Minutes 04-06-2021 Virtual Business Meeting

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12 BACKGROUND: The month of April is National Fair Housing Month. April 2021 will mark the 53rd anniversary of the enactment of the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 and the 27th anniversary Fair Housing portion of the Orange County Civil Rights Ordinance. These laws grant every person a right to live where they choose, free from discrimination on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, religion, familial status, or disability. The Orange County Civil Rights Ordinance, established in 1987, adds additional protection from discrimination based on age and veterans status. The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development has chosen "Fair Housing: More Than Just Words" as the 2021 Fair Housing Month theme. The chosen theme addresses the idea that ending discrimination in housing is more than providing equal housing opportunities for all. Housing can also be a tool to erase economic and education inequalities and help dismantle systemic racism. In the 1930s, the federal Government Federal Housing Administration ("FHA") was part of the New Deal, whose job was to guarantee Americans' loans so they could buy a home in subdivisions and suburbs across the United States. FHA made homeownership possible for millions of average Americans by ensuring long-term, low monthly paying mortgages. However, the FHA required deed restrictions that prevented Blacks from purchasing these homes. This housing boom was bolstered by the Serviceman's Readjustment Act of 1944 ("G.I. Bill") that provided $95 billion into expanding a range of benefits for returning World War II Veterans. Benefits included helping 16 million veterans receive low-cost mortgages, low- interest loans to start a business or a farm, getting one year of unemployment compensation, and receiving education expenses to attend high school, college, or vocational school. Veterans Administration Mortgages guaranteed mortgages for nearly five million new homes for veterans. Between 1946 and 1947, VA mortgages alone accounted for 40% of the homes purchased during that year. Residential ownership became the critical foundation to economic empowerment in the United States. The G.I. Bill was championed as improving returning veterans' economic prospects, promising each soldier the status of the "unforgotten man." Ira Katznelson in, When Affirmative Action Was White: The Untold Story of Racial Inequality in the Twentieth-Century America , contends that the New Deal and Harry Truman's Fair Deal Programs discriminated and contributed to the widening gap between Black and White Americans. Katznelson says the G.I. Bill "was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow." He argues that President Franklin Roosevelt, to gain legislative support for the G.l Bill, made compromises with Southern legislators that allowed the G.I. Bill to be drafted in a discriminatory manner. As a result, the G.I Bill, while race-neutral, disproportionately impact black veterans because the legislation as written allowed the program to be in the hands of state and local officials who could interpret guidelines in a racially discriminatory manner, thus excluding Black veterans from receiving benefits. A study conducted by the Research Division of Veterans Administration in 1950 demonstrated that between September 1940 and August 1945, returning Black veterans participated almost at the same levels as their white counterparts in G.I Bill programs. However, they did not benefit in the same way. White local officials, businessmen, bankers, and college administrators were in charge of local programs that disenfranchised programs Black veterans. Depending on locality, Blacks veterans were denied housing and business loans, admission to white-only colleges and universities, unemployment benefits, and excluded from job training programs and career opportunities. It didn't take long after the G.l Bill's passage for reports of the obstacles