In response to proposed changes to the Fair Housing Act, Brown School graduate students Jack Seigel and Nora Garcia launched a petition decrying their predicted impact on the process of filing a lawsuit over housing discrimination.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Fair Housing Act (FHA) currently prohibits practices of disparate impact, which are practices that appear to be neutral, but disproportionately harm certain groups. For example, a landlord might turn away potential renters who use Section 8 vouchers for housing, but since a large portion of voucher holders are black, this policy would have a disparate impact on African Americans.

Siegel and Garcia’s petition criticizes how under the proposed changes to the FHA, the “burden of proof” would fall disproportionately upon those who are least able to bear it.

“The proposed rule changes the test for how discrimination is proved in court in a way that both makes it harder to prove and shifts the burden onto the people that are potentially being discriminated against. That’s unfair in that we know that housing discrimination still happens, even though it is illegal,” Seigel said.

Under the proposed new HUD laws, plaintiffs would be required to show that a specific policy was unnecessary for a legitimate purpose, that it has a disparate impact on a certain group and finally that the effect is significant. Plaintiffs would also need to gather evidence before requesting evidence from the defendants, which many advocates argue would increase the cost of pursuing a lawsuit against unfair housing practices.

“It becomes that much harder for nonprofits to pull the trigger with all the costs, expense and time to build it up,” community engagement specialist at the Metropolitan St. Louis Equal Housing and Opportunity Council (EHOC) Glenn Burleigh said. “If you don’t think you have a very good chance of getting into the main part of it, the idea is that if you set the bar high enough to not let people in, it discourages people from coming in in the first place.”

Locally, HUD’s new policies have the potential to impact both the St Louis and Washington University communities.

“There is a lack of affordable housing in St. Louis and there [are] also examples of housing discrimination in St. Louis,” Seigel said.

Particularly, at Washington University, this shift in Federal housing policy has the potential to impact many St Louis residents who work for the University.

“A lot of our support workers, janitorial and otherwise, are people who are making basically poverty wages and living in housing situations that are often precarious, and the housing protection that the disparate impact rollback of protection would entail would really be damaging to those folks,” chair of allies and outreach for Washington University Graduate Workers Union (WUGWU) Grace Ward said.

As a group, WUGWU also emphasizes the importance of HUD’s policy change to low-income workers in the greater St Louis region and is encouraging the University to be a leader within the region by standing up for workers.

“As a union, the reason that we’re backing the petition is because as an organization we’re concerned about improving the lives of workers across St. Louis, and, St. Louis being a fraught place with housing policies, we think it’s important for the Wash. U. community to stand up and mobilize behind making sure that we’re not losing protections for the constituency of working people,” Ward said.

EHOC agrees with WUGWU’s assessment, citing the over 100 rental ads it recently found in St Louis which illegally discriminate against Section 8 recipients, a clear example of disparate impact practices.

Seigel hopes that members of the Washington University community will continue to be politically active around housing discrimination issues in a variety of ways.
“To stay involved, there was just legislation introduced at the St. Louis County Council to establish an Equal Housing Trust Fund, and by making a public comment and expressing support can help,” Seigel said.

Burleigh encourages students with an interest in fair housing issues to volunteer at EHOC.

“The first thing I would suggest is to come in and be a tester. When you do that, you are going to be trained and they will explain to you fair housing and it is one of the most direct ways you can help. We really do need volunteers to help us with testing and you don’t need a special degree,” Burleigh said.

Ward emphasized that University students should avoid the temptation to ignore issues which often do not directly affect them.

“[For students] who are in a position where their housing is secure, I think it can be easy to ignore the realities of what it can be like to be poor and the somebody in a group that has been discriminated against in STL, such as black families. We cannot totally grasp the severity to lose the protection of your ability to get fair housing” Ward said. “There are people who work on this campus [who] are people that can be affected by this rollback of protections and we should not be okay with that.”