CAFHA Fair Housing Spotlight

CAFHA Fair Housing Spotlight

Q&A with Maury McGough

1. Tell us about your background, including your education, professional experience before HUD and positions you have held while with HUD?

I was a volunteer community organizer for the Calumet Community Congress (CCC) in Northwest Indiana in 1969-70. The CCC was an organizing effort of the Industrial Areas Foundation which was then based in Chicago. My first paying job as an organizer was with the Northwest Austin Council on Chicago’s west side in the early 1970s. There I had the opportunity of working with great organizers like Tom Gaudette, Shel Trapp and Gail Cincatta. The major issues in North Austin all revolved around race and housing (blockbusting, redlining, disinvestment). I also was an organizer with the North Toledo Area Corporation in Toledo, Ohio and staff director of the Neighborhoods Uniting Project in Prince George’s County, Maryland. In 1979 I became the first executive director of the Northwest Indiana Open Housing Center (NWIOHC) in Gary, Indiana. This was my first job in fair housing per se although much of my organizing had been around issues peripheral to fair housing (CRA challenges, reinvestment campaigns). I was fortunate in that NWIOC had a close organizational relationship with the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Communities. I spent much of the first six months on the job at the Leadership Council learning about the art of testing from David Schucker and Jack Woltjan. One of Bill Caruso’s ancillary duties at the Leadership Council was to act as the NWIOHC’s general counsel. So I picked up a little bit of an understanding of fair housing law by watching Bill at work.

I started at HUD in December, 1985. I first served as a special assistant to the then Regional Director, Tom Higginbothan. One of my primary assignments was to act as a liaison with the private fair housing movement which gave me an opportunity to observe outstanding fair housing practitioners throughout the Region such as Bill Tisdale in Milwaukee, Cliff Schrupp in Detroit and Karla Irvine in Cincinnati. In 1992 I became chief of the Region’s Systemic Investigations Branch. That was the unit in FHEO that investigated cases involving land use, zoning, mortgage lending discrimination and other such issues with pattern and practice implications. As the result of a reorganization in 1995, the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity was divided into two separate organizational units; the Fair Housing Enforcement Center and the Program Operations and Compliance Center (POCC). I was named as Director of the POCC. The POCC enforced civil rights requirements against recipients of HUD funds such as CDBG entitlement communities and public housing authorities. In 1999 FHEO was subjected to another reorganization which reintegrated the Fair Housing Enforcement Center and the POCC into a single organizational unit. I was named Director of the Chicago Program Center responsible for all HUD’s civil rights programs in the states of Minnesota and Illinois reporting to the Regional Director Barbara Knox. In May, 2011 following Barbara’s retirement, I was named as Regional Director.

2. What are your duties as Regional Director?

The HUD field organization is divided into ten regions. Region V includes the six states of the upper Great lakes; Illinois, Indiana Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin. There are HUD fair housing offices in each of these states. As FHEO Director my duties are to manage all of HUD’s civil rights program activities throughout the Region including Fair Housing Act enforcement, civil rights compliance, community education and outreach.

3. What do you hope to accomplish in the next year? Next 5 years?

I have the great privilege of following Barbara Knox as Regional Director. Barbara set a standard of excellence in federal fair housing enforcement which I hope to maintain even in the face of diminishing resources. This will require an intensified emphasis on staff training and more coordination among all HUD’s state fair housing offices in the Region. It will also require close working relationships with our FHAP and FHIP partners.

In the long run I hope to contribute to HUD’s efforts to affirmatively further fair housing. I believe an essential aspect of this effort is the building of closer working relationships between fair housing and affordable housing advocates. This is especially important given the recent upsurge in NIMBYISM.

4. When the housing market starts to pick up, what do you see as some of the things HUD might do to help build more integrated communities?

The Fair Housing Act was drafted to achieve two purposes: to end discrimination in housing and to “replace ghettos with truly integrated living patterns.” Over the last forty years, fair housing advocates have come a long way in developing an effective “fair housing enforcement infrastructure.” In the 1970s and 1980s an impressive body of fair housing law was developed through the efforts of Caruso and others. This body of law has stood up well even as civil rights protections have been rolled back in other areas. The FHAP and FHIP programs were established and strengthened. NFHA has evolved into a highly effective organization capable of advancing a fair housing agenda on the national level. This is not to say that housing discrimination has gone away but rather we now have most of the tools necessary to successfully confront it.

The challenge for fair housing advocates over the next forty years is to build a similar infrastructure in support of integration. This will require a lot of work at the local level including building coalitions with affordable housing and disability rights advocates, challenging communities’ analysis of impediments and litigating against restrictive land use policies among other things – all without letting up on our enforcement efforts.

It will also require that fair housing advocates address the issue of urban disinvestment. It is not possible to achieve integration if the problems our central cities are left unaddressed.

Obviously HUD has a major role to play in all of this. The Fair Housing Act contains the mandate that all HUD programs are to be administered in a manner so as to affirmatively further fair housing. Executive Order 12892 extends this mandate to all domestic agencies and tasks HUD with coordinating these efforts. However, neither HUD, nor the entire federal government working, can bring about integration. HUD can be a partner but, just as HUD alone did not build our enforcement infrastructure, it cannot build an integration infrastructure. Only local advocates working in concert can accomplish that.

5. What are HUD's plans to improve housing opportunities for seniors in the Chicago area?

HUD’s 202 Housing Subsidy Program contains to receive considerable congressional support. This is the program by which HUD subsidizes the development of housing for low-income senior citizens thus greatly expanding the supply of available, affordable housing. From a fair housing perspective, housing opportunities for seniors often equate with enforcing the fair Housing Act’s and Section 504’s protections against disability discrimination. That includes enforcement of the design and construction provisions of the Fair Housing Act. It also includes ensuring that all seniors, whether they live in assisted or in private housing, have their right to receive a reasonable accommodation enforced so as they can continue to live independently.