S. 5579: Mapping Housing Discrimination Act

The bill would create a HUD grant program to help colleges and universities research, digitize, and map historic housing discrimination records. The goal is to build a public, national database showing where housing discrimination occurred, based on records from after 1850.

What counts as the records being studied

The bill focuses on historic property records and local laws that show housing discrimination. This includes things like:

• racial covenants or other discriminatory clauses in deeds;
• restrictive language used by developers, neighborhood groups, real estate operators, or property owners;
• state laws or local ordinances that allowed discrimination against protected groups under fair housing law.

Who could get grants

The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of Policy Development and Research would award competitive grants to eligible entities, defined as institutions of higher education, including minority-serving institutions. Projects would have to focus on at least one local jurisdiction, such as a city, county, or the District of Columbia.

What grant recipients would do

Grant recipients would analyze records, digitize them, and create spatial datasets that map historic housing discrimination patterns. They could use the funds to:

• work with local governments or other institutions on research and digitization;
• pay jurisdictions to help digitize deeds and other records;
• buy or develop digital tools to identify racial covenants in records;
• create datasets and submit them to HUD;
• coordinate with other researchers and volunteers.

Standards, data, and public database

Within one year, HUD would have to create uniform data standards for how the records are analyzed, digitized, and mapped. HUD would do this with help from the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity and by seeking input from schools, civil rights groups, and others doing related research.

HUD would then use the submitted data to build a national database of historic housing discrimination records. The database would have to be made publicly available for free on HUD’s website. If a grant recipient requests it, HUD could wait up to 180 days before adding that project’s data to the database.

If a grant recipient pays a jurisdiction to digitize records, those deeds and records would have to be made publicly available at no cost.

Reporting requirements

Grant recipients would have to report to HUD within 180 days of getting a grant, and then every year after that, on topics such as project progress, outreach, volunteer involvement, coordination with local governments, and dataset creation. HUD would also have to report to Congress within one year and then at least every three years on the grant program, the database, and related HUD work.

Funding

The bill authorizes $5 million per year from fiscal years 2027 through 2036 for the grant program, plus $750,000 per year for HUD’s administrative costs for the same period.

Relevant Companies

None found