Housing Report
Floor Speech
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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- 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.
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