Fair-Housing Groups Fight Back Against Funding Cuts

Levittown today

A million dollars recently flew out the door of Long Island Housing Services, the only nonprofit fair-housing advocacy and enforcement organization serving Nassau and Suffolk counties.

The money – part of $30 million in Trump Administration funding cuts to 66 fair-housing groups nationwide – was slated to be used locally over the next three years for outreach, education, advocacy and, if necessary, litigation on behalf of homebuyers or renters who face unlawful discrimination.

But a Feb. 27 form letter delivered to the LIHS and other grantees explained that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development was terminating the contracts “at the direction of [the] Department of Government Efficiency,” because the program “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities.”

Thankfully, a federal court judge has temporarily stopped the cuts.

Ian Wilder, the attorney who runs the Bohemia-based nonprofit, said that while the LIHS has offered federally funded fair-housing services for more than 30 years – including four years during the first Trump Administration – his team expected policy changes with Trump returning to office, and was prepared to re-negotiate workplans. After all, Wilder notes, “elections have consequences.”

But HUD’s notice still hit hard.

“When I saw the letter come through at 10 p.m. on a Thursday night,” the attorney said, “I shook for a good five minutes.”

Wilder plans to use some of his organization’s cash reserves to avoid immediate service cuts and staff layoffs. And, like other nonprofit leaders, he’s keeping a close eye on what comes next from Washington.

Meanwhile, four fair-housing organizations – all members of the National Fair Housing Alliance – have filed a federal class-action lawsuit alleging that the Elon Musk-led DOGE lacks the authority to make such funding decisions, and that HUD acted “arbitrarily and capriciously” by failing to provide affected nonprofits with a reasoned explanation for its termination decision.

The suit seeks restoration of the grants, a prohibition on further cuts and restitution of attorney’s fees and other costs.

The 1960s civil rights era Fair Housing Act bans housing discrimination based on race or color, religion, national origin, sex, disability or family status. Despite the support of numerous state and local laws, however, it doesn’t seem to have eliminated the practice.

In 2023, there were more than 34,000 fair-housing complaints filed in the United States, a record high for the third year in a row. Most of those complaints – which originated with apartment tenants, prospective renters and homebuyers – were filed through private nonprofits like LIHS, with discrimination based on disability accounting for the majority (52.6 percent).

Blatant harassment cases nationwide spiked 66 percent between 2022 and 2023, according to the NFHA, with women, single parents, people of color, persons with disabilities, immigrants and those using housing-assistance programs among the most vulnerable to coercion, intimidation, threats or other interference with their housing opportunities.

As startling as those numbers are, advocates agree that reported complaints represent only a small portion of the millions of incidents of illegal housing discrimination occurring each year. Victims often keep silent, fearing retaliation or loss of housing.

Long Island’s own history of racial segregation dates back to post-World War II restrictive covenants, redlining and exclusionary zoning in Levittown, America’s legendary “first suburb.” Though advocates like Wilder say there’s been some progress in recent years, housing discrimination persists thanks to intractable economic disparities – bolstered by lenders, real estate agents and landlords who impose unequal financial terms and steer potential homebuyers into communities based on their perceived race or ethnicity.

A 2021 New York State Senate investigation into Long Island housing discrimination concluded that, before the passage of fair-housing laws, “discrimination was overt” and minority home-seekers were frequently met with slammed doors and racial epithets.

According to the report, “Today, the image of a slammed door has been replaced with a revolving door, where people are politely escorted in, then out, and ultimately away from desirable housing … in ways that can be imperceptible to individual homebuyers, often leaving even those directly affected by it unaware that discrimination has occurred.”

Last month, as it tore up grant checks to organizations working to open those doors, HUD also began tearing up regulations, including the Obama/Biden-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule, which requires federal funding recipients at the state and local levels to take specific actions that explicitly address, combat and remedy housing disparities resulting from past patterns of segregation.

The revised rule published for public comment on March 3 requires only a “general commitment that grantees will take active steps to promote fair housing.”

Touting the proposed changes on Fox Business News, HUD Secretary Scott Turner recently noted that “we have to save our suburbs” and called the previous rules “75 pages of bureaucratic red tape.”

“Really, it was just crippling people from having the suburban American dream,” Turner added. “We’re taking it down today so that we can restore our suburbs.”

I guess that says it all.

A version of this article first appeared on InnovateLI.