April was National Fair Housing Month, commemorating the April 11, 1968 enactment of the Fair Housing Act by Lyndon Johnson. The Oregon Fair Housing Council marked the 40th anniversary last Wednesday with the first ever 'fair housing' bus tour of a US city.The tour took participants through Portland, with a view toward historical housing discrimination.Some of the forms that housing discrimination has taken include so-called 'urban renewal' programs, population displacement, and real estate profiteering. Sherill Brown-Frost, Director of Member Services for the National Fair Housing Alliance, spoke to tour participants While the bus tour did not cover a myriad of current challenges such as Brownfields, gentrification in North Portland or increasing homelessness downtown, it did point out concrete examples of where and when discrimination has occurred in Portland on the basis of race, age, color, or other factors
- KBOO