Latonia Williams

Abstract

This casenote argues that African-American homeownership is disparately impacted by the discriminatory use of credit scores in homeowners insurance underwriting, asserting a violation of § 3604 of the Fair Housing Act and advocating for Congressional action to ban this practice. It explains that the “American Dream” of homeownership has long been denied to African-Americans through discriminatory Federal Housing Administration (FHA) policies and insurance underwriting practices. Although explicitly racist policies were revised in the 1950s and 1960s, modern underwriting methods—particularly risk classification and credit scoring—have effectively replaced them, producing similarly disenfranchising results. These practices reinforce the historically vulnerable position of African-Americans by limiting their access to homeowners insurance and thereby to homeownership itself, resulting in a disparate, discriminatory impact under the Fair Housing Act. The casenote concludes that Congressional intervention is necessary to eliminate this discriminatory impact and allow African-Americans a fair opportunity to achieve homeownership.

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