Justice Dept. to Boost Housing Fairness Enforcement : Real estate: Banking regulators also plan to probe mortgage lenders with high rates of minority rejections.

Justice Department civil rights enforcers, stepping up their attack on housing discrimination, Monday announced plans to establish their own “tester” program to uncover unlawful bias in selling and renting housing.

But the new force will not attempt to uncover possible discrimination in mortgage lending--a form of potential housing bias documented two weeks ago in a sweeping study by the Federal Reserve of mortgage loan rejections.

That study found that blacks and Latinos are turned down for home mortgages at much higher rates than Anglos.

Reacting to the Fed study, Assistant Atty. Gen. John R. Dunne said the Justice Department will call together federal agencies with regulatory authority over mortgage lending to develop a joint investigative and enforcement program.

He said mortgage lending is an area of great “complexity” involving complicated statistical analysis and other investigation to establish that rejection of mortgage applicants constitutes a pattern or practice of illegal discrimination rather than legitimate underwriting standards.

Both Justice Department moves are being made at the direction of Acting Atty. Gen. William P. Barr. An aide said Barr has decided to make the attack on housing discrimination one of his priority programs. His nomination for the top Justice Department job is scheduled to be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Nov. 12.

Meanwhile, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency said it would use the Fed report as a basis for special examinations of banks with the highest minority-rejection rates. The exams would seek to determine compliance with fairness-in-lending laws.

The OCC, headed by Robert L. Clarke, supervises many of the country’s biggest banks. It did not name the banks or areas that might be investigated.

Last month’s Fed study “raised troubling questions about discrimination that may be occurring in the credit markets,” Clarke wrote in a letter to Sen. Paul Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat and member of the Senate Banking committee. “Thus, the OCC intends to increase its efforts to detect and counter illegal discrimination,” he said in the letter, which was released to news organizations.

In announcing the decision to use Justice Department testers, Barr labeled housing discrimination “a pernicious evil that strikes at the essence of the American dream--the right to live in the home of one’s choice.”

The department will shift funds from other Justice Department activities for the $1.4 million that will be spent on the testing initiative over the next two years, Dunne said. In the past, the department has relied on “testing” evidence provided by advocacy groups and other private parties. In a typical testing effort, a black testing couple seeks housing at an apartment rental office, followed a short time later by white testers seeking similar housing.

The testers each claim to have the same demographic profile, most notably income, with the only difference being race. If the rental office tells the black testers that no housing is available, then tells the whites that there is housing, the Justice Department has the makings of a violation of the Fair Housing Act.

The testing program adopts in part legislation introduced by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), which Dunne said was “a catalyst” for the Justice Department move. But the Hatch proposal included testing for real estate lenders as well as real estate brokers.

Dunne said Barr had directed him to develop “a “pro-active enforcement effort.” The directive came after the study showing sharply different rates of mortgage rejections and another study by the Housing and Urban Development Department that found that blacks and Latinos in 25 major cities have a greater than 50% chance of encountering housing discrimination.

The Justice Department, which gained authority to pursue mortgage lending violations in March, 1989, has brought fewer than five cases alleging violations against individuals and no cases charging a pattern or practice of such discrimination.