Fair Housing at 58: Where Michigan Stands and Where the Work Continues
The Fair Housing Act turned 58 this month. It’s worth pausing to ask: what has changed, what hasn’t, and what are we doing about it?
A Law Worth Celebrating… and Interrogating
Fifty-seven years ago, in the grief-soaked days following Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act. It was a landmark achievement, a legal declaration that where you can live in America should not be determined by the color of your skin, your religion, your national origin, your gender, or your family status.
The law mattered. It still matters.
But if we only celebrate the law without examining what it has and hasn’t accomplished, we do a disservice to the people it was meant to protect. Fair Housing Month isn’t just a time for reflection. It’s a time for honest assessment. And in Michigan, that assessment reveals both genuine progress and stubborn, persistent challenges.
So where do things actually stand?
The Numbers Behind the Gap
Start with homeownership, the cornerstone of wealth-building for most American families, and one of the primary things the Fair Housing Act was designed to protect.
A 2024 Michigan Statewide Housing Needs Assessment found a 34-percentage-point homeownership gap between Black and white households in our state, a stark measure of how much the law’s promise of an equal housing market remains unfulfilled.
That gap isn’t a mystery. It is the compounded result of decades of deliberate policy — redlining, racially restrictive deed covenants, exclusionary zoning — that locked generations of Black families out of the wealth-building engine of homeownership, even as white families were subsidized into it. The Fair Housing Act ended the legal scaffolding of that system, but it could not erase the results overnight. More than half a century later, researchers note that “without actively working against these forces, they don’t just go away.”
Affordability compounds the problem. In Michigan, more than half of renters were housing-cost burdened in 2022, spending more than 30% of their income on housing, including one in four who were severely burdened, spending more than half their income just to keep a roof over their heads.
The math is unforgiving: a full-time worker earning $15 per hour brings home roughly $2,600 a month before taxes. To avoid cost burden, their housing should cost no more than $780. But the average two-bedroom apartment in Michigan rents for well over $1,200 a month, immediately pushing that working family into cost-burdened territory.
And the supply side isn’t keeping up. Michigan’s housing availability rate fell to just 1.8% in 2024, well below the roughly 5% that signals a healthy market. This means workers and residents across the state are competing for an increasingly limited supply of homes.
Fair Housing Discrimination: Still Happening
It would be comforting to believe that overt housing discrimination belongs to the past. It doesn’t.
Research consistently shows that housing cost burden is higher among Black renters compared with other racial and ethnic groups, a disparity that reflects both economic disadvantage and ongoing discriminatory practices in the rental and lending markets.
Michigan advocates and fair housing centers continue to document cases: families with housing vouchers turned away by landlords who refuse to accept them, people with disabilities denied reasonable accommodations, tenants facing discriminatory treatment in rental transactions. Until recently, Michigan law didn’t even prohibit landlords from refusing to rent to people whose income came from legal sources like housing vouchers or Social Security. In late 2024, Governor Whitmer signed legislation protecting Michigan residents from being denied housing based on their source of income, a law expected to reduce homelessness and housing insecurity by removing a common barrier to finding safe and affordable housing.
That’s progress. But the fact that this protection was only enacted in 2024, 55 years after the Fair Housing Act, tells its own story about how long these battles take.
The Modern Face of Housing Inequity
Today’s barriers to fair housing don’t always look like the discrimination of 1968. Some are structural. Some are subtle. Some are encoded in systems and policies that don’t mention race at all, but whose effects fall disproportionately on communities of color and low-income families.
Exclusionary zoning is one of the most powerful. When communities use single-family zoning to limit what can be built and where, they restrict the supply of affordable housing in ways that effectively price out lower-income families, who are disproportionately families of color. The result is economic and racial segregation achieved without a single explicitly discriminatory act.
There’s also the emerging threat of algorithmic bias: landlords, lenders, and advertisers increasingly relying on automated systems and artificial intelligence to screen tenants, underwrite mortgages, and target housing ads. These tools often replicate and reinforce historical biases encoded in the data they’re trained on, creating what researchers have called a high-tech, 21st-century version of redlining.
The form discrimination takes has evolved. Its impact has not.
What Michigan Is Doing. And What Habitat Michigan Is Part Of
The challenges are significant. So is the response.
At the state level, Michigan has been investing in housing production and preservation. The Michigan State Housing Development Authority allocated significant resources in 2024 toward creating and preserving thousands of housing units. Legislative action on source of income protections, fair chance housing for people with conviction histories, and zoning reform are all part of an active policy conversation in Lansing.
At the federal level, Congress passed meaningful bipartisan housing legislation in both chambers in 2025 and early 2026. The ROAD to Housing Act and the Housing for the 21st Century Act together represent a convergence of housing reform ambitions across both chambers that the country has not seen in a very long time, touching supply, zoning, financing, repair, and regulatory reform.
Habitat for Humanity of Michigan is part of this landscape: building, repairing, advocating, and educating across all 83 Michigan counties through 43 Habitat for Humanity affiliates.
We represent families in need of urgent home repairs, guide residents on their journey toward homeownership, and work to eliminate the obstacles that stand between Michigan families and a safe, decent place to live. As a HUD-approved housing counseling agency, we work directly with families navigating the barriers that data describes in the abstract: credit histories shaped by decades of systemic exclusion, down payment gaps that reflect generational wealth divides, housing markets where affordability is structurally out of reach for working families.
With more than 18 million U.S. households spending over half their income on housing, the affordable housing crisis continues to grow, and Habitat Michigan advocates alongside policymakers at every level to push for solutions: increasing the supply of affordable homeownership, ensuring equitable access, and improving the resilience of the homes families already own.
Fair Housing Is Active, Not Passive
Here’s what we’ve learned in this work: fair housing is not self-executing. The law is a tool. What matters is whether communities, organizations, advocates, and individuals pick it up and use it.
That means advocating for zoning reform that allows more types of housing in more communities. It means supporting organizations like Michigan’s Fair Housing Centers that investigate discrimination and defend the rights of families being denied housing. It means backing legislation that closes the gaps the 1968 law left open. And it means building — literally building — the affordable homes our state needs.
At Habitat Michigan, we believe that the vision behind the Fair Housing Act — a housing market where your background doesn’t arbitrarily limit your access — is worth fighting for. Not as a historical aspiration, but as a present-day operating principle.
Fifty-eight years in, the law is solid. The work is not finished.
If you want to be part of it, as a donor, volunteer, advocate, or community partner, we’d be glad to have you. Learn more about how Habitat Michigan is working to make fair housing real for Michigan families.
