HUD Proposals Threaten Fair Housing Rights for Marginalized Communities
By: Nick Adjami
March 5, 2026
1. Disparate Impact
In January, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) proposed a rule to dismantle a key fair housing tool. “Disparate impact” refers to a policy or practice that seems neutral on its face, but has the effect of disproportionately harming members of a certain protected class. The legal framework has been used across a wide range of cases—from protecting survivors of domestic violence against discriminatory eviction policies, to protecting people of color against discriminatory lending policies. In each case, the policy challenged did not explicitly discriminate, but in practice disproportionately and unjustifiably harmed members of a protected class, and so was struck down. HUD’s new proposal abandons this framework and would allow housing discrimination to go unchecked at the federal level.
ERC wrote in comments submitted to HUD that the rule would “undermine longstanding protections against the most invidious and pervasive forms of housing discrimination” and impose significant barriers to fair housing enforcement. ERC also signed a comment filed by the National Fair Housing Alliance along with 173 other organizations condemning the proposal, urging HUD to preserve disparate impact and perform its duty of fully enforcing the Fair Housing Act.
2. Mixed Status
In February, HUD proposed a rule to ban families from federally subsidized housing if any member of the family is undocumented. Currently, undocumented immigrants do not get federal rental assistance, but they can live with family members who do. The proposed rule would require all tenants to verify their citizenship or legal status. Nearly 80,000 people would face eviction, including nearly 37,000 U.S. citizen children. “The government doesn’t want people living on the streets, but we won’t have any other option,” said one public housing resident in Los Angeles. The National Housing Law Project and Protecting Immigrant Families launched a campaign to collect comments opposing the proposal, which can be submitted through April 21.
3. Time Limits and Work Requirements
Finally, on March 2, HUD proposed a rule that would allow time limits and work requirements for people receiving federal housing assistance. The move puts more than three million people at risk of losing aid, facing eviction, and potentially becoming homeless.
Specifically, the rule would allow state and local housing agencies to limit assistance to as little as two years and require recipients to work up to 40 hours per week. These policies could be imposed for public housing residents as well as Housing Choice Voucher recipients. Research shows that work requirements and time limits do not increase employment rates or bring individuals and families out of poverty. They only force aid recipients to submit burdensome documentation and face homelessness if they are deemed ineligible or their time expires. These changes are rooted in false stereotypes about people who receive assistance and jeopardize aid for all recipients, but especially people with disabilities.
In theory, the rule creates exemptions for people with disabilities who are unable to work, but in practice many people will likely struggle to navigate the process of providing documentation to prove their disability and receive the necessary exemption. Meanwhile, people with disabilities who can work face serious barriers to employment, such as disability discrimination, which could impede them from maintaining full-time employment, jeopardizing their housing assistance.
Housing rights organizations like the National Housing Law Project urge the federal government to “enact proven solutions to help struggling households earn more and get ahead,” instead of “taking housing away from millions of people.” Members of the public have until May 1 to submit a comment on the proposed rule.
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The ERC is a civil rights organization that identifies and seeks to eliminate unlawful and unfair discrimination in housing, employment and public accommodations in its home community of Greater Washington DC and nationwide. The ERC’s core strategy for identifying unlawful and unfair discrimination is civil rights testing. When the ERC identifies discrimination, it seeks to eliminate it through the use of testing data to educate the public and business community, support policy advocacy, conduct compliance testing and training, and, if necessary, take enforcement action. For more information, please visit www.equalrightscenter.org.
