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With the election of Donald Trump as President in 2016, housing advocates in California knew an attack on federal fair housing protections would be coming and they went on the offensive.

Sam Tepperman-Gelfant, a managing attorney at Public Advocates, suggested that the California legislature put a key provision of the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act – the duty to affirmatively further fair housing, or AFFH – into state law. AFFH is an unusual anti-racist law, requiring the government to take active steps to dismantle the racist structures of our housing system. After languishing for decades, this long standing legal requirement had been reinvigorated in 2015 with powerful new regulations adopted under the Obama administration.

As expected, it was soon clear that the Trump administration intended to gut AFFH.

Public Advocates partnered with the Western Center on Law & Poverty, National Housing Law Project and other groups on the campaign to support AFFH. The result was AB 686, a bill by Assemblymember Miguel Santiago to enshrine the AFFH requirement and the 2015 federal regulations in California law.

After nearly two years of determined advocacy, the bill reached Governor Jerry Brown’s desk. He signed it into law in September of 2018.

California’s new law is even stronger than the federal requirements that were under attack. It requires every city, county and state agency in California to take proactive measures to fix housing inequality on the basis of race, national origin, disability and other protected classes. This was a monumental win for communities of color and housing advocates, including Public Advocates, a win that strengthened community voices in public policy to achieve tangible benefits.

“We now have a law in California, AB 686, that requires us to acknowledge that the housing crisis is not just an economic crisis — it’s a civil rights crisis that falls particularly hard on people of color, immigrants and people with disabilities. AB 686 not only directs the state to come to terms with that, but to take proactive measures to remedy it,” said Sam Tepperman-Gelfant.

“The housing crisis not just an economic crisis — it’s a civil rights crisis that falls particularly hard on people of color, immigrants and people with disabilities.”

Sam Tepperman-Gelfant, Managing Attorney, Public Advocates

As part of the implementation of AB 686, all cities and counties must reach out and engage constituents on issues of inequity and discrimination in housing. Since the bill became law, Public Advocates has been using it to attack residential segregation, advance renters rights, and increase affordable housing. That’s the part about making rights real for people in California.

With our Bay Area housing justice partners, we leveraged affirmatively furthering fair housing requirements to get the region to plan for more than 50,000 homes for lower-income households in the region’s most racially and economically exclusive cities. Now we are supporting efforts to make sure every city in the region looks deeply and broadly at the needs of those who are suffering the most from our unjust housing systems – by listening directly to their voices – and taking bold action to address those needs. At the state level, we worked with legal partners around the state to win strong guidelines from the California Department of Housing & Community Development to guide the work of the agency in overseeing and enforcing the affirmatively furthering fair housing requirement in all corners of the state.

The passage and signing of AB 686 was an historic win for Californians. When the federal government tried to roll back protections and failed to address the entrenched patterns of residential segregation across the United States, California was able to step up – pointing the way for other states. This impact-legislation challenged the systemic causes of poverty and racial discrimination in housing at a crucial time in US history.

“The architects of the civil rights era recognized … that generations of new government policies would be needed to erase that racist past.”

Sam Tepperman-Gelfant, Managing Attorney, Public Advocates

Sam Tepperman-Gelfant said, “More than 50 years ago, the architects of the Fair Housing Act recognized that generations of government and private-sector policies had created racial segregation and inequality – and that equally powerful new policies would be needed to undo those harms. This new law is an urgent call to action for every level of government in California to make every community a place where people of all races and circumstances can thrive, securing a better future together.”