Community Legal Aid is a nonprofit that offers free legal support to low-income and older Massachusetts residents in Berkshire, Franklin, Hampden, Hampshire, and Worcester counties. To celebrate Fair Housing Month, it’s using grants from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development to expand its legal work around housing into Berkshire County. Peter Beck – who is also the chair of the Williamstown planning board – will be the designated Community Legal Aid attorney working on fair housing out of the organization’s downtown Pittsfield office. Beck discussed the legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act and today’s challenges around fair housing with WAMC.

BECK: It guaranteed equal access to housing regardless of your race, your national origin. It also now includes your family status, your gender, which includes gender identity and sexual orientation. But it ensures that landlords, and anyone involved in the housing market, basically in any capacity, can’t discriminate against folks who are looking to access or keep housing based on who they are.

WAMC: How pervasive of a problem is that in Western Massachusetts?

So, it’s pervasive in Western Massachusetts, just like it’s pervasive everywhere. So, it remains a really difficult problem and a really important problem to tackle. Sometimes the different ways in which people discriminate or are discriminated against can change, depending on the time period, depending on the location. Sometimes disability is the category that we see the most discrimination against, or sometimes it’s race or gender. Sometimes it’s more explicit and on its face, and sometimes it’s more subtle. And sometimes folks don’t even know they’re being discriminated against, because they might be told the unit is not available when it actually is, and then someone who is different from them gets the unit when they got rejected discriminated against.

Community Legal Aid