Monday’s half-day hearing on “housing issues” held in the Statehouse by the Vermont Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights broke little new ground on the fair housing front. A few points worth highlighting:

• Housing discrimination by race and national origin is still very much with us, as evidenced by Vermont Legal Aid’s 2014 testing. (White American renters received preferential treatment in 46 percent of the national origin tests and 36 percent of the race-based tests, for example.) The new Vermont NAACP chapter reported having received about 50 housing discrimination complaints since September; how many of those complaints were referred to investigators at the Human Rights Commission or Vermont Legal Aid was unclear, however. Parts of Burlington and Winooski, in part because of an influx of refugees, are becoming residentially segregated.
• Race-based discrimination, often disguised with “a smile and a handshake,” tends to be more subtle than disability-based discrimination. The latter category regularly draws the most complaints to the commission and Vermont Legal Aid. Affordable housing accessible to people with disabilities is in chronically short supply.
• Vermont’s low vacancy rate can exacerbate discrimination, as landlords have more latitude to be “choosey.”
• Small-time landlords, who own one or just a few rentals, are more likely than their large-scale, professional counterparts to be ignorant of fair housing law; and the great majority of the state’s roughly 7,000 landlords are not members of the landlords’ association. One remedy is more education and outreach, to landlords and tenants.
• One proposal that might ensure better fair-housing-law compliance, not to mention code enforcement: a state rental registry, coupled with mandatory fair-housing training for landlords.