Fair Housing
PRF Law’s Fair Housing Practice represents people who have been unfairly denied housing opportunities, as well as non-profit fair housing organizations that investigate and combat housing discrimination.
The Fair Housing Act (FHA) prohibits discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex (including sexual orientation), familial status (a person who has a child under 18 years old), national origin, and disability with respect to the sale or rental of housing, as well as discrimination in housing services and the advertising of housing. The FHA also prohibits discrimination in home loans and other housing-related lending. Some state and local laws provide greater protections than the Fair Housing Act, including by prohibiting housing discrimination based on discrimination based on age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, military service or status, personal appearance, family responsibilities, political affiliation, or place of residence.
The Fair Housing Rights We Enforce:
PRF Law enforces fair housing violations, including by representing the victims of housing discrimination and fair housing groups that serve as private attorneys general in enforcing the law. The types of violations we enforce include:
Refusing to sell or rent a home because of a person’s protected status.
Refusing to sell or rent an apartment because of a person’s protected status.
Steering people away from certain communities, homes, or rentals, or telling them that housing is not available because of a person’s protected status.
Discriminating in the services provided to a tenant or homeowner based on a person’s protected status, including by failing to maintain or market foreclosed homes on an equal basis in certain communities.
Publishing advertisements or making statements about housing that are discriminatory, including by discouraging people of particular backgrounds to apply for housing or by steering advertisements away from people based on their protected status.
Discrimination in home mortgages based on a person’s protected status, including refusing to provide a loan or offering a higher interest rate or a smaller amount of credit.
Retaliation for making complaints about housing discrimination.
Making an Impact
Peter Romer-Friedman has litigated groundbreaking fair housing cases and has obtained some of the largest recoveries under the Fair Housing Act.
In Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center v. U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, No. 08 Civ. 01938 (D.D.C.), Peter and a legal team that included the NAACP Legal Defense & Education Fund filed a lawsuit on behalf of the National Fair Housing Alliance, a local fair housing group, and a class of Black homeowners challenging racial discrimination by Louisiana and the Department of Housing & Urban Development (HUD) in the largest housing rebuilding program in the nation’s history. After Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana and HUD provided rebuilding grants to homeowners that were tied to the market value of their homes prior to the storm, a formula that had a severe disparate impact on Black families. In some cases, Black families were given less than $2,000 to rebuild their homes, while white families who owned homes that were nearly identical and were similarly damaged received rebuilding grants of $150,000. Peter and his co-counsel obtained a preliminary injunction that prevented Louisiana from spending the remaining federal funds so that the funds could eliminate racial disparities in the program. In response to the lawsuit, HUD and Louisiana made changes to the rebuilding program that provided $469 million of relief to homeowners and later agreed to a $62 million settlement that mostly benefitted Black homeowners.
In National Fair Housing Alliance v. Wells Fargo & Co., No. 09-12-0708-8 (HUD), Peter was lead counsel in a first-of-its-kind Fair Housing Act case in which 13 fair housing groups challenged Wells Fargo’s failure to properly maintain and market foreclosed properties in predominantly black and Latino communities nationally. Peter, along with his co-counsel from the National Fair Housing Alliance, helped to develop novel legal theories about how the Fair Housing Act prohibits banks from discriminating based on race when maintaining and marketing foreclosed properties, and they negotiated a $42 million settlement in which Wells Fargo agreed to improve how it maintained and marketed foreclosed properties nationwide.
In Equal Rights Center v. Equity Residential, No. 06 Civ. 01060 CCB (D. Md.), Peter and his co-counsel at the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs represented a fair housing organization in massive accessibility fair housing lawsuit involving hundreds of properties, defeating the defendant’s summary judgment on the issue of whether the fair housing group had standing and winning summary judgment for the Equal Rights Center on the merits. These victories led to a landmark settlement in 2016 in which Equity Residential agreed to survey and remediate conditions at 85 of its properties.
In Mobley v. Facebook, Inc., No. 16 Civ. 06440 (N.D. Cal.), Peter was lead counsel in a first-of-its-kind challenge to Facebook’s practice of denying housing advertisements to Facebook users based on their race, sex, and other protected statuses. Peter was the chief negotiator in obtaining a settlement in which Facebook agreed to far-reaching changes to its advertising platform to prevent housing discrimination, including creating a special mandatory portal for the creation of housing ads without discriminatory filtering options.
Relevant Cases
