As Trump strips away Fair Housing Act, Kansas City shows how to fight back | Opinion

The promise of fair and equal housing in Kansas City and across America is eroding in real time. The federal Fair Housing Act, signed by President Lyndon Johnson 58 years ago, still prohibits discrimination and segregation in all its virulent forms. But today, the second Trump administration is steadily stripping away the enforcement tools and protections that give that law real force, leaving the people it was meant to protect increasingly vulnerable.

The historical irony is striking. In January 1968, just months before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Kansas City, a city whose deep, entrenched segregation had become a national example of why fair housing laws were urgently needed. Local civil rights activists had just succeeded in passing a pioneering fair housing ordinance, and King met with leaders such as Chester Owens and the trailblazing journalist Helen T. Gray. The next day, speaking at Kansas State University, King warned that America faced a “dangerous development”: the growth of “predominantly Negro central cities, ringed by white suburbs.” If that pattern continued, he said, it would “invite social disaster,” and the only solution was “strong fair housing bills.”

Three months later, King’s assassination broke the political stalemate and propelled the Fair Housing Act into law. In the decades that followed, his conviction that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” seemed to bear out. The act, reinforced by state and local laws, expanded to protect more people and address more forms of discrimination, while more violations were investigated and charged by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Justice. While it has never fully fulfilled its promise, fair housing law and enforcement was, for a time, moving steadily in the right direction.

Staff cuts, fewer cases against landlords

Fifty-eight years later, that progress is being reversed. The hollowing out of federal enforcement began in the early weeks of this administration. Abrupt and unprecedented staff cuts, funding reductions and shifting priorities at HUD and DOJ mean fewer investigations and fewer systemic cases against landlords, lenders and other entities engaged in housing. Notably, one of DOJ’s first major Fair Housing Act lawsuits, filed in 1973, was against Donald Trump and his father, alleging a sweeping, racially discriminatory scheme in their New York apartment empire. Today, the federal government’s role has shifted from vigorous enforcement to retreat and even sabotage.

HUD, following one of Trump’s early executive orders, has proposed eliminating its longstanding “disparate impact” rule — one of the most important tools for proving discrimination when policies appear neutral but disproportionately harm protected groups. Proposals affecting mixed immigration status households also threaten to push vulnerable families out of federally assisted housing.

At the same time, from the outset, the federal government targeted certain protected groups — especially immigrants — fueling a new climate of hostility. Federal policies and rhetoric aimed at immigrants and transgender individuals can embolden housing providers who wish to exclude or harass tenants, while discouraging those tenants from asserting their rights.

Rise of algorithmic renting decisions

Another emerging threat is the rapid expansion of algorithmic decision-making in housing. Landlords, especially large corporate owners, increasingly rely on automated screening systems and predictive scoring tools to decide who can rent. These systems often draw on historical data shaped by decades of discrimination. Without strong oversight and transparency, they risk quietly reproducing those same patterns — now hidden inside proprietary algorithms that are already difficult to challenge, even as the Trump administration removes guardrails and limits liability for their use.

Federal retrenchment is only part of the story. Missouri has compounded these challenges. The state has weakened its own civil rights enforcement, preempted Kansas City’s protections for Housing Choice voucher holders, and pursued policies that restrict access to public benefits and accommodations for immigrant communities and for transgender people. Together, these actions send a troubling signal about who is — and is not — protected.

Meanwhile, poverty and the affordable housing crisis continue to erode the promise of fair housing from another direction. As sociologist Matthew Desmond has shown in “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” housing instability does not simply reflect poverty — it produces it. Families forced from their homes are pushed into worse conditions, destabilizing communities and making upward mobility far more difficult — especially for Black and Latino households and tenants with disabilities, who bear a disproportionate and statistically significant share of these displacements. In this cyclical way, the promise of both fair housing and stable housing is broken every day.

‘Rent Is Too Damn High’

My wife and I attended a Kansas City event last month called “The Rent Is Too Damn High,” featuring the illustrious panel of Desmond, “There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America” author Brian Goldstone, and KC Tenants co-founder Tara Raghuveer. But what stayed with me most were the tenants who spoke before them. They described a pattern that has become all too common: A building with serious repair needs is neglected by a corporate landlord that continues to raise rents, leading to displacement. That displacement leads to housing that is worse, less stable, and harder to afford. And the next move is worse still, often pushing families out of their communities altogether. By the time a family has paid for those moves, lost their children’s home school and weathered losses of income, they are on the brink of poverty.

Kansas City proves Desmond right: Housing instability here is not just a symptom of the crisis — it is a driver of it. And as corporate landlords take control of more rental housing, they are contributing further to that instability.

To meet the promise of fair housing — that where we live is not determined by who we are — we need not retreat and sabotage but even stronger enforcement and better tools. That means:

• More robust oversight of large corporations.
• More investigations and testing by HUD and DOJ.
• A strong disparate impact tool to address systemic discrimination, including in artificial intelligence-driven tenant screening and mortgage products.
• Application of AI-enhanced tools to discern fair housing violations.
• Abundant funding of local and state housing rights organizations.
• And at the local, state and regional levels, we must have a greater supply of safe, affordable housing.

A tall order — but Kansas City’s history also offers reason for hope. When Dr. King came here in 1968, the city reflected both the worst of segregation and the best of civic action. Local activists and leaders helped pass a pioneering fair housing ordinance even as the city struggled with deep inequality.

That dual legacy endures.

Gains from Heartland Center, KC Tenants

Today, for every corporate landlord that neglects conditions while raising rents, there are organized tenant groups such as those at Stonegate Meadows, who organized with the help of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom and successfully filed a class action lawsuit to improve conditions. There is the nationally recognized KC Tenants union, which has helped tenants make gains at properties across the city. For every gap in enforcement, there are local organizations such as the Heartland Center and Legal Services of Western Missouri, along with national groups like the National Fair Housing Alliance, working to hold the line.

For example, local advocates worked with the often proactive city to pass a Right to Counsel ordinance that provides tenants facing eviction with legal representation. For every effort to weaken protections, there are lawyers, organizers and community leaders pushing back.

Kansas City has always reflected an American paradox — deep inequities alongside determined efforts to overcome them. That paradox has never defined the city as much as the people who challenge it. Time and again, we have shown that we can bend the arc of the moral universe back toward justice — and we can do so again.

Gary Rhoades is a nationally recognized civil rights attorney who is the incoming executive director of the Heartland Center for Jobs and Freedom in Kansas City, Missouri as well as a member of the City of Kansas City’s Housing Trust Fund Board. The opinions stated here are his own.