Louisville Metro Releases 20-Year Action Plan
for Fair Housing
February 13, 2014 – The Louisville Metro Human Relations Commission (LMHRC) will release a 20-year action plan for improving fair housing, Making Louisville Home For Us All: A 20-Year Action Plan for Fair Housing, at a press conference on Thursday, February 13th at 10:00 a.m. at The Kentucky Center for African Heritage, 1701 W Muhammad Ali Blvd, Louisville, KY 40203. Release of the report will coincide with the LMHRC’s annual Race & Relations Conference, to be held on February 13th and 14th, 2014.
Making Louisville Home for Us All details Louisville’s history of discrimination in housing and efforts over time to combat that discrimination. The report documents, utilizing many kinds of data, that residential segregation remains a major problem in metro Louisville and suggests forward-looking remedies. The report analyzes action steps developed from the 2010 report Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice in Louisville Metro, KY. Making Louisville Home for Us All contains goals to effectively measure and continuously improve fair housing choice in our community.
According to Catherine Fosl, University of Louisville social scientist and lead researcher of the report, “This 20-year action plan offers concrete steps for making fair and affordable housing a reality in metro Louisville. Unlike many action plans in major cities all across the USA, it is firmly grounded in our local history. That history includes persistent structural residential segregation and discrimination that are with us still, but it also includes concerted effort and creative initiatives by many Louisvillians working together in search of ending housing disparities and reducing poverty. That kind of long term commitment by government and business leaders and ordinary citizens is an important part of what lies ahead in rooting out the vestiges of discrimination and making Louisville home for us all.”
The report was researched and produced for the LMHRC by the University of Louisville’s Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research in consultation with the Metropolitan Housing Coalition (MHC), which coordinated the development of the action steps outlined in the report.
“Louisville’s current segregation is a legacy of past policies spanning decades”, said Cathy Hinko, Executive Director of the Metropolitan Housing Coalition. “Having action steps to further fair housing that takes us out twenty years is the right framework for the future for Louisville,” said Hinko. “There are immediate action steps to take, but there must be a long-term commitment.” Hinko identified two action steps she believes are real “game changers”: Making fair housing a mandatory lens for review of all actions by all parts of Metro government and the development and utilization of a market analysis to assess housing demand by area of the city, type of housing, price/rental points needed and connection to job centers.
The principal editor and author of the report is Catherine Fosl, PhD. Contributors include Cathy Hinko, Nicole Cissell, Amber Duke, Curtis Stauffer, Joshua Poe, Mariam Williams, and Dana Loustalot Duncan, with special assistance from Tracy E. K’Meyer, PhD.
The report was made possible through 2012-13 partnership funds to the LMHRC as a Fair Housing Assistance Program agency, part of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)/Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO).
The report is available as a free download at https://metropolitanhousing.org/wp-content/uploads/member_docs/FairHousingReport_2013_15.pdf.
