsel for tenants facing eviction and to fund it in this year’s budget.”
07Local
Support a community land trust near you
Find a community land trust on Grounded Solutions Network’s national map. These nonprofits own the land under homes so the homes stay affordable when they resell. Sign up for your nearest trust’s volunteer list or give to it directly.
08Personal
Report housing discrimination
If you see or face discrimination in renting, buying, lending or insurance, call HUD at 1-800-669-9777 or file online. This includes a home appraisal you believe was lowered because of race; the Appraisal Complaint National Hotline (refermyappraisalcomplaint.asc.gov) tells you which agencies to contact. HUD sets time limits on complaints, so write down dates, names and what was said, and report quickly.
09National
Comment on HUD’s proposed disparate impact changes
HUD is taking public comments until Oct. 9, 2026, on a proposal to remove the disparate impact standard from its Title VI rules. Click “Submit a Public Comment” on the Federal Register page. Sample wording:
“I oppose this proposal. Disparate impact rules let HUD address policies that shut people out of housing because of race even when no one can prove intent. Please keep them.”
10National
Donate to a national housing justice group
Set up a monthly gift to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which lobbies for affordable homes. Other options include the National Fair Housing Alliance, which supports local fair housing centers, and the National Homelessness Law Center, which challenges laws that punish people for sleeping outside.
How we got here
Dates in History
- Nov. 5, 1917
In Buchanan v. Warley, the Supreme Court unanimously struck down a Louisville, Kentucky, ordinance that barred Black people from buying homes on majority-white blocks. Cities and developers turned to private racial covenants instead. Read more ›
- May 31, 1921
A white mob began a two-day attack on the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It burned 1,256 homes and 191 businesses across more than 35 blocks and left about 10,000 Black residents homeless. Read more ›
- Nov. 22, 1926
In Village of Euclid v. Ambler Realty Co., the Supreme Court upheld zoning that separates land uses. The ruling became the legal basis for zoning that limits neighborhoods to single-family homes. Read more ›
- June 13, 1933
Congress created the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation. From 1935 to 1940, it produced maps grading neighborhoods for lending risk, and majority-Black areas were often colored red as “hazardous”. Read more ›
- May 3, 1948
In Shelley v. Kraemer, the Supreme Court ruled that courts cannot enforce racial covenants. J.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley had bought a St. Louis home in 1945 that carried a 1911 covenant. Read more ›
- April 11, 1968
President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.. It banned discrimination in the sale, rental and financing of housing. Read more ›
- 1969
Black civil rights activists in southwest Georgia founded New Communities near Albany, Georgia, on about 5,700 acres. It is widely recognized as the first model for community land trusts in the US. Read more ›
- June 25, 2015
In Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Fair Housing Act allows disparate impact claims. Read more ›
- June 28, 2022
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to return Bruce’s Beach to descendants of Charles and Willa Bruce. The city of Manhattan Beach had taken the Black-owned resort by eminent domain in 1924. Read more ›
- June 28, 2024
In City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that enforcing public camping bans against homeless people does not violate the Eighth Amendment, even when shelter beds are not available. Read more ›
- February 2025
HUD Secretary Scott Turner ended the 2021 AFFH rule and replaced it with local self-certification. Read more ›
- Jan. 14, 2026
HUD proposed removing its Fair Housing Act disparate impact regulation. It said courts, not the agency, should decide how disparate impact claims work. Read more ›
Go deeper
Library
Books
ReadThe Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Richard Rothstein (2017)
Rothstein documents how federal, state and local governments created housing segregation through zoning, public housing and mortgage rules.
Just Action: How to Challenge Segregation Enacted Under the Color of Law
Leah Rothstein and Richard Rothstein (2023)
This follow-up to The Color of Law lists local policies residents can push for, from zoning changes to covenant removal.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Matthew Desmond (2016)
Desmond follows eight families facing eviction in Milwaukee. The book won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (2019)
Taylor shows how federal programs in the 1970s steered Black buyers into bad homes and loans. It was a 2020 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History.
Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
Beryl Satter (2009)
Satter tells how speculators in Chicago sold homes to Black families “on contract” at inflated prices, and how her father fought them in court.
Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States
Kenneth T. Jackson (1985)
Jackson’s history of the suburbs was one of the first books to examine federal redlining maps and mortgage policy.
Homelessness Is a Housing Problem: How Structural Factors Explain U.S. Patterns
Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern (2022)
The authors compare cities and find that housing costs and rental vacancy rates explain regional homelessness rates better than drug use or mental illness.
Shop the Banned Books Book Club. Every book above links to our Banned Books Book Club shop on Bookshop.org, which supports independent bookstores.
Trainings
Learn with othersMapping Prejudice community mapping sessions
Mapping Prejudice, University of Minnesota Libraries (Free)
Twice-monthly Zoom sessions teach volunteers to read historical deeds and identify racial covenants.
Advocates’ Guide 2026
National Low Income Housing Coalition (Free)
A yearly guide to federal housing programs, tenant protections and advocacy tactics, with chapters written by experts. Download it as a PDF.
Just Action book group discussion guide
Leah Rothstein and Richard Rothstein (Free)
A discussion guide for groups reading Just Action, built around local steps to challenge segregation in your own community.
Housing Not Handcuffs Organizing Toolbox
National Homelessness Law Center (Free)
Guides for organizing against laws that punish homelessness, including a housing rights training manual.
Our Homes, Our Votes
National Low Income Housing Coalition (Free)
A nonpartisan toolkit for registering and turning out renters and people with low incomes, and for asking candidates about housing.
Key Figures
People to knowJ.D. and Ethel Lee Shelley
The Shelleys bought a home in St. Louis in 1945 and were sued under a racial covenant. Their case, Shelley v. Kraemer, ended court enforcement of covenants in 1948.
Robert C. Weaver
Weaver, an economist and housing official, served as the first HUD secretary from 1966 to 1968. He was the first Black cabinet member in US history.
Edward Brooke
Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, was the first Black senator elected by popular vote. He co-wrote the Fair Housing Act of 1968 with Walter Mondale.
George Romney
Romney served as HUD secretary under President Nixon after the Fair Housing Act passed. He pushed to enforce the law, and the Nixon White House resisted.
Richard Rothstein
Rothstein is a senior fellow emeritus at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute. His book The Color of Law documented government-made segregation.
Matthew Desmond
Desmond is a sociologist at Princeton and principal investigator of the Eviction Lab, which collects national eviction data. He won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Evicted.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Taylor is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton. Her book Race for Profit, on how banks and real estate firms exploited Black homebuyers in the 1970s, was a 2020 Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Nikole Hannah-Jones
As a ProPublica reporter, Hannah-Jones investigated the federal government’s failure to enforce the Fair Housing Act in her 2012 series “Living Apart.”
From the Archive
Anti-Racism Daily, 2020–2024- 2021-04-14
Decommodify housing.
Explains tenant unions and community land trusts as ways to keep homes out of the speculative market, and traces land trusts to civil rights organizers in Georgia.
- 2021-05-12
Reverse racist land grabs.
Tells how Manhattan Beach, California, seized the Black-owned Bruce’s Beach resort by eminent domain and covers sundown towns.
- 2020-09-02
Rally for fair appraisals.
Covers racial bias in home appraisals, its roots in redlining and how to report a biased appraisal.
- 2020-07-20
Protect your community from the harm of gentrification.
Describes how gentrification drives displacement of Black and Latino residents and what local policies can protect long-term residents.
Podcasts
Listen
Fresh Air: A ‘Forgotten History’ of How the U.S. Government Segregated America (May 3, 2017)
Terry Gross, with guest Richard Rothstein
Rothstein explains how New Deal housing programs kept Black families out of the suburbs and concentrated them in city public housing.
This American Life: “House Rules,” Episode 512 (2013)
Ira Glass, with Nancy Updike and Nikole Hannah-Jones
Reporters test rental discrimination in New York City and trace how HUD Secretary George Romney’s push to enforce the Fair Housing Act was blocked by the Nixon White House.
There Goes the Neighborhood
Kai Wright (WNYC)
This series reports on gentrification and how it changes who can afford to live in a city.
Blindspot, Season 2: Tulsa Burning
WNYC Studios and HISTORY
This season tells the story of the Greenwood District before, during and after the 1921 massacre.
Say it precisely
Terminology
- Redlining
- The practice of denying loans or services to people in certain neighborhoods, usually Black neighborhoods. The name comes from 1930s federal maps that colored those areas red.
- Racial covenant
- A clause in a property deed that barred selling or renting the home to people of certain races. Courts stopped enforcing them in 1948, and the Fair Housing Act outlawed them in 1968.
- Contract selling
- A sale in which the seller keeps the deed until the buyer pays in full. Buyers who missed one payment could lose the home and everything they had paid.
- Exclusionary zoning
- Local land-use rules, such as large minimum lot sizes or bans on apartments, that raise the cost of living in a place. These rules keep out renters and lower-income families.
- Disparate impact
- A legal theory that a policy can be discriminatory if it harms a protected group more than others without a strong justification, even if no one intended harm.
- Affirmatively furthering fair housing (AFFH)
- A duty in the Fair Housing Act that requires HUD and the communities it funds to take steps against segregation, beyond not discriminating.
- Community land trust
- A nonprofit that owns land and leases it to the people who own the homes on it. Resale limits keep the homes affordable for the next buyer.
- Eviction filing
- A court case a landlord files to remove a tenant. A filing can appear on a tenant’s record and make it harder to rent later, even if the case is dismissed.
- Right to counsel
- A law guaranteeing a free lawyer to tenants in eviction court, usually those with low incomes.
- Gentrification
- The arrival of higher-income residents and investment in a lower-income neighborhood, which often raises rents and property values.
- Displacement
- When residents are forced to leave their neighborhood because of rising costs, eviction or redevelopment.
- Point-in-time count
- A count of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January, done each year by local communities for HUD. It misses many people who stay with others or in cars.
Questions people ask
FAQ
Redlining ended decades ago. Why does it still affect people?
Families shut out of homeownership in the 1930s through the 1960s could not pass home equity to their children. In 2022, the typical white family had about six times the wealth of the typical Black family (Federal Reserve).
Didn’t the Fair Housing Act make housing discrimination illegal?
Yes. Since 1968, it has been illegal to discriminate by race in selling, renting or lending (US Department of Justice). Enforcement depends largely on people filing complaints and on fair housing groups that send testers. The law did not undo segregation that already existed.
Is the homeownership gap closing?
Slowly, if at all. In the second quarter of 2026, the Black homeownership rate was 45.4 percent and the white rate was 74.5 percent, a gap of about 29 points (Census Bureau). Black homeownership rose 1.5 points from a year earlier (Census Bureau).
What is HUD changing about disparate impact?
In January 2026, HUD proposed deleting its regulation that explains how disparate impact claims work under the Fair Housing Act (Federal Register). HUD argues courts should set those standards and that federal policy should focus on intentional discrimination. The Supreme Court’s 2015 ruling that the Fair Housing Act allows disparate impact claims still stands (Wikipedia).
What did the Supreme Court decide in Grants Pass?
In 2024, the Court ruled 6-3 that cities can fine or jail people for sleeping outside on public property, even when shelters are full (Wikipedia). It overturned a lower-court rule that had blocked such enforcement in Western states. Since then, more than 350 cities and 14 states have adopted tougher laws (Stateline).
Are evictions going up or down?
Eviction Lab found that filings fell for the second year in a row in 2025, to about 1.23 million in the places it tracks (Eviction Lab). Some cities saw increases. Black renters still faced a larger share of filings than their share of renters (Eviction Lab).
I found a racial covenant in my deed. Is it legal?
It is not enforceable. The Supreme Court barred court enforcement in 1948 (Wikipedia), and the Fair Housing Act banned covenants in 1968 (US Department of Justice). In some places, owners can record a document that rejects the covenant, and Just Deeds can help.
Receipts
Sources
Every claim in this guide is cited inline. Here are all 29 sources in one place.
Show all 29 sources
- https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/qtr226/Q226press.pdf
- https://federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/greater-wealth-greater-uncertainty-changes-in-racial-inequality-in-the-survey-of-consumer-finances-20231018.html
- https://evictionlab.org/ets-report-2025/
- https://nlihc.org/resource/hud-2025-annual-homelessness-assessment-report-finds-first-reduction-overall-homelessness
- https://www.hud.gov/news/hud-no-26-037
- https://ncrc.org/gentrification/
- https://www.nahb.org/blog/2025/02/hud-affh-rule
- https://leadingage.org/hud-terminates-fair-housing-rule/
- https://nationalfairhousing.org/issue/affirmatively-furthering-fair-housing/
- https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/01/14/2026-00590/huds-implementation-of-the-fair-housing-acts-disparate-impact-standard
- https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/10/2026-16228/huds-implementation-of-the-fair-housing-acts-disparate-impact-standard-amendments-to-huds-title-vi
- https://stateline.org/2026/06/25/2-years-after-grants-pass-14-states-350-cities-have-tougher-laws-on-street-homelessness/
- https://www.aclu.org/two-years-since-grants-pass-tracking-the-criminalization-of-homelessness
- https://civilrighttocounsel.org/
- https://www.hud.gov/reporthousingdiscrimination
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Grants_Pass_v._Johnson
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchanan_v._Warley
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_of_Euclid_v._Ambler_Realty_Co.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Owners%27_Loan_Corporation
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shelley_v._Kraemer
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1968
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Department_of_Housing_and_Community_Affairs_v._Inclusive_Communities_Project,_Inc.
- https://www.justice.gov/crt/fair-housing-act-1
- http://usslave.blogspot.com/2009/08/dr-kenneth-clark-interviews-james.html
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Communities
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach
- https://groundedsolutions.org/sehmap/
- https://refermyappraisalcomplaint.asc.gov/
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