Fair Housing is a Civil Right, So Why is Rent Still So Damn High?
By Dyan Ruiz, Co-Founder of People Power Media
April 3, 2025
Most people don't know that they have a Civil Right in America to Fair Housing, a right that was passed at the federal level 57 years ago. Actually, April is Fair Housing Month!
The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was a landmark civil rights law that outlawed housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, and familial status. Enshrining a civil right to Fair Housing was intended to undo the historic racism, segregation, and disinvestment that were features of many land use policies, such as redlining and Redevelopment.
But what does Fair Housing really mean if our rents are still so damn high? That doesn't seem fair, and it isn't. In this blog post, I will share why, over half a century later in San Francisco, throughout California, and across the country, housing justice advocates must continue to fight for fair housing.
In everything we do, we at the REP-SF Coalition advocate for the City & County of San Francisco and the State of California to uphold their legal obligation to Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH). We are one of the few groups in the country that does this vital work.
“Politicians and the real estate lobby are distorting Fair Housing laws so that developers and landlords can make more money – building overpriced housing that in fact discriminates against and displaces low-income people and communities of color.”
But we face major roadblocks. This is because politicians and the real estate lobby are distorting Fair Housing laws so that developers and landlords can make more money – building overpriced housing that in fact discriminates against and displaces low-income people and communities of color. I’m going to break down how the real estate lobby is doing this in California, and how we change course through REP-SF’s bold, visionary solutions for achieving true racial, social, and economic equity.
I am the Co-Founder of People Power Media, and we facilitate the REP-SF Coalition. On March 6, I spoke on a panel at the Housing California 2025 Conference with our friends at Public Advocates. The panel was called “Lessons on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing in Housing Elements.” This blog post is adapted from my presentation, where I discussed REP-SF’s Citywide People’s Plan and the coalition’s successful advocacy to include over 100 equity-based actions into San Francisco's Housing Element.
In representing the REP-SF Coalition, I was there to share the challenges of upholding Fair Housing rights in our advocacy. I already gave you a hint why. The real estate lobby is manipulating the system to increase developer profits, while making you think they’re doing you a favor. But more on that later. First, some background on AFFH.
History of Fair Housing Law
For this, I’m going to remix and borrow from our friends at PolicyLink, who do the critical work of advocating for Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) at the federal level and nationally.
The AFFH rule is a provision of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which banned housing discrimination and predatory real estate practices. Though the fight for fair housing began long before 1968, this legislation was a critical step toward dismantling systemic barriers to equitable housing access.
Today, this hard-fought law is still an important tool of defense for Black, Indigenous, Brown, and disabled communities and anyone marginalized because of their race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, or familial status.
The people who fought for and designed the Fair Housing Act understood that just outlawing the most obvious discrimination would not reverse the harms caused by entrenched racial inequities, from redlining to predatory lending practices and more.
That’s why they added a provision that requires the government to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing — meaning any entity that gets our public federal funds for housing (from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, or HUD) has to show how they’re using that money to proactively end housing inequities, and all the ways they affect people’s lives — from access to good schools, public transportation, jobs, and clean water and air.
The Fair Housing Act was never just about ending discrimination—it was about creating the conditions for all communities and all people to thrive.
This was taken from PolicyLink’s AFFH Explainer and their latest email blast celebrating “April as Housing Futures Month, a call to reimagine housing systems that ensure stability, dignity, and opportunity for all.”
So basically, Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing is about proactively promoting fair housing. It’s not just about preventing discrimination. And government entities that get money from the Feds need to show how they’re doing this.
Moving on to a quick summary of AFFH laws in recent years. AFFH law was strengthened during Obama’s presidency and clawed back during the first Trump presidency. Parts of it were reinstated during Biden’s presidency. And just last month, on March 3, 2025, Trump once again pulled it back to having no teeth like during his first term. Our friends at PolicyLink have summarized key takeaways of what has changed and what this could mean for states and local jurisdictions. Read PolicyLink's explainer.
Back during the first Trump presidency, here in California, in anticipation of Trump clawing back the Obama-era AFFH laws, the state of California passed AB-686 in 2018 to expand fair housing requirements and protections. That enacted the AFFH obligation within the state of California and required that Housing Elements (which are housing plans that every jurisdiction in California has to submit to the State) and all other housing policies follow AFFH law.
Housing Justice Heroes Have to Fight for Every Inch
Now that you know what AFFH means in theory, let’s move on to what’s happening with it in reality. Every organizer knows that it's one thing to have something written down that says the City or the State should be doing something, like upholding Fair Housing laws, but it’s another thing for that to really happen. And that’s what our communities are seeing in San Francisco and throughout the State of California. Policy work is political.
Dyan Ruiz presenting Citywide People’s Plan to the SF Board of Supervisors in November 2022.
Housing Elements include housing policies that will guide the jurisdiction over eight years. When the San Francisco Housing Element was being drafted, the REP-SF Coalition engaged with the SF Planning Department throughout the process. But we found that there wasn't a lot of creativity there to realize the City’s first-time goal of focusing on equity. In response, in the Fall of 2022, the REP-SF Coalition put together the Citywide Peoples Plan, a visionary roadmap to housing justice in San Francisco based on our collective community expertise.
Rally for REP-SF Citywide People’s Plan, November 2022.
As a result of our advocacy, as well as the solutions laid out in the Citywide Peoples Plan, the REP-SF coalition was able to get the City to include over 100 equity-based actions in San Francisco's final draft of the Housing Element when it was passed in January 2023. This included solutions for:
Affordable housing funding, production & preservation,
Acquisition & rehabilitation of existing buildings,
Eviction prevention,
Expanding & improving supportive housing for unhoused residents, and
People-centered, community planning.
At the same time, profit-driven, market-rate developer lobbyists were also able to get some of the provisions they were advocating for in the SF Housing Element. And these same real estate lobbyists were able to pass significant state laws that severely undermined our efforts for housing justice.
Since the San Francisco Housing Element was passed, it's been very difficult to get the City and the SF Planning Department to focus on these equity-based actions. While the REP-SF Coalition engages regularly with the City, and we met with the California Department of Housing & Community Development (HCD), the state’s enforcement arm for housing elements, we still find that their focus is not on these community priorities.
How Fair Housing Laws are Being Manipulated by the Real Estate Lobby
Structurally and legally, the biggest challenge to on-the-ground organizers who want to apply Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing laws is that there is a huge divide between interpreting what Fair Housing means when it comes to who we are building this housing for.
Existing AFFH laws are vague when it comes to the people being served by fair housing. Housing justice advocates maintain that “protected classes,” those who are supposed to be protected by Fair Housing and Civil Rights law, primarily benefit from affordable housing. Whereas state law is written by and heavily influenced by real estate lobbyists like the YIMBYs and is primarily driven by pro-developer politicians like CA Senators Scott Wiener and Nancy Skinner, and CA Assemblymembers Buffy Wicks and Matt Haney. The YIMBYs and other real estate lobbyists, and the politicians that do their bidding, make it extremely difficult to interpret fair housing to mean housing for low-income people and communities of color.
“While AFFH law talks about access to housing for protected classes, it’s not explicitly stated that it should be for what most advocates would assume it should cover – that is, affordable housing for people with low and moderate incomes and people of color.”
While AFFH law talks about access to housing for protected classes, it’s not explicitly stated that it should be for what most advocates would assume it should cover – that is, affordable housing for people with low and moderate incomes and people of color.
It's the debate between access to and building housing for all incomes, what people say market-rate housing serves, and building affordable housing. Of course, market-rate housing does not serve all incomes. Market-rate housing primarily serves high-income people and investors, and excludes low-income and middle-income families and workers. This is true no matter the form that housing takes, like a multi-unit building, or its location. No, you can’t just build a multi-unit building in a middle-income or affluent neighborhood (AKA “High Opportunity or Resource Area” and call that increasing housing access to low-income people. If that housing isn’t affordable, then only affluent people or investors will use that housing, just like any other market-rate development. That new condo building is a vertical gated community.
We have found that the focus of both the state’s monitoring of San Francisco's Housing Element, as well as city policy changes so far, has been on streamlining market-rate development. They are ignoring and not creating any enforceable mandates to build the 57% affordable housing that the City is supposed to be building.
An example of this is HCD’s “Policy and Practice Review,” which focuses on “structural changes” to the SF Development approval process. In our joint letter from REP-SF, SFADC, and CCHO to HCD and the City about the Policy and Practice Review (Nov. 2023), we said, “In an attempt to facilitate housing development ‘at all income levels,’ the PPR in fact seeks to fully deregulate expensive, market-rate housing while undermining provisions of San Francisco's Housing Element designed to achieve our city's affordability, fair housing, and anti-displacement goals.” We met with and communicated this with the Director of HCD, senior staff who focus on Fair Housing, and other HCD staff.
The REP-SF coalition recently delivered our petition to City and State officials to demand that San Francisco put affordability, equity, and the protection of tenants and small businesses first. The petition highlights the over 100 equity-based actions in the Housing Element that the City is currently ignoring, in violation of its obligation to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing. Several hundred SF residents signed our petition to join us in demanding equity-based policies for truly affordable housing, tenant and small business protections, and community planning. Many of these actions are now overdue, since they were identified as short-term actions to be completed by January 31, 2025.
Instead of using state resources and staffing time to find ways for developers to make more money, HCD needs to help communities leverage HCD’s tools and technical assistance for fair housing goals. We really welcome that assistance and hope to work with HCD more in the future.
One example of a systemic problem created by state law is within SB-330, the Housing Crisis Act. Within SB-330 is the “Builder’s Remedy,” what advocates call the “Developer Dirty Bomb,” which creates a punitive environment that forces cities to build overpriced, market-rate housing, or else their funding for affordable housing and transportation will be cut by the State. Anything that puts you out of compliance, including not building the City’s overall housing goals, triggers punishing cities. In forcing cities to bend over backwards to create more profit for developers, what gets held hostage is housing we actually need, housing we can afford. For example, all affordable housing stopped in San Francisco, holding up funding for about six months, because the City was late in submitting its paperwork to get a “Pro-Housing Designation” from HCD.
Fair Housing All Comes Down To On-The-Ground Community Solutions
From our perspective, the affirmative actions for fair housing – “Affirmative” and “Fair” being the operative words – are always driven by the community.
For example, a recent success story for implementing equity-based actions just took place last month. The REP-SF Coalition requested for months to have a San Francisco Planning Commission hearing on the set of Housing Element actions that increase tenant protections. We know that the pressures to increase development and demolitions to reach the unprecedented housing production numbers in this current cycle will result in mass displacements, job losses, and the destruction of our communities. For us, the proposed upzonings, which create incentives for developers to demolish and build over thriving commercial corridors, set up the potential for a new wave of Redevelopment. It’s evident that “protected classes” are not served by market-rate housing, but not only that, they are also being harmed by the incessant push to encourage overpriced market-rate housing.
On Feb. 27, 2025, the REP-SF coalition, along with our allied coalitions, SF Anti-Displacement Coalition (SFADC) and Council of Community Housing Organizations (CCHO), were able to successfully hold that public hearing on tenant displacement. Our community presentation focused on a set of comprehensive solutions to ensure residents are able to stay in the city. These solutions include relocation specialists, upzoning for affordable housing, and requirements for affordable family-sized units.
We expanded on these solutions in a technical letter to SF Planning that showed how existing loopholes and bureaucratic systems mean that tenants are falling through the cracks. We asked for a similar level of consideration and staff support for tenants and small businesses who will be displaced by development, as developers get. We are working closely with the Planning Dept. staff, but it was our on-the-ground expertise that was needed, just like the drafting of the Housing Element and the Citywide People’s Plan, to write policies we knew that would help. It was also a citywide community effort to organize turnout for public comment and hold a press conference on our solutions.
“If Fair Housing laws are vague and we need parameters to better define them, look no further than the values of the REP-SF Coalition: affordability, equity, diversity and culture, stability, leading with community expertise, and social change.”
Our work continues as more hearings about the upzonings are coming up, including a similar Planning Commission Hearing on Small Business Displacement. Fair Housing Month is going to be a busy April! You can learn more about how to get involved here. And we have coming up, our Claiming Space for Community Campaign, where we claim site-by-site, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, spaces for affordable housing and community needs.
If Fair Housing laws are vague and we need parameters to better define them, look no further than the values of the REP-SF Coalition: affordability, equity, diversity and culture, stability, leading with community expertise, and social change.
It’s not too late to change the direction of the City, the State’s, and the country’s housing policies. We don’t need to repeat the mistakes of the past. At the REP-SF Coalition, not only do we have the solutions to make Fair Housing a reality, but we are writing and fighting for the policies to make it happen, for our communities now and generations to come.
