Housing discrimination, by the numbers
October 17, 2008 at 1:46 pm by Mara Shalhoup in NewsAt a National Commission on Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity hearing held this morning at Morehouse, officials shared some grim statistics on how Atlanta handles complaints about housing discrimination.
A panel including former U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros listened to testimony from several witnesses. The group, which conducted similar hearings in L.A., Chicago, Houston and Boston, will take the witnesses’ recommendations to Washington.
Karen Lawson, CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Education Fund, said that in 207, HUD’s Atlanta regional office received 436 complaints alleging violation of the federal Fair Housing Act — “by far the largest number in the country.”
Yet the office only took action in four of those complaints, Lawson said.
“As these numbers make clear, something is terribly wrong with enforcement at HUD,” she said. “The question for this commission is, ‘What can we do about it?’”
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