Private bar opportunities in fair housing, lending.

The article presents an overview of the speeches that were presented at the American Bar Association's Annual Meeting held in New Orleans in 1994 concerning the fair housing legislation in the U.S. Deval Patrick, assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Justice Department, stressed the connection between integrated housing and integrated education. Patrick said it was impossible to ignore the fact that discrimination is alive and well in the housing and lending markets. Half of all minorities who seek to rent or buy a home will face discrimination from the seller, landlord, real estate agent, or the lending company, and he challenged those who don't believe the statistics to look at the U.S. Justice department's own fair housing testing program, which bears out the grim reality that pattern discrimination can be found from Detroit to Iowa to South Dakota. Kerry Scanlon, deputy assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Justice Department, pointed out that for 20 years the federal government under the Department of Housing and Urban Development had no teeth with which to fight discrimination. All that changed with amendments to the Fair Housing Act in 1988. David H. Harris Jr., executive director for the Land Loss Prevention Project at North Carolina Central University Law School, said lending discrimination can be seen as a gauge of the overall economic health of a community.