Housing Bias Called ‘Significant Problem’

Housing discrimination remains “a significant problem” despite 20 years of federal effort to root out bias in the real estate and mortgage industries, Assistant Atty. Gen. William Bradford Reynolds said Friday at a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act.

Reynolds said the agency’s campaign to fight discriminatory housing practices has been “impressive,” but critics of the Administration disagreed.

Reynolds told a group at Jackson State University, a predominantly black college in Jackson, Miss., that “discrimination today, while less blatant, is no less real” than it was before the civil rights hey-day of the 1960s.