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Los Angeles County is in an affordable housing crisis. This crisis is particularly pronounced for low-income workers. With the government and private sector unable to solve the crisis on their own, many labor unions are looking for ways to get involved. Our client, UNITE HERE Local 11 (UH11) – a hospitality workers’ union – is looking into creative methods of addressing the housing crisis for its members, other hospitality workers, and the rest of the region’s working class. This report investigates two solutions: converting hotels and motels into housing and establishing housing cooperatives. This research employs a mixed-methods approach consisting of literature reviews, document analysis, quantitative data and spatial analyses, and expert interviews. On the hotel/motel conversion side, our findings suggest that there are opportunities to convert hotels/motels into housing, but further municipal action is needed to implement this model at scale. Our findings on the cooperative side suggest that financial, tax, and legal challenges may stymy the establishment of new cooperatives, but community land trusts present a feasible intermediate model. Our report concludes with several recommendations: regarding conversions, UH11 should pilot conversion projects and advocate for certain state and local reforms to further facilitate conversions; and regarding cooperatives, UH11 should partner with existing community land trusts to develop cooperative housing. With these strategies, UH11 can play a pivotal role in expanding affordable housing options for its members and other low-income workers in Los Angeles County and provide models for union-led initiatives to address housing insecurity in other high-cost metropolitan areas.

Producing less than 20,000 units on average annually in California, the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) cannot meet the outsized demand for subsidized housing alone . This report examines alternatives to the Low Income Housing Tax Credit in the State of California, with particular emphasis on the Los Angeles market. This report analyzes project feasibility in today’s conditions, as well as an analysis of the financial impact that certain international policies could have on affordable housing development at the project level. The analyses aim to illustrate possible project models as additional options beyond LIHTC, and demonstrate the value of including higher income projects within an affordable housing system on being able to leverage more debt, equity and other financial resources and thereby produce more affordable housing at all levels.

Objective: We investigate the contributions of state and local governments to the diffusion of American fair housing law and policy, focusing on the period from 1919 to 1968, prior to similar legal requirements and policies being approved at the federal level. Methods: Relying on archival data obtained at two presidential libraries, our findings provide insights into diffusion's political effects. Results: Myriad state and local laws, constituting breakthroughs that spread horizontally and/or bottom‐up, preceded similar requirements in the national Fair Housing Act of 1968 and implementation policies subsequently adopted by the federal bureaucracy. Conclusions: Progressive subnational governments can promote the rights of politically marginalized individuals and groups when the national government and other subnational jurisdictions do not. States and localities can use desegregation approaches not available at the federal level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how white supremacy diluted the nationwide struggle to eliminate racial residential segregation known as the Fair Housing Movement. As the sole civil rights organization dedicated to fair housing, the National Committee Against Discrimination in Housing (NCDH) fought valiantly to help African Americans buy homes in white neighborhoods and generated the political momentum necessary for the passage of fair housing laws from 1950 through 1987. However, it also disseminated a moderate vision of fair housing that depended on white Americans' comfort. This vision left the NCDH vulnerable to criticism from Progressive and Black Power fair housing activists who believe in fair housing on African Americans' terms or advocate for reinvestment in African American neighborhoods. Although these factions remain ignored and underfunded, they challenge the notion of a unified national Fair Housing Movement and offer an alternative, more equitable vision of this often-overlooked portion of the Civil Rights Movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines attitudes toward property, government, access to housing, integration, and community identity as expressed in the discourse surrounding the struggle over fair housing in Westchester, New York surrounding the 2009 court-ordered settlement. Building on the 'new suburban history', this article argues that opposition to fair housing drew on long-term conservative trends in the national political culture after 1968, but also reflected the specific dynamics of the early Obama years. Fair housing opponents contend that housing 'choices,' rooted in the values of 'hard work,' meritocracy, private property, and the free market, exemplify the patriotic tradition of American individualism. But, in doing so, they ignore decades of state-sponsored housing discrimination that contradicted free market principles. Drawing heavily on what one scholar has called 'race-based neighborhood stereotyping', these ideas constitute an important starting point for understanding the crippling resistance to fair housing initiatives, since this discourse has proven remarkably durable and politically galvanizing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) is the largest affordable housing production program in the United States. The program has been the subject of some criticism because it has done an unimpressive job of placing low-income renter households in high-opportunity neighborhoods, especially in suburban jurisdictions. This research examines, at the municipal level, what kinds of communities do not contain LIHTC properties. Communities with no LIHTC properties are compared with places that include LITHC housing in terms of geographic, demographic, socioeconomic, and housing-stock characteristics. The analysis focuses on all municipalities in the US and those that grew in population and multifamily housing from 2010 to 2019. It finds that 72% of all municipalities, and 52% of all growing municipalities contain no LIHTC housing. A logit analysis of the factors that influence the likelihood that LIHTC housing is absent from a municipality finds that the most important predictors are population size, being a suburb in a large metropolitan area, and the percentage of rental and multifamily housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An elusive goal of the Housing Choice Voucher program is to provide more—and better—locational choices for recipient households. Yet landlord discrimination can be a barrier, particularly in areas of greater opportunity. Using a difference-in-difference design with different comparison groups, we evaluate the effectiveness of source-of-income discrimination laws in 31 jurisdictions enacting such laws between 2007 and 2017 in improving locational outcomes for voucher households. We find evidence that such laws lead to more upwardly mobile moves (or greater improvement in neighborhoods) among existing voucher holders who move. Specifically, existing voucher holders who move post enactment experience greater reductions in neighborhood poverty rates and in voucher household shares. We also find that after SOI laws pass, voucher holders move to neighborhoods with larger white population shares than their original neighborhoods. Effects are modest, but they hold for households whose head is Black as well as for families with children, two groups who may face greater challenges in housing markets. We do not find any change in the characteristics of the neighborhoods where new voucher holders lease up after the passage of SOI laws, but this may be confounded by compositional change in the neighborhoods where successful voucher holders originate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data sharing between housing and education agencies will provide housing agencies with resources to assist them with efforts to decrease segregation and mitigate the adverse health outcomes experienced by people of color. The Fair Housing Act has the potential to fulfill its original integrationist purpose if housing and education agencies combine resources and data to create and implement fair housing plans. The Biden Administration's restored rule to affirmatively further fair housing pursuant to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which seeks to reduce segregation and increase housing equity. However, it omits most of the processes set forth by the Obama Administration whereby federal agencies provide the proper tools to housing agencies so that they are able to make data-based decisions about housing policies. This article advocates for the sharing of data between housing and education agencies to optimize the positive impact of fair housing not only within housing, but also on the education, employment, and health opportunities for communities of color. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After overseeing the adoption of two landmark civil rights proposals in 1964 and 1965, the Johnson administration and its allies in Congress sought to implement the third item of its broader agenda: a legal prohibition on racial discrimination in the sale and rental of housing. Enacting fair housing legislation, however, proved to be a vexing process. Advocates had to win support from northern White Democrats skeptical of the policy, as well as Republicans who were often (and increasingly) unreliable allies. Fair housing legislation failed in 1966 (89th Congress) but passed two years later, during the 90th Congress. We provide a legislative policy history detailing how, after three tumultuous years, Congress came to enact the fair housing provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. Overall, the battle to enact fair housing legislation presaged a dynamic that would take hold as the Great Society gave way to the Nixon years: once federal civil rights policies started to bear directly on the lives of White northerners, they became much harder to pass and implement. It also showcased the moment at which the Republican Party in Congress first moved to the right on civil rights and explicitly adopted a position of racial conservatism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the National Asian American Survey to explore issues of housing access and discrimination among Asians and Latino/as, and particularly how identity and heterogeneity within these two groups can lead to their underrepresentation in housing programs. Then, using Philadelphia as a case study, we draw on administrative data, interviews, and focus groups to show that both Asians and Latino/as are underrepresented due to a range of linguistic, cultural, and structural barriers. These findings highlight the complexity of affirmatively furthering fair housing for America’s increasingly diverse population.

This article traces D.C. White business leaders' advocacy of (low-income) Black suburban relocation and White upper-class resettlement in D.C.'s central neighborhoods in the 1960s and 1970s. By examining the organizational papers and memos of meetings and policy documents from the Federal City Council, a D.C. nonprofit advocacy organization for the city's leading business and real estate leaders, I document how predominantly White business leaders appropriated fair housing and regional fair share political stances to articulate revanchist desires. These leaders' revanchist rhetoric depicted the Black poor—especially the single Black mother with children—as the primary figure of neighborhood blight and domestic deviance. In the wake of these revanchist politics, low-income Black mothers remained principal victims of pro-mobility policies and gentrification agendas that forced them to continually move to support demolition or redevelopment. This article affirms low-income Black mother activists' political support for placemaking and low-cost, family-friendly, and well-maintained communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2015, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) issued the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Rule, arguably the most significant federal effort in a generation to address place-based disparities in access to opportunity and to advance fair housing. In 2018, HUD suspended the rule, it said in part because of the resources it was expending to implement it and in part because of the large share of municipal plans that HUD determined had failed to meet the rule's requirements. In this article, we present the first analysis of the fair housing plans that HUD did not accept, examining how municipalities failed to meet the rule's requirements, what those failures imply about advancing fair housing, and the extent to which HUD's enforcement strategy was working before the suspension. Our analysis shows that HUD engaged in detailed reviews of municipalities' Assessments of Fair Housing and provided constructive feedback. The most common issue with which municipalities struggled was setting realistic goals that would actually advance fair housing and creating measurable metrics and milestones to gauge progress. Several municipalities neglected to conduct thorough regional analyses or analyses of all relevant disparities in access to opportunity. Both shortcomings reflect broader challenges municipalities face in advancing fair housing, particularly in identifying strategies that address interconnected causes of disparities in access to opportunity and in building regional support to address those causes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A lawsuit that argued that the method used to calculate rent limits in the Housing Choice Voucher Program promoted racial segregation in Dallas, Texas, resulted in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development developing zip code-based voucher rent limits in Dallas in 2011. This rent calculation approach was then expanded to five other demonstration sites in 2012. This article analyzes whether adjusting voucher rent limits reduces a minority household's likelihood of living in a high-minority neighborhood, improves their likelihood of living in a higher opportunity neighborhood, and reduces the disparity in location outcomes between minority and White households in the voucher program. This article finds evidence of improvements in the location outcomes of Black and Hispanic voucher households because of the use of zip code-based rent limits, but that these results are only marginal with respect to the persistent disparities in outcomes based on race within the voucher program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is no exact European equivalent to the U.S. Fair Housing Act. The member states of the European Union (EU) have transposed into law the EU Racial Equality Directive of 2000 that prohibits discrimination in, among other things, access to the supply of goods and services, including housing, on the basis of race. Most housing discrimination case law so far comes from nonbinding decisions of the European Court of Human Rights and European Committee of Social Rights under the revised European Social Charter of the Council of Europe. This article explains how the European context of discrimination and segregation differs from the American, reviews the major legal conventions establishing equal rights in housing, protected classes, and key precedents. It discusses how mixing policies in social housing are the primary mechanism to reduce residential segregation in Europe. The special case of extreme discrimination against the Roma is presented, before concluding with some comparative observations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As is true for most legislation, the Fair Housing Act (FHA) was a product of its time; the legislation's content, and even passage, was formed by dominant issues in housing markets and the country at that time. The context shaped the goals of the FHA and the strategies and tools employed under its auspices. Fifty years after the passage of the FHA, much of that context has changed. This commentary argues that changes in the context not only raise new fair housing challenges and create new gaps in our knowledge, but also may necessitate a fresh look at fair housing strategies and tools if they are to be effective at achieving the goals of the act. This commentary begins with a brief background on the FHA itself, the social context at the time of its writing, and its main goals. Next it lays out a few key changes in housing markets relevant for fair housing, highlighting challenges they may create and where research could be of greatest value. It then considers challenges arising from threats to two specific U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) fair housing rules seen by many as critical fair housing tools. The commentary ends with two examples of a "refresh," where current context has shaped, or reshaped, a strategy to address today's fair housing challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Department of Housing and Urban Development's 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule requires municipalities to formulate new plans to address obstacles to fair housing and disparities in access to opportunity. Although the rule provides a more rigorous structure for plan compliance than previously, as a form of metaregulation, it still gives substantial flexibility to localities. Are municipalities creating more robust fair housing plans under the new rule, and what types of municipalities are creating more rigorous goals? Analyzing the plans filed thus far, we find that municipalities propose significantly more robust goals under the new rule than they did previously. Local capacity is positively correlated with goals containing measurable objectives or new policies. Measures of local motivation are positively associated with goals that enhance household mobility or propose place-based investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Essay surveys contemporary issues in American land use regulation. Its central claim is that, despite good intentions, regulations often have either been ineffective or exacerbated existing problems. The problems underlying regulation include contested understandings of private property rights, continual economic and social change, and a political process prone to ad hoc deal making. Together, they result in regulation that is conceptually incoherent and continually provisional. The Essay briefly reviews how land use philosophy has changed from early nuisance prevention, through Progressive Era comprehensive planning, to modern views of regulation as transactional. It examines our regulatory takings framework for delineating between private property rights and legitimate government regulation. The Essay reviews such contentious issues as affordable housing. Finally, it asserts that, in the absence of a generally agreed upon understanding of land use goals, comprehensive grand bargains among factions and public-private partnerships would facilitate entrenchment and favoritism. The ensuing uncertainty and lack of housing opportunities in cities where workers would be most productive harms individual advancement and the national economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares federal, state, and local civil rights agencies' effectiveness in enforcing the Fair Housing Act. Two factors primarily define effective enforcement: whether agencies' conciliation efforts are more likely to lead to agreements between the parties involved in complaints and whether agencies are more likely to provide remedies to complainants in cases in which there is cause to believe discrimination occurred. The analysis shows that state and local agencies are generally more effective than the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) both at conciliating complaints and at providing remedies. HUD does appear to be more effective than state and local agencies in terms of the dollar amount of monetary relief awarded when successful conciliations occur, but HUD's remedial effectiveness disappears after controlling for the likelihood of successful conciliations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to create low-income housing opportunities and mitigate exclusionary zoning, in 1968 Congress mandated that municipalities receiving comprehensive planning funds must create a housing element. In tandem, many states mandated that municipal housing elements must accommodate low-income housing needs. After examining empirical research for California, Florida, Illinois, and Minnesota, this review found aspirational success because those states rewarded the municipal planning process. In order to increase low-income housing, this review argues for state housing policy reform. Under US Department of Housing and Urban Development’s revised fair housing rule, which requires an assessment of local data, states can no longer ignore the exclusionary behavior of municipalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to explore social service workers’ awareness, knowledge, and attitudes about fair housing in Utah. Using a fair housing awareness scale, a fair housing knowledge scale, a fair housing attitude scale, and fair housing vignettes, 195 social service workers were surveyed in Utah. Descriptive results demonstrated that although social service workers knew about fair housing laws, they did not know whom to contact for fair housing violations. In addition, while they had a basic knowledge of the Fair Housing Act provisions, they were unsure of the specifics of the Act (e.g., who was protected and how that protection worked). ANOVA results indicated that nonprofit social service workers had higher pro–fair housing opinions than social service workers in government agencies as did social service workers who work directly with clients. These results indicate that further trainings to educate social service workers about fair housing are needed. Drawing on the findings, future research should focus more on the client's perspective of the effectiveness of services received. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]