[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 165 (Wednesday, September 23, 2020)]
[Senate]
[Pages S5807-S5809]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                             Housing Report

  Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, the coronavirus has been the great revealer 
in our country. This crisis, of course, isn't happening in a vacuum. It 
is layered atop a system that already was not working for a whole lot 
of people and that had centuries of racism built into it.
  Few places is that more true than in our housing system. When it 
comes to housing, like so many problems in this country, we have a 
President who makes things worse, not better. For 4 years now, 
President Trump and his administration have systematically undermined 
fair housing.
  I would add, since the Senator from Utah is in the Presiding 
Officer's chair, that I would do a shout-out for his father and what he 
did as Secretary of HUD in the late sixties, early seventies in trying 
to move this country forward.
  That was obviously not in my prepared remarks. I didn't know that you 
would be presiding, but thank you.
  The Trump agenda--very different from the agenda in the Romney HUD 
administration--turned back the clock on civil rights protections that 
leave communities of color, people with disabilities, and LGBTQ people 
behind.
  This week I released a comprehensive report from the Banking, 
Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee, detailing the ways that President 
Trump has made inequality and segregation in housing worse and the work 
we have to do to undo the damage.
  More than 50 years after Congress passed the Fair Housing Act, access 
to housing remains not just unequal but separate and unequal.
  The contours of our country are too often still defined by Black, 
Latino, Asian or White neighborhoods, all with very different levels of 
access to resources--schools, grocery stores, healthcare, clean air and 
water, public safety.
  This is not an accident; it has been done by design. For decades, the 
Federal Government not only condoned housing segregation and 
discrimination--perhaps unbelievably, perhaps not--it actively promoted 
it.
  We all know about Black codes. We know about Jim Crow, even if too 
many want to deny we are still living with this Jim Crow legacy today. 
It wasn't just the most blatant racist laws; discrimination was woven 
into the creation of our modern housing system from the beginning.
  After the Great Depression, President Roosevelt created the 
government-sponsored Home Owners' Loan Corporation, the HOLC, and the 
Federal Housing Administration, the FHA.
  These could have been tools for expanding opportunity for everyone. 
They did that for White Americans, but for Black Americans they did the 
opposite. HOLC partnered with local real estate agents and appraisers 
to make what they called residential security maps. These maps used 
color coding to differentiate between supposedly high-

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risk and low-risk neighborhoods, with green signifying the best 
neighborhoods and red indicating a so-called hazardous area.
  Neighborhoods that were home to people of color--even a small 
percentage--were marked ``declining'' or ``hazardous.'' That is what we 
know as redlining.
  It was despicable racism, woven into the fabric of our housing 
system. We still live with the results. Capital, in the form of low-
cost, stable mortgages, flowed to White neighborhoods--like the 
neighborhood in which I grew up in Mansfield, OH--and dried up in Black 
neighborhoods or neighborhoods that were home to immigrants.
  White borrowers were able to build wealth through home ownership that 
could be passed down through families. Our government systematically 
denied Black families the same wealth-building opportunity.
  From 1934 through 1962, 98 percent--98 percent--of all FHA mortgages 
went to White homeowners--98 percent.
  It wasn't until Dr. King's assassination in 1968 that Congress 
finally passed the Fair Housing Act to outlaw discrimination and 
promote integrated communities. The Fair Housing Act was followed by 
the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act and Equal Credit Opportunity Act and 
the Community Reinvestment Act. These laws all provided powerful tools 
to root out discrimination and to invest in underserved communities.
  But for too long, those laws simply weren't implemented.
  Administrations of both parties ignored the Fair Housing Act's 
requirement that the Federal Government--this is a legal term--
affirmatively further fair housing. Minority communities, though, 
remained underinvested. It took decades for all courts to say that if a 
housing policy has a discriminatory effect, it is, in fact, 
discriminatory. That is pretty simple. If a housing policy has a 
discriminatory effect, it is, in fact, discriminatory.
  The government also didn't collect enough housing data to root out 
discriminatory housing that fed the subprime mortgage crisis. We know 
the 2008 crisis stripped away much of the housing wealth that families 
of color had fought for.
  Today, access to housing and all the opportunity and stability that 
comes with it remains unequal. The African-American home ownership rate 
is nearly 30 percentage points below the White home ownership rate--30 
percent below. Analysts have tried to explain the diversity with income 
and education as factors, but it never tells the whole story. With all 
else equal, similarly situated African Americans are markedly less 
likely to own a home than their White counterparts.
  Black and Latino renters are also more likely to pay a larger share 
of their income toward housing than White renters, making it even 
harder to get by, even harder to save to buy a home.
  We know--and many of us have repeated many times--that one-quarter of 
renters in this country pay at least half their income in rent and 
utilities, meaning if one thing happens in their life--their car breaks 
down, their child gets sick, or they have a minor workplace injury that 
keeps them out of work 4 or 5 days--everything in their lives can turn 
upside down. They can be evicted and all that happens with that. That 
is the legacy of redlining and racial exclusion at work.
  During the last administration, President Obama made significant 
strides in enforcing civil rights laws that have been on the book for 
decades. But instead of continuing that progress, President Trump has 
simply choked that progress. He has turned back the clock. He has 
undone the progress that so many of us fought for.
  Over the past 4 years, the Trump administration has done several 
affirmative--if you will--affirmative things to discriminate--not just 
that it didn't get around to enforcing, but it has done things that, by 
themselves, have caused damage to the progress we have made.
  He appointed an OCC Director who undermined the Community 
Reinvestment Act by making it less likely that banks will provide the 
loans, investments, and services that these communities need.
  The Trump administration cut back on housing data collection, 
allowing lending discrimination to go unchecked.
  The administration tried to make mortgages more expensive and harder 
to get, particularly for people of color.
  The administration denied opportunities for home ownership to 
hundreds of thousands of young adults.
  The Trump administration forced families to choose between access to 
affordable housing and food and healthcare and a path to citizenship.
  The administration gutted the so-called disparate impact standard 
that helps root out policies that have hidden discriminatory effects.
  The Trump administration dismantled the affirmatively furthering fair 
housing rule, essentially telling communities around the country: Don't 
even bother trying to create a better, more equal housing system, and 
we will not help you if you want to
  On and on and on it goes.
  I invite everyone to read our report and join us to take action. We 
have our work cut out for us to undo the damage President Trump has 
done and to get to work to actually erase the legacy of redlining and 
the legacy of Jim Crow and build a housing system that works for 
everyone.
  Housing is the foundation of so much in life, and when people start 
behind because they can't get access to clean, accessible, fair--fair 
and safe housing, they, in many cases, simply can't catch up.
  We have to restore the Fair Housing Act to its full strength. This 
means providing the tools to help communities create more inclusive 
housing markets, to end home lending discrimination, to strengthen fair 
housing oversight.
  We must break down barriers to home ownership and redesign our 
housing finance system so that it better serves Black and Brown 
communities.
  We have to protect the basic premise that LGBTQ people seeking 
shelter should be treated with the same dignity and respect as every 
other person. I think some of these are just so obvious, so important 
in a society like ours. I will say that one again--the basic premise 
that LGBTQ people seeking shelter should be treated with the same 
dignity and respect as every other American.
  We must provide long-overdue investments in housing and community 
development in communities of color. Black families and other 
communities of color have endured too many decades of our country's 
housing policies failing them.
  The same year we passed the Fair Housing Act, Dr. King gave a speech 
we call ``The Other America.'' In that speech, here is what he said:

       Our nation has constantly taken a positive step forward on 
     the question of racial justice and racial equality. But over 
     and over again at the same time, it made certain backward 
     steps.

  The Trump administration is that backward step. Fundamentally, we all 
pretty much want the same thing--a home that is safe in a community we 
care about, where we can get to work and our kids have a good school, 
with room for our family, whether that is three kids or an aging parent 
or simply a beloved pet.
  You should get to define what home looks like for you. You should be 
able to find it. You should be able to afford it. You should be able to 
do it without the crippling stress of ``Can I meet my rent payment or 
my mortgage every month?''
  For too many Black and Brown families, that has been out of reach--to 
find it, to afford it, to live in it without crippling stress.
  Congress cannot ignore these challenges. We can't keep allowing the 
Trump administration to gut the tools we have to make people's lives 
better.
  If we want to make the economy work better for everyone--including 
communities of color that have been systematically excluded from 
opportunity--we cannot shrink from these challenges. That is the 
purpose of the report we are issuing today. When work has dignity, 
everyone can find and afford a place to call home.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. TILLIS. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for 
the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.

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