Fair Housing Meter debuts at 30 percent
An inaugural reading on the state of fair housing and equal opportunity in the United States
With the posting today of the first Fair Housing Meter video, the project makes its formal debut with an initial reading of 30 percent.
When I introduced Fair Housing Meter a year ago, I wrote that the meter had settled on a number and that the reading would be revealed soon. Life got in the way, but here we are now.
At the time, I had been contemplating something closer to 40 percent. It is a year later, and the context is different.
My current assessment of where fair housing and equal opportunity stand today takes into account enforcement, policy direction, institutional commitment, and broader social and political conditions that shape whether fair housing laws are meaningfully advanced or allowed to weaken. Reducing all of that to a single number is not an exact science. But my goal is to create a disciplined way of expressing and tracking a larger set of developments over time.
A reading of 30 percent is sobering, but it is not meant to discount the extraordinary progress represented by generations of struggle, legislation, litigation, and advocacy. The nation’s fair housing framework is a monumental achievement by any standard. But even when laws are on the books, rights are not self-executing.
The video posted today introduces the project in brief form and explains why the meter begins where it does. I think it is fitting that this effort begins in earnest as the United States approaches its 250th birthday. Anniversaries invite celebration as well as reflection and accounting. They raise questions about unfinished promises as much as fulfilled ones. So, it seems particularly appropriate to begin keeping a record of where one core measure of civil rights progress appears to stand.
A meter is meant to move, and future posts will track where it moves from here.
As I note in the video, I close with a quotation from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose assassination inspired the passage of the Fair Housing Act 58 years ago this month: “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
That balance is relevant here. A reading of 30 percent may be disappointing, but it does not surrender hope.