Cohousing-L Mailing List: Re: Outcomes and Fair Housing Laws and RANT warning...

[Elizabeth Magill (pastorliz]

A quick look at the history of discrimination in housing shows that  
one popular strategy was to describe the neighborhood, thus providing  
an easy way for people to determine who was welcome.

So, "white neighborhood" and "jewish neighborhood" were common in  
advertising.

Later people became more circumspect and ads showed only pictures, or  
described only facilities, of interest to the people they were trying  
to reach.

I worked with the ads for a builder just a short time ago who refused  
to place ads in the paper when asked to include pictures of people of  
color in their rotation with pictures of people who are white.

MANY developments (of all sorts) use language about their older  
neighborhoods to discourage families with children from joining... or  
to discourage "too many" families with children.

So I am quite pleased that we are beginning to work toward having  
cohousing ads demonstrate that we are serious about overcoming the  
past discrimination in housing developments. Its a value most of us  
state in our vision, and its good to show it visibly in our  
advertising as well.


-Liz
(The Rev.) Elizabeth M. Magill
PastorLiz [at] verizon.net
Worcester Fellowship
PO Box 3510 Worcester MA 01613
www.worcesterfellowship.org
508-450-0431



On Aug 12, 2009, at 6:15 PM, Greg Nelson wrote:

> Diane writes:
>
> > Did you get this message from the FIC? I'm not sure it went out over
> > Cohousing-L.
>
> [...]
>
> > We are writing to notify you of changes to the Communities Directory
> > and possibly to your community's listing as a result of the FIC's
> > efforts to comply with Fair Housing Laws.
> > [...]
> > In addition to modifying survey questions we are required to remove
> > potentially illegal content from community descriptions
>
> Now is it just me, or does anyone else feel that this just plain  
> STINKS?
>
> I am HUGELY in favor of the concept of Fair Housing.  We are actively
> working to try to make units in our community that are affordable to
> lower income families, because we want to encourage diversity and
> because we think that good quality, energy-efficient, low-VOC housing
> should be available to everyone.
>
> But I don't understand why is it okay for someone to be able to
> research the demographics of a *city* they might want to move to (you
> can find out all kinds of things from the Census and other sites) and
> yet ILLEGAL for them to receive that information about a *cohousing
> community*?  It seems to me that a community *providing* information
> about itself is vastly different than a community *requesting*
> information about prospective residents.
>
> Surely people want to know, before wasting their time visiting and
> attending meetings, if the community is all older or younger than they
> are, or has only singles or no singles or... exactly the kind of
> information we're being told can no longer be made available.  It's
> not like the information isn't there if someone wants to find it.
>
> I personally think that someone ought to take the gag-order aspects of
> the Fair Housing Laws to court as violating freedom of speech.
>
> Greg Nelson                     email:  ghn [at] pgt.com
> White Hawk Ecovillage           phone:  607-273-2576
> Ithaca, NY 14850                web:    www.whitehawk.org
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