Engagement in our Fair Housing Study
Engagement in our Fair Housing Study
We, as local governments and public housing authorities in the Baltimore region, are teaming up to improve life and increase opportunities for people in their homes and communities.
You are a key player in our work to make this happen!
Below you will find some background information about our 2025 Fair Housing Plan, including our upcoming September 25 meeting, and a quick survey. You can let us know through this survey if you would like to participate in one or more of our working groups or if you know of any organizations we should reach out to for input. Scroll down to the bottom of this page for information from our first two meetings.
Third Meeting: Baltimore-Area Fair Housing Study
This will be our third large stakeholder meeting for this study, and we hope you can join us to meet in person over lunch! Stay tuned for event registration. We will encourage you to arrive around 11:30, so you can sign-in and get your lunch, and we can start the meeting right at noon, ending by 1:30 pm. A virtual option will also be available for those who cannot attend in person.
We will be meeting at the Harriet Tubman Cultural Center in Columbia, formerly Harriet Tubman High School, a segregated school for Black Howard County residents. Harriet Tubman High School did not close until the County fully integrated its schools in 1965, eleven years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Now it is a County historical, cultural, and educational center, hosting camps and visits, and featuring hybrid meeting capability for gatherings like this one. It also has historical displays and rooms that document key aspects of Howard County's history that relate to our study. We encourage you to come early or stay afterwards and take a look around.
At this meeting we will hear again from our working groups on Enforcement in the Private Market, Housing Supply and Siting of Affordable Housing, and Fair Housing Barriers for Renters. We will also review the most relevant new data from our consultants at Root Policy Research, and we will begin to discuss possible action steps. We anticipate a draft document in late October or early November.
Stay tuned for registration options.
About the Fair Housing Act and Plan
Back in 1968, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act to address housing discrimination and historical unfair policies. This included redlining, segregation, and other 20th century discriminatory policies that kept people from investments and opportunities because of their race, religion, or nationality.
Because of this, every five years, we must:
Examine data to see if people in our region face unequal access to jobs, education, health, and communities with low poverty. We look to see if that inequality corresponds to characteristics protected by fair housing laws. This includes race, having a disability, what country you come from, your religion, your gender, and if you have children.
See if policies under our control or influence could still be contributing to these disparities, even if by mistake. If so, these policies can be considered "impediments to fair housing choice."
Create action steps to address any of those policies and impediments.
Put those action steps in our 2025-2030 plans for using federal housing funds, and then we take action. (Now we are implementing our 2020-2025 plans.)
Right now, we are in the early stages of creating our 2025 Fair Housing Plan.
An important part of creating this plan will be to talk to people about their homes, their communities, and any barriers they face. This is where you come in. How would you like to be involved? Who should we be talking with during this process?
Take our survey on the following tabs.
For more information, contact Dan Pontious, BMC Housing Policy Coordinator, at dpontious@baltometro.org or (410) 732-0500 x1055. Your input is valuable!
Second Meeting: Baltimore-Area Fair Housing Study
Thanks to the 59 people who joined this second virtual large stakeholder meeting for this study. We saw the latest data on fair-housing-related disparities in the region, heard updates from our topic-specific small groups, and talked about next steps. See the top of this web page for information on our third large meeting on September 25.
Click on the "Files" button below for the agenda and materials from this meeting.
Kickoff Meeting: Baltimore-Area Fair Housing Study
Thanks to the 68 people who joined us for the first meeting for the 2025 Baltimore-Area Fair Housing Study! We went over our proposed process for developing this study and shared initial data. We also introduced our main consultant, Root Policy Research, our other partners, Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership and Baltimore Neighborhood Indicators Alliance, and the co-chairs for our working groups. Our slides for this meeting are posted at the in the "Files" tab below, along with a draft resident survey and the results from a similar survey we conducted for our 2020 document.
Please fill out the survey above if you are interested in participating in a small working group and/or have suggestions of organizations we should talk with as we conduct this study.