Report Sample on Black Securing Housing Movement

Introduction

The black housing securing Movement was formed on the ground to ask for reparations of the Black descendants for structural racism, causing the current generation of black people to experience financial instability and always lag behind their White counterparts (Kaplan, & Valls, 2007). The members of this Movement will be entirely black, and the Movement shall run locally since it is a matter that engages the Black community in the United States. Besides, the Movement shall seek new policies that will help the future generation of Black descendants have equal opportunities in terms of housing affordability and ownership.

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Why the Movement Will Be Managed Locally

There is no doubt that access to housing remains unequal. Despite ongoing lawsuits being filled in all most all government in the United States against discrimination, members of disadvantaged communities, particularly among the people of color, have difficulty finding a high-quality house to live in high- opportunity regions. Besides, most Black communities live in inner cities with poor housing structure, infrastructure and social services due to the long- history of past Black community housing discrimination that favored the White and disadvantaged the Black, causing presenting housing affordability crisis amongst the minority groups in the American society.

The Objective of the Movement and the Rationale

The purpose of this paper is to present belief, demand, and an argument for reparations to descendants of African Americans whose ancestors were enslaved from large-scale racial discrimination, particularly over structural racism in the United States. After World War II, White-implemented government homeownership programs such as mortgage programs for veterans, segregation against blacks. These programs facilitated huge white families to be financially stable as they moved to the social ladder's first class. The generations of the white that benefitted from this program since they inherited this wealth. While on the other hand, this structural racism in the United States housing system has led to persistent racial disparities in financial and wealth well-being, certainly in terms of households. These discriminations persist in contemporary American society and have deeply entrenched that it could take over 200 years for the average Black family to amass the same wealth as its white counterparts.Believe of the Movement'

Prevailing Conditions of the Black People

African American families have a division of white families' wealth, leaving them more financially unstable and with far fewer economic mobility. The Black Live securing Movement argue that one of the factors has been attributed to this situation. For instance, Black households have less access to tax-advantaged forms of savings because of a long history of employment segregation practices. Moreover, the history of mortgage market inequalities implies that Blacks have fewer homeowners opportunities than whites. They have less access to savings and tax benefits due to owning a home; this problem of housing discrimination has a long history in American society.

Historical Genesis of Housing Segregation

Between 1992 and 2013, the number of renter households in the U.S committing under 30 percent of their income costs dropped from 54 percent to 43 percent. At the same time, there is a rise in the percentage of renter households paying almost half of their income to housing costs. The percentage has risen from 21 percent to 30 percent. African Americans make up the biggest composition of renting houses and usually commit almost half of their income to the house (Herbert, McCue, & Sanchez-Moyano, 2013).

According to Rothstein (2017), the severe forms of neighborhood-based racial division witnessed in several cities where Black resides began in the middle decades of the 20th century. Nancy Denton, Douglas Massey, and others document these incidences. During the 1920s, community and neighborhood committees used increasingly protective agreements and 'code of ethics to oblige property owners to uphold segregation by refusing to sell, rent black home-seekers. These strategies did not realize the projected outcome. Therefore, residents utilized violence and intimidation to eject black developers in white neighborhoods and discourage impending interlope (Rothstein, 2017).

Kennedy affirmed that the Roosevelt government generated the New Deal legislation to create a stable society by making the sustained homeownership dream come true. The Home Owners Loan Corporation (HOLC), the FHA, and the VA adopted this legislation. The HOLC that offered fully amortized mortgages was established in 1930. After it, the FHA worked differently from HOLC by insuring federal mortgage loans rather than making mortgage loans available. Since FHA offered a more reliable deal, those HOLC lenders were taking loans from the program. The Servicemembers' Readjustment Act of 1944 formulated the VA that assumed giving federally financed mortgage loans to World War II veterans. To the shock of African-American veterans, the VA denied them loans since the FHA used its biased system to decide whom to give loans, which disadvantaged many black people. Consequently, loans in high risk such as urban communities and discordant racial region would more probably not be insured. Therefore, to ensure that its loans were insured, the VA complacently followed the FHA's predisposition.

From the beginning, the FHA presented itself as the defender of the all-white American neighborhood by executing several discriminatory restrictive policies. One of the policies concentrated on particular assessment standards in the FHA underwriting hand out. The handout manifestly commanded that loans high-risk loans should not be given to Black people since making white neighborhoods unsuitable for insurance. Besides, the handout advised implementing racially restrictive agreements that transfer property to other races hence claimed "[I]f a neighborhood is to retain stability, properties must continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes." (Grebler, 1953). Therefore, although racially deterring agreements were created judicially unenforceable after Shelly v. Kramer

The Demands of the Movement

The ground for African-American World War II veterans' compensation is the damage to the wealth portfolios due to segregation from the Federal assistance program and property loss. The group is aware that the opponent may claim that compensation for such loss is hard to calculate. Nonetheless, hard proof is present to illustrate the upsurge value of a home that was financed and insured with federal assistance programs. For instance, White-Americans, who benefited from the EHA and VA assistance project, witnessed their homes' value upsurge radically, particularly in the 1970s, when the value tripled (Grebler, 1953). Therefore, those excluded from the housing market by FHA ethically restrictive agreements and who later pursuit becoming first-time homebuyers experienced an elevation in housing costs.

According to Engel (1999), the Black Securing Housing Movement will adopt a formula generated by Professor Kathleen Engel's "Calculating Lost Access to Community Method" or the "CLAC Method." This approach to calculating compensation value aims to estimate the value of living in a desirable community versus the value that a complainant of housing segregation has suffered by securing housing in a less luxurious community. Utilizing the sales price discrepancies between the two homes in varying communities, the author of the formula gives an example of her approach would work. She explained that an individual who sought to buy a home for $150,000 in an excellent zone versus his alternative, buying a home in a less suitable region for $100,000. The value of his lost access to the community that he originally sought to purchase a home based on the price differential would be $50,000. The complainant's "opportunity cost is the discounted present value of the interest that he could have earned on the $50,000 if he had invested it in an income-generating vehicle." (Engel, 1999).

Support for the Demand

The formation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 offer hopes for the reparations of the African American veterans, who by then could not seek a substantial legal remedy to fights housing discrimination. This law provides a legal ground for seeking compensation. Besides, the other legislation that backs up the Civil Rights Acts of 1964, including the Fair Housing Act of 1968 (Kaplan & Valls, 2007). The Fair Housing Act of 1968 forbids housing discrimination in the sale, lease or rental of housing based on color, race, sex, religion, national origin, ad familial status. The acts guarantee relief for housing discrimination in the following ways: damage, compensatory, injunctions, punitive damages, attorney's fees and civil penalties (Gotham, 2000). Under compensation, there are two forms of compensatory damages intangible and tangible. Examples of tangible contemplation entail lost wages for the time spent locating for a substitute housing, the cost of momentary housing and the duration spent arranging the case and attending the lawsuits. In the case of intangible loss, it entails compensation in terms of emotional and psychological distress because of house discrimination. For this kind of completion, a complaint needs to present a court with direct testimony or the fact identifier gathered, inferring mental and emotional distress from the proof that there is no medical proof.

Conclusion

The movements have proposed the use of Housing Choice Vouchers to solve the current problem of housing affordability among the Black community and prevent future black communities from being victims. The Housing Choice Vouchers have to be designed to help low-income families afford a high-quality, decent, and safe home. The plan can move anywhere; they can locate an affordable home.

References

Engel, K. C. (1999). Moving up the residential hierarchy: a new remedy for an old injury arising from housing discrimination. Wash. ULQ, 77, 1153.
https://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?handle=hein.journals/walq77&div=42&id=&page

Grebler, L. (1953). Importance of Federal Programs in Mortgage Finance. In The Role of Federal Credit Aids in Residential Construction (pp. 29-53). NBER.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/chapters/c9296/c9296.pdf

Gotham, K. F. (2000, March). Separate and unequal: The Housing Act of 1968 and the Section 235 program. In Sociological Forum (Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 13-37). Kluwer Academic Publishers-Plenum Publishers. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1007542019652

Herbert, C. E., McCue, D. T., & Sanchez-Moyano, R. (2013). Is homeownership still an effective means of building wealth for low-income and minority households? (Was it ever?). Homeownership Built to Last. https://www.jchs.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/hbtl-06.pdf

Kaplan, J., & Valls, A. (2007). Housing discrimination as a basis for Black reparations. Public Affairs Quarterly, 21(3), 255-273.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40441462?seq=1

Kennedy, D. M. (2009). What the New Deal Did. Political Science Quarterly, 124(2), 251-268. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655654?seq=1

Rothstein, R. (2017). The color of law: A forgotten history of how our government segregated America. Liveright Publishing.
https://www.amazon.com/Color-Law-Forgotten-Government-Segregated/dp/1631492853.