Discrimination in housing focus of HUD campaign launched Friday
Discussion at UCLA focuses on rights of victims, education
By Joy McMasters Daily Bruin Staff As part of Fair Housing Month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced an advertising campaign Friday at UCLA to educate people about the reality of housing discrimination and how to report it.
Some have come to think of it as "discrimination with a smile," but this view belies the fact that people are denied housing every day based on factors such as race, religion, and family size, HUD officials say.
"Thirty-two years ago this week, Congress passed a fair housing act in homage to Dr. Martin Luther King and I can think of no better time than now to introduce this new and aggressive campaign," said HUD Assistant Secretary Eva Plaza.
The campaign, discussed at a town meeting in Dodd Hall hosted by the UCLA School of Law, includes a number of public service announcements featuring actor Edward James Olmos.
"When (housing discrimination) happens to one of us, it happens to everyone," Olmos said.
"Once you know your community and your laws, you have a better chance of being able to participate," he said.
According to Olmos, the announcements have the potential to make a large impact.
The announcements will be available this month in both English and Spanish, and Plaza said similar commercials will hopefully be made in Asian languages.
"This new HUD initiative is meant to reach Americans in the languages they grew up speaking," said Art Agnos, HUD representative for the Pacific region.
"The newest Americans among us need extra effort and that's our goal with these public service announcements," he said.
Discrimination many times involves landlords telling people of a certain race that there are no vacancies, banks not extending credit to single women, or applying clauses in property documents dating back to the 1930s which state no non-whites may live in a specified house, Agnos said.
The announcements address this range in possible offenses, explaining that, "Housing discrimination may be in-your-face or subtle, but it's still against the law."
According to Plaza, the reasons people do not report such housing discrimination include their cultural backgrounds and a lack of information about what their rights are and what legal action can be taken when those rights are denied.
"The goal of all this is to turn a cycle of non-enforcement to a cycle of active enforcement," said UCLA Professor Richard Sander, president of the Los Angeles Fair Housing Institute.
He said that since the 1960s systematic housing discrimination involving African Americans has decreased significantly, but that in Latino communities which don't have as much of a history of dealing with the issue, it is quite common but infrequently reported.
"Within Los Angeles, Latinos are one-twentieth as likely to report housing discrimination as blacks," Sander said.
A number of Friday's speakers expressed the importance of educating not only the victims of housing discrimination, but the landlords who think they can get away with it and have not seen that there can be legal consequences.
"Housing discrimination is not just wrong, it's illegal  flat out illegal," Agnos said.
Dean Jonathan Varat said the law school was honored to be a part of not only Friday's event but the ongoing process of combatting housing discrimination.
"Our law school believes strongly in reaching out to the community of Los Angeles," Varat said. "Law faculty and law student involvement in the community has been pervasive."
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