The federal government will ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity under the Fair Housing Act, and will investigate complaints from LGBTQ tenants and homebuyers since Jan. 20, 2020.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development becomes the first agency to fulfill an executive order regarding sex discrimination that President Joe Biden issued on his first day in office, Bloomberg News reported.
The agency has only received approximately 200 such complaints in the past year, but officials expect more to be filed as word of the new policy spreads.
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The department also ended the course for the so-called “midnight rule” proposed by the Trump administration, which would have allowed shelters to base placement decisions on biological sex, not gender. The rule, which was never finalized, could have resulted in transgender women being put in men’s homeless shelters.
This likely won’t be the last of housing policy changes for Biden. On Jan. 27, Biden ordered his administration to review the government’s role in promoting discriminatory housing policies. In doing so, he specifically named two rules that were scrapped under President Donald Trump regarding systemic segregation and implicit bias in housing and lending.
[Bloomberg News] — Sasha Jones