We’ve got great news! Thanks to all your hard work, the Louisiana Home Protection Act (SB 27) made it through the Senate.  We can’t thank you enough! Now comes the hard part: Senator Broome is moving this important foreclosure prevention bill through the House, and we need your help.

Please click to here to send an email to your Representative and prevent needless foreclosures.

If passed, the bill would improve homeownership protection by making information available about free housing counseling or legal services for homeowners facing sheriff’s sale.

Louisiana Home Protection Act headed for Senate floor!

The Louisiana Home Protection Act sailed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee Tuesday and is now headed for the Senate floor! Please take a moment right now to help prevent needless foreclosures.

If passed, the bill would improve homeownership protection by making information available about free housing counseling or legal services for homeowners facing sheriff’s sale.

Medicaid Expansion Clears House Committee

Safe, decent and affordable housing is important to health outcomes, just as access to better medicine and preventative care are.  Yesterday, Rep. Smith cleared her Medicaid Expansion bill out of the Committee on Health and Welfare.  Click here to read why Medicaid expansion is crucial to promoting housing opportunity.  Then take action to expand coverage for 422,000 Louisianians.

Access to health insurance is well known to reduce health care costs, but how would Medicaid expansion promote housing choice?  Safe, decent and affordable housing is important to health outcomes, just as access to better medicine and preventative care are.  Medical journals and studies have long documented the connection between housing choice and physical health, perhaps none better than a study entitled “Moving to Opportunity”, published in the New England Journal of Medicine.  The study quantified the correlation between housing choice and health at the neighborhood level by collecting data on over 4,000 families with follow up over a 10 and 15 year time period.  The study found that housing can serve as a platform to improve health outcomes. Read More…

“This is dumb.  Can we all agree that this is dumb?”,  asked Senator Lindsey Graham at a recent federal hearing on the sequestration.   Many of hear of sequestration, which is another word for across-the-board slashing of federal funds, but are unclear of  how it will impact Louisiana. Read More…

The last Congress let the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) expire, which means that women lost essential protections from abusers.  As an organization that works to uphold civil rights in housing for all people, we need your help in promoting protections for women and girls.

The U.S. Senate passed it’s version, please take this opportunity to ask House members to do their part, too.

The VAWA provides access to emergency, transitional and permanent housing for survivors of domestic violence.  The Senate bill also provides important legal protections for survivors of domestic or sexual violence, including protections for LGBT individuals, undocumented women, and Native survivors of gender-based violence.  In addition, the legislation includes help for law enforcement agencies to address the nearly 300,000 rape kits that are backlogged nationwide and waiting to be analyzed.

We wrote about this last year too, and we’ll hope you’ll join us once again in calling on Congress to do the right thing.

Click here to send a letter to your Representative in the House, urging them to take up the bill quickly.

One year ago, the Obama Administration published a draft of a regulation that institutionalizes an important legal doctrine for advocates to use in enforcing civil rights law.  The regulation legally defines “disparate impact”, which is used to confront policies that may seem neutral on their face, but actually have a discriminatory impact on a group of people.

While the President’s last term included many important advances, now is the time for the President to make good on civil rights promises made.  This is the moment that will define the future of our commitment to civil rights, and the President must stand with us to continue the work begun in the 1960’s to ensure fair and equal housing opportunity for all. Read More…

Many of them will be on their way out.  Others will sit tight.  What should this Congress do when they return in November?

1)  Protect renters living in properties facing foreclosure, before these protections sunset.

2)  Prevent devastating cuts triggered by sequestration. Read More…

The Independent Agency Regulatory Analysis Act (S. 3468) could change the way that independent federal agencies operate, and pave the way to challenge landmark regulatory reforms such as the Dodd-Frank Act.

Introduced in the Senate last month, the bill strips agencies of their independence by subjecting them to White House review, essentially politicizing them.  For example, when Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act to provide oversight of Wall Street, it established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) outside of the executive branch in order to insulate the agency from political pressure by making it independent. Read More…

Wall Street is pushing back against the government’s use of disparate impact theory to enforce discrimination claims.  Disparate impact theory says that something that seems neutral may, in fact, have an unintended negative consequence for a class of people.  In a recent letter, the American Bankers Association suggested to regulators that they scrap the “disparate impact approach” as a “particular concern among banks”.

The largest single group that may be impacted if disparate impact enforcement is gutted is people with disabilities.  Take action now to protect the Fair Housing Act.

The U.S. House is voting TODAY on its annual housing spending bill, and at the last moment two amendments were introduced that block rights for families facing discrimination, including people with disabilities. Please contact your Representative right now.

Call your Representative right now at:  (202) 224-3121 or click here to send an email to tell them you oppose the Garrett AND the Scalise amendments to H.R. 5972.

Points to mention when you call:

• These amendments fly in the face of the basic American values of free choice and fairness.
• The Fair Housing Act has a framework to root out both plainly intentional discriminatory acts and seemingly “neutral” policies that allow housing discrimination to continue nationwide.
• Rep. Garrett’s amendment attempts to eliminate this decades-old protection for American families by blocking the enforcement of HUD’s proposed regulation regarding the disparate impact theory under the Fair Housing Act.
• Rep. Scalise’s amendment supersedes local laws that can prohibit landlords from using criminal background checks to deny housing to potential applicants