HUD Publishes Proposed Fair Housing Disparate Impact Regs.

Tomorrow HUD will publish in Federal Register a proposed rule to implement the Fair Housing Act’s Discriminatory Effects Standard; the public will have 60 days to comment on the proposed rule. The rule will be available for comment on the www.regulations.gov website

The advance copy of the rule available on Tuesday is HERE (this link may not work after Tuesday; look in tomorrow's Federal Register for the final version of the proposed rule).

From the proposed rule:

The purpose of this proposed rule...is to establish uniform standards for determining when a housing practice with a discriminatory effect violates the Fair Housing Act....This proposed rule establishes a uniform standard of liability for facially neutral housing practices that have a discriminatory effect. Under this rule, liability is determined by a burdenshifting approach. The plaintiff or complainant first must bear the burden of proving its prima facie case of either disparate impact or perpetuation of segregation, after which the burden shifts to the defendant or respondent to prove that the challenged practice has a necessary and manifest relationship to one or more of the defendant’s or respondent’s legitimate, nondiscriminatory interests. If the defendant or respondent satisfies its burden, the plaintiff or complainant may still establish liability by demonstrating that these legitimate nondiscriminatory interests could be served by a policy or decision that produces a less discriminatory effect.

My June 2011 post with some related background can be found HERE. My post from last week HERE has materials from a disparate impact fair housing case recently accepted by the Supreme Court.

Originally created and posted on the Oregon Housing Blog.