Debra Kamin

A mindset.

A mindset about culture, about religion, about social topics that are touchy like abortion, about all the things that are dividing society right now.

They want people who fall in line with a very specific type of thinking.

To them, being sufficiently white means not just having the right ancestry coming from a specific European background.

It also means thinking the right way about all of these issues.

And if you don't, you're actually not pure enough, for lack of a better word.

It all comes down to what is essentially in their mind a loophole in the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

So the Fair Housing Act of 1968 is one of the bedrock civil rights laws in the United States.

Before we had the Fair Housing Act, whites-only neighborhoods in parts of this country were the norm.

They were expected.

And what it says in its most distilled form is you cannot discriminate in housing.

If you are a person who provides housing, whether you are a landlord or a realtor or a bank providing a mortgage, you cannot say someone will get this housing and someone won't.

based on factors like color of skin, like gender, like religion, like sexual orientation.

All of that is off the table.

Housing access has to be fair.

However, like every law, it has a bunch of specific language.

And there is this one sentence in the Fair Housing Act that Eric and Peter have really honed in on that mentions that people who are part of a membership association can provide housing specifically for their members.

Mm-hmm.

There's a reason this language is in the law.

It's so, for example, if you are a church and you want to have a house on the property of the church for clergy to live in, you're allowed to do that.