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TRENTON -- Equal housing opportunity advocates, real estate agents, landlords, attorneys and others involved with the housing industry are expected to gather at the New Jersey Law Center in New Brunswick tomorrow for the Division on Civil Rights’ second annual Fair Housing Conference.
Co-sponsored by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the New Jersey State Bar Foundation, the conference will provide a day-long training seminar focused on the obligations of housing providers under state and federal law, as well as the legal rights of those seeking to rent or purchase housing.
This year’s conference will focus largely on housing and accessibility for persons with disabilities. Information will be provided concerning disability rights law, as well as the state of the law concerning housing accessibility requirements. Training will be conducted by staff from a special HUD initiative called “Accessibility FIRST,” which stands for Fair Housing Instruction, Resources, Support, Technical Guidance. The conference is scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. in the Law Center at One Constitution Square, New Brunswick.
The Division on Civil Rights will distribute at the conference a report on 2007 Fair Housing Enforcement and Outreach Initiatives. Data contained in the report shows that, for a third consecutive year, disability was the leading reason for housing discrimination complaints filed with the Division, followed respectively by race, lawful source of income, familial status and national origin.
According to data included in the DCR housing report, 41 percent of housing discrimination cases filed with Division in 2007 alleged disability-related discrimination, 37 percent alleged race-based discrimination and 22 percent alleged discrimination based on lawful source of income - typically the use of Section 8 federal housing assistance.
Discrimination related to the familial status of a buyer or renter accounted for 14 percent of discrimination cases brought to the DCR, while national origin accounted for about 12 percent. Overall, the Division’s Housing Investigations Unit received 186 new housing discrimination cases in 2007 - the highest number of constituent-generated housing complaints ever filed with the Division in a single year.
“Notably, 19 percent of all new discrimination investigations launched by the Division in 2007 involved housing,” said Division Director Frank Vespa-Papaleo. “We continue to see considerable growth in the number of housing cases we are handling, and that is attributable to two primary factors: amendment of the New Jersey Law Against Discrimination to include lawful source of income as a basis for discrimination, and re-establishment of our work-sharing agreement with HUD.”
The work sharing agreement with HUD allows for the “dual filing” of housing complaints under federal and state anti-discrimination statutes. Since the re-establishment of the agreement a few years ago, HUD has elected to defer and let the Division on Civil Rights take on a significant number of dual-filed case investigations. Not only has this trend resulted in more housing cases, Vespa-Papaleo noted, but it has also resulted under the agreement in an increase in federal aid to the Division for fair housing enforcement.
Held in conjunction with National Fair Housing Month, tomorrow’s conference is being co-sponsored by the New Jersey Commission on Civil Rights, the Department of Community Affairs and the New Jersey Association of County Disability Services.
The conference is expected to feature such accommodations for persons with disabilities as translation by certified American Sign Language interpreters, assistive listening devices and computer-assisted real-time captioning (CART).
View the 2007 Fair Housing Report (600k PDF)
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