House keys sitting on an eviction notice received in the mail. (Photo by Getty Images)
D.C. drama saturates the news — and saps the patience of those still managing to watch.
This overwhelming flow is much the point: the informal Trump advisor and Virginia-born Steve Bannon has noted a goal to “flood the zone” with “muzzle velocity.” The new regime wants to shock and scare. In this alone, they have succeeded.
Most of us have lost. Civil rights are being attacked rather than enforced. And scourges like housing discrimination, which my organization emerged to fight more than 50 years ago, are on the rebound.
The warning lights are blinking red. Think housing discrimination is a thing of the past? Consider the case of Tiera McLeish, a disabled Army veteran from Yorktown.
Until recently, Tiera was living there with her two children.
“They loved it,” Tiera said. Yorktown made them all feel at home.
But Tiera told us that her ex-husband, who she said had been abusive years before, started “hunting us down” and suing for custody of their daughter. Around this time, she lost her job, and then her car suddenly needed a major repair. She fell a month behind on her lease.
Tiera reached out to two veterans’ groups for help. Disabled American Veterans, a national nonprofit, and the Virginia Department of Veterans Services, a state agency, offered to cover the missing month’s rent. But Tiera’s landlord wouldn’t accept this generosity.
That was the first time her property manager broke the law — specifically, the Virginia Fair Housing Law, which prohibits discrimination over the source of funds used to pay rent. That same law and several other state and federal statutes also bar discrimination against people facing domestic violence.
Nevertheless, the landlord filed for eviction, a process Virginia law makes cheap and easy. Fearing that she and her children could suddenly be homeless, Tiera drove out of state to live with family. But still her landlord wouldn’t stop. Tiera received a $17,000 bill for the rest of her lease. This was another illegal action, prohibited by consumer protection laws.
Tiera is a decorated military veteran. She was honorably discharged as a sergeant after earning Army Commendation and Army Achievement medals, among other personal, campaign and unit awards. But now, she and her children fit a terribly familiar profile: Black women like Tiera face the most eviction filings, more than double the rate of white men and women. And the most common age among Americans experiencing an eviction is under 18.
But Tiera will not face another common reality, with just 1.6% of renters facing eviction in Virginia going to court with a lawyer. Today one of our attorneys at Housing Opportunities Made Equal of Virginia (HOME of VA) will argue her case before a judge in Yorktown. We will contest the eviction filing and file suit to secure justice for the landlord’s multiple acts of housing discrimination.
“I don’t think my landlord was counting on there being good people in the world,” Tiera told us.
She hopes our representation will dissolve the power of what she sees as simple “greed” by the property manager. And she is determined to move forward, taking classes in hospitality management to pursue a new career in hotels.
“I want to welcome people in,” she said last week, “lean into my values and make people feel comfortable.”
This isn’t Tiera’s only goal: “I want to show my children that this doesn’t define us,” she added. “Facing discrimination, us being homeless — that’s not who we are as a family.”
For more than 50 years, through Democratic and Republican presidential administrations, those of us in the housing justice movement have had partners in Washington to fight bias. That makes sense: this work isn’t about politics. It’s about what’s right. But the new regime has other plans.
The Trump administration is cancelling grants to organizations like ours that handle more than 75% of housing discrimination reports filed each year. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) has announced agency-wide staff cuts of 50% while gutting its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. HUD also aims to close dozens of field offices around the country.
At HOME of VA, we are working to fill the void. Together with fellow fair housing attorneys around the country and courageous clients like Tiera, we are conducting investigations, filing lawsuits and vigorously defending housing rights. Laws protecting Americans from discrimination are only as good as their enforcement. We must support fair housing organizations to ensure that the promise of equal access to housing is a reality for all.
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