What Is Fair Housing?

A federal fair-housing law prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, ethnicity, religion and other factors, like gender identity and disability. That applies to any number of scenarios, in which such discrimination has occurred: a homeowner refusing to negotiate a sale; a landlord failing to make repairs; a mortgage lender denying a loan.

President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act on April 11, 1968, days after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. The law, initially focused on racial discrimination, was the linchpin of the broader Civil Rights Act of 1968 and was later expanded to include other factors.

Yet complaints of discrimination remain about everything from prejudiced home appraisals to racial steering. In 2022, there were more than 33,000 fair housing complaints received by organizations across the country.

A three-year investigative project from Newsday, published in 2019, found that Black home buyers experience discrimination with nearly half of the real estate agents and brokers they employ; a multiyear investigation a decade earlier conducted by the National Fair Housing Alliance found that 87 percent of real estate agents participated in racial steering, opting to only show their clients homes in neighborhoods where most of the neighbors were of their same race.

“The way real estate agents engage in housing discrimination has gotten a lot more subtle but it is definitely still existent,” said Lisa Rice, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance. “A lot of real estate agents are very misguided and they’re not pro fair housing in their heart.”

Who is protected under the Fair Housing Act?

The fair-housing law placed a sweeping prohibition on all acts of discrimination related to the home buying and renting process, making prejudicial treatment based on race, religion or national origin a crime. Violators can be fined tens of thousands of dollars, or more. Gender was added as another protected category in 1974.