Suspension of civil rights?  Secretary Carson recently attempted to "suspend" an important fair housing advance in the Housing Choice Voucher program that would have raised voucher rents in low poverty neighborhoods in 23 metro areas.  We consider this to be not just an affront to the fair housing rights of thousands of low income families but also an abuse of federal administrative law standards.  See our August 15 press release here.  For broader context on how this kind of regulatory abuse is playing out across the administration, see this recent article in Slate from NYU's Institute for Policy Integrity.    

 

Protecting our civil rights infrastructure:  Another serious threat to our nation's civil rights infrastructure has continued to percolate below the radar in Congress - the "Regulatory Review Act."  Read this morning's article in the American Prospect explaining the myriad dangers of this new attack on the Administrative Procedure Act: "Stacking the Deck: The Regulatory Accountability Act's Threat to Civil Rights," by PRRAC's Director of Housing Policy, Megan Haberle. 

Register today for the October 19-20 conference of the National Coalition on School Diversity, A Struggle We Must Win: Advancing School Integration through Activism, Youth Voice, and Policy Reform.  $100 for general registration, $50 for students.  Sessions will be held at Columbia Teachers College, NYU, and at selected K-12 schools around New York City

Other resources and events

 

Connecting Housing and School Policy:   Our colleagues in Richmond have continued to work to connect housing and school integration policy, beginning with a series of meetings we were privileged to participate in back in 2015. Their new report was just published: Confronting School and Housing Segregation in the Richmond Region: can we learn and live together? (Univ. of Richmond, Virginia Commonwealth Univ., August 2017).

 

Source of Income Discrimination :  Thanks to the efforts of Antonia Fasanelli of the Homeless Persons Representation Project in Baltimore, and other members of the ABA Section on Civil Rights and Social Justice, the ABA House of Delegates has adopted a resolution and report urging "federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial governments to enact legislation prohibiting discrimination in housing on the basis of lawful source of income."

 

History and resistance in Milwaukee: On August 28, 1967, the Milwaukee NAACP Youth Council and a host of activists and community members marched for over 200 consecutive nights to demand an end to housing segregation. This year, the March On Milwaukee 50th anniversary commemoration is seeking to honor that history with "200 Nights of Freedom," a series of community-based events to highlight the continuing harms of segregation, poverty, and incarceration, and to celebrate a renewed spirit of activism.  

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PRRAC has moved!  please note our new address - 740 15th St. NW, Suite 300, Washington, DC 20005 (we are a little too close to the White House now, but we will get used to it, eventually).