Civil Rights Commission Uncovers Frequent Bias in Boston Housing

Widespread discriminatory housing practices continue to occur in Massachusetts despite the Commonwealth's fair housing law, an advisory committee on civil rights charged in a report released yesterday.

The committee, chaired by Clark Byse, professor of Law, urged the formation of a state authority with strong powers to supervise strictly all realty transactions and to impose severe penalties for any violations of the fair housing act. Concentration of Negroes in "overpriced, substandard housing" persists on a large scale, said the report, because of tactics used by Boston realtors and home owners to defy the law and deny Negro families adequate housing outside certain segregated areas.

To bring pressure on owners of the unsound lodgings the committee advocated state legislation authorizing the courts to designate the city as rent receiver in-place of any landlord who falls to comply with the housing code. New York recently enacted such a rent law, considering it the surest way to force compliance with the code.

A study of Massachusetts to determine the most effective methods to determine the most effective methods of enforcing anti-discrimination laws and codes was recommended in the report to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, which organized the local committee.

Since Boston public housing projects now have "de facto" segregation, the committee called for amendment of the Presidential Housing Order to include present public housing among those projects which can receive federal funds only by complying with the order's anti-discrimination provisions.

The segregated Negro ghetto, a small, curved area in and around Roxbury sometimes called the "black boomerang," contains over half of the Negroes in Massachusetts. Most of these families pay much more for inadequate housing than do whites in better homes.

Added the report: Negroes able to afford better homes are prevented form buying them by dealers' methods ranging from outright refusal to deal with Negroes to endless delays of a Negro's housing request. Most brokers, however, simply fabricate non-discriminatory objections to otherwise qualified Negro applicants, or refuse to tell them about the full range of available housing.