Wyden Works to Understand Housing Discrimination

In a statement on July 30, Senator Ron Wyden announced that he was cosponsoring legislation alongside numerous other senators and private endorsement. The legislation in question, the Mapping Housing Discrimination Act (MHDA), would help further research on racially restrictive covenants, as well as create a publicly available database of historic housing discrimination patterns.

The MHDA’s stated goals are to:

• Create a competitive grant program for educational institutions to conduct primary data analysis of local historic property records from 1850-1988 for the purpose of identifying racial covenants and racially restrictive language
• Support efforts by local governments to digitize historic deeds and other property records at the local level
• Create a national, publicly available database at the Department of Housing and Urban Developmentof historic housing discrimination patterns in property records, including local datasets produced by grant recipients

This legislation comes following work done at the University of Minnesota on racially restrictive housing covenants that have “stopped many people who were not white from buying property and building wealth for most of the last century,” says the University’s site.

In his statement, Wyden said, “Many of the 21st century neighborhoods we know were fundamentally and cruelly shaped by racist red-lining and discriminatory covenants. The legacy of these policies is long, and the effects are still being felt by families of color today. Part of tackling systemic racism is addressing historic forms of housing discrimination that has negatively impacted Black, Indigenous, Hispanic, and Asian & Pacific Islander homeownership and precluded wealth-building among communities of color.”

Because the heart of the bill would rely on universities around Oregon and elsewhere to “analyze,  digitize, and map historic records relating to housing discrimination,” Wyden hopes to see some effort on the part of colleges nationwide. 

He said, “I hope universities in Oregon and all over the nation will be able to mobilize this funding to understand housing inequities of the past and present so that we can prevent them in the future.”

The end goal of this bill is to give a clear and publicly available resource so that everyone can learn the foundations upon which their communities were built, an effort made more important by the fact that many people are simply unaware that such policies remain. 

Lisa Rice, President and CEO of the National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), enforced this idea, saying, “Sadly, the remnants of these discriminatory policies remain, and many have no idea about the racist history in their own communities or how the legacy of discrimination continues to affect millions of people.” 

Rice and the NFHA are among fifteen other private groups including the National Community Reinvestment Coalition and the Economic Policy Institute to endorse the bill. Alongside Wyden in introducing the bill are senators from over a dozen states, including the bill’s presenter, Senator Tina Smith, D-Minn.

By Ethan Hauck