Fair Housing Act

Fair Housing Act

Disability Matters Radio with Joyce Bender

Tuesday, November 19, 2019

#AdvocacyMatters Segment

The Fair Housing Act is in the news.

Many of your listeners may have worked on the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988. In 1988, Congress extended the federal Fair Housing Act to protect people with disabilities against housing-related discrimination. Disability Rights Pennsylvania has a short fact sheet on this law on our website.

The law protects people with disabilities against housing discrimination. The benefit of the law is that we can file complaints of housing discrimination with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development or one of the state or local agencies authorized to handle a federal complaint of housing discrimination under the Fair Housing Act. 

On November 1st, the National Fair Housing Alliance released a report that reviewed federal housing discrimination complaints filed in 2018.

This is what they found:

• Housing complaints in 2018 were up 8% over 2017. The number of complaints in 2018 were 31,202. This was the highest number of federal complaints filed since the Alliance started tracking complaints in 1995.
• Complaints based on disability is most housing complaints filed under the Fair Housing Act.
• In 2018, there were 17,575 complaints based on disability. This represented 56.33 percent of all cases. Many of these complaints are related to reasonable accommodations or modifications and access issues.

#AdvocacyMatters. It’s important that we act to protect the laws we fought hard to gain. Then to educate our community about how to use the laws to remedy discrimination when it happens.