by Jesse Eisinger

Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-owned mortgage giant, made it harder for millions of Americans to refinance their high-interest-rate mortgages for fear it would cut into company profits, present and former Freddie Mac officials disclosed in recent interviews.

In closed door meetings, two Republican-leaning board members and at least one executive resisted a mass refi policy for an additional reason, according to the interviews: They regarded it as a backdoor economic stimulus.

Freddie's policy was financially brutal: During the worst years of the Great Recession, when homeowners most needed the savings they could have gotten from refinancing to lower interest rates, Freddie helped keep millions of borrowers locked in high-interest-rate mortgages.

A more aggressive refi program by both Freddie and its sister company Fannie Mae would have helped an additional nine million homeowners to refinance, saving them nearly $75 billion in interest payments to date, Columbia University housing economist Christopher Mayer estimates. In addition, it would have prevented hundreds of thousands of delinquencies and foreclosures, he says.

Freddie's resistance to refis highlights a central conflict of interest that plagues both Freddie and Fannie. That conflict is even more pronounced now that they are owned by taxpayers. The companies, which own or back about 60 percent of U.S. home mortgages, have a mandate to help expand homeownership and also to generate profits. These goals can work at cross purposes.

Freddie and Fannie maintained and erected barriers to refinancings when the Obama administration launched a program in early 2009 specifically designed to make refinancing more accessible — the Home Affordable Refinance Program, or HARP. Freddie continued to hinder refinancings through a late 2011 relaunch of HARP designed to further slash refi costs and paperwork. At that point, Fannie began opening its gates more widely, but Freddie still kept barriers in place.

Only in the last few months, under a new chief executive, has Freddie loosened many of its restrictions on refinancing.

"Almost immediately after taxpayers bailed them out, Fannie and Freddie imposed unprecedented restrictions on refinancing, preventing millions of people from saving money on their mortgages and leaving hundreds of thousands of people to lose their homes unnecessarily," says Mayer. Then after the 2011 HARP relaunch, "Freddie was worse" than Fannie, he said.

The Internal Debate

Now, interviews with former board members and an executive have revealed two reasons why Freddie dragged its feet.

According to interviews, these officials feared that mass refinancing would hurt the company's bottom line and therefore its ability to repay taxpayers, who had bailed out Freddie and Fannie in 2008 to the current tune of almost $142 billion. Fears that borrowers who got refis would suffer high rates of default anyway, costing Freddie, have not been borne out.

Internally, Freddie debated its compliance with HARP for years. Robert Glauber, who left Freddie's board in March, contended in board meetings that aspects of the refinancing program were "designed to be a stimulus" for the economy, said John Koskinen, who served as Freddie Mac's chairman from 2008 to 2011, during which time he also served briefly as its interim chief executive.

Glauber, director Linda Bammann and head of risk management Paige Wisdom resisted mass refis. One executive viewed their objections as colored by partisan unwillingness to help the economy recover, something that would benefit President Obama.

But Koskinen did not regard the discussion as partisan. "I don't think we ever had a discussion of whether this was good for a Democratic administration."

Glauber was a Republican appointee to the Treasury Department under President George H. W. Bush and has had a career in various Wall Street roles. In a brief email to ProPublica, he disputed a quotation attributed to him but did not comment on the substance of the internal debates. He wrote that "it is an outrage that what claim to be confidential discussions in the board room are aired in your publication."

Bammann, who donated $250 to the National Republican Congressional Committee this year, declined to comment. Wisdom did not respond to requests for comment.

Freddie Mac declined to make an executive available. The company is "always trying to find a balance to stimulate borrowing on responsible terms at prices that protect us from risk," a spokesman said. The new CEO, Donald Layton, has made it clear that making changes to the company's refi program is "a major priority," the spokesman said. And he pointed out that Freddie has streamlined its refi process outside of the HARP program as well.

The spokesman declined to comment on Freddie's internal discussions.

HARP was intended to lower barriers to refinancing for borrowers, especially for those who have high loan balances or owe more than their homes are worth, known as being under water. But HARP has disappointed in part because of Freddie and Fannie's restrictive refi rules.

When the program was overhauled late last year, Freddie retained more restrictions than Fannie, puzzling many housing experts.

Still, after the HARP overhaul, refis have risen. Freddie Mac has done more than 284,000 HARP refis this year through August, compared with 185,000 for all of last year. Fannie has done 334,000 in the same period, compared with 215,000 last year. In all, the two companies have done more than 1.6 million refis under the program. The administration's initial goal was to help four to five million.

Concerns about providing a stimulus were not the only reason for Freddie's restrictions. Several company executives and board members worried that doing mass refis would hurt Freddie Mac's bottom line.

To appreciate this concern, it's crucial to understand Freddie's and Fannie's business. The companies are two-headed beasts: One part is an insurance company with a public mission to help the housing market and the other is an investment fund that generates profits by trading mortgage investments. The investment side existed originally to keep the mortgage securities markets flowing. But as the portfolios grew in the years leading up to the financial crisis, the tail began to wag the dog. The huge profits from the portfolios inflated executives' pay packages and began to overshadow the public mission of helping homeowners, critics say.

Refinancings can hurt the value of those portfolios. When a new, lower rate mortgage is issued, the old loan is paid off. The ultimate backer of that original loan — in this case Freddie or Fannie — takes a loss because the loan was "pre-paid," meaning it was paid off earlier than expected. Mortgage securities make money from interest rates paid over time, so they decline in value if the flow of interest payments gets cut off, such as when a refi allows the original loan to get paid off early.

Glauber was concerned about Freddie incurring such losses, because taxpayers were ultimately on the hook. "Bob's position would have been if it has a cost, it is not consistent with conservatorship," Koskinen said.

Bammann, a former executive of JPMorgan Chase, and Wisdom voiced similar objections. Wisdom criticized the refi program, saying that it was "policy, not business," according to the executive.

Board member Nicolas Retsinas, who served in various housing policy positions for the Clinton administration, argued consistently for an expansive refinancing policy, according to people familiar with the meetings. He argued that in calculating the costs of the refi program, Freddie should take into account the benefit from lowering defaults and foreclosures and the improved housing market and stronger economy that would come from refinancings.

Retsinas declined to comment.

Koskinen, a Democrat who served in the Clinton administration, said it was prudent for the board to discuss the costs of a refi program. "The board's view was you could decide to categorize it or ignore it but couldn't say it didn't exist. The intellectually honest thing was to say, 'How large was that cost?'" he said.

Freddie Frustrates Its Regulator

Early in the Great Recession, support for a mass refi program was bipartisan. Refis help borrowers who are current on their loans, scoring them prevailing rates.

Columbia economist Glenn Hubbard, now an economic advisor to Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney, co-authored op-eds in the Wall Street Journal and later in the New York Times with his colleague Mayer, proposing a mass refi program. Many congressional Republicans supported it.

But the Wall Street Journal editorialized against it in February 2009, arguing a mass refi program amounted to undue government interference with the marketplace and would cause huge losses for taxpayers. Republicans turned against it.

The Obama administration and the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), which oversees Fannie and Freddie, didn't fix HARP for years.

Under conservatorship, the FHFA has the responsibility to regulate the companies and to approve their major business decisions. Ed DeMarco, the acting head of the agency, has become a political lightning rod, criticized for having been too timid in helping the housing market. Critics contend he underestimated how much such an overall improvement would eventually help Fannie and Freddie's bottom lines.

At the same time, DeMarco has been frustrated by Freddie Mac, according to people who are familiar with his tenure.

"Freddie is the party of 'no.' Fannie is the party of ‘let's make it work,'" said a person familiar with DeMarco and the FHFA.

The FHFA was frustrated when Freddie Mac announced its guidelines in November 2011 because they restricted refis more tightly than Fannie's did.

One example: Freddie was not going to allow certain well-situated borrowers into HARP, borrowers with a "loan-to-value" ratio of 80 or below. In other words, if a borrower had a $100,000 home and had a mortgage loan of $80,000 or less, he or she would not be eligible.

That wasn't the only restriction. Freddie sometimes required properties to be re-appraised, which added cost and delay. And it hindered the ability for borrowers to get a refi from a new bank rather than from the one that had given them the original loan. "We were adding barriers to the homeowner," says the Freddie executive.

Freddie's risk management operation, the division in charge of making sure Freddie doesn't take decisions likely to incur heavy losses, was particularly active in raising concerns over allowing more refis. For example, when Freddie insures a mortgage, it retains the right to void its guarantee and force the bank that made the loan to be responsible for it under certain circumstances, such as if the bank had done poor underwriting and the borrower's income was misrepresented. Facilitating refis under HARP could require giving up those rights. Wisdom, the risk officer, argued that Freddie should not give up such rights lightly, because surrendering them could cost Freddie dearly.

But since many borrowers on these Freddie-backed loans had been making regular payments for a number of years, others argued there would likely be only a relatively small number of cases in which Freddie would need to force banks to take back loans. Thus, Freddie wouldn't be giving up anything of much value.

Freddie Mac produced a memo in the fall of 2011, which was described to ProPublica, estimating that HARP would cause hundreds of millions of dollars in losses. The memo estimated big losses on the portfolio as well as from giving up the rights to return the loans. It minimized the benefits to Freddie's insurance business from an improved housing market and improved economy. It also minimized the costs to the company of trapping homeowners in mortgages with interest rates so high they would eventually default.

That analysis appears to have been overly cautious. A recent New York Federal Reserve study estimated how much refinancings can help reduce future defaults and found that the benefits were greater than expected. "We were too conservative and that's been subsequently borne out," says the Freddie executive.

DeMarco has said he instructed Freddie and Fannie not to take into consideration portfolio losses. In a letter to Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) in May, DeMarco wrote that "FHFA specifically directed both [Fannie and Freddie] to exclude from consideration changes in their own investment income as part of the HARP evaluation process."

The existence of the memo raises a question of whether Freddie ignored that instruction from its regulator. It also raises the question of why FHFA did not act immediately to prevent Freddie from imposing its tighter rules.

DeMarco and the FHFA did not respond to requests for comment.

Freddie's 80 percent loan-to-value barrier had spillover effects. Mortgage experts say it led banks to reject out of hand borrowers who were close to that threshold. If a borrower initially appeared to qualify for a refi, but then the appraisal of the home pushed him below the barrier, Freddie would reject the refi and the mortgage company would have wasted time and money. So banks avoided a wide swath of homeowners whose loan-to-value ratio was near 80 percent.

At the FHFA, "nobody was happy with Freddie under 80 percent but we decided to deal with it later. And we dealt with it," says a person familiar with the FHFA's efforts.

Today, more refis are being done under HARP and the barriers at Freddie have started to come down. The new CEO, Donald Layton, deserves some credit, says the Freddie executive: "Don made important changes in the program and is willing to override narrow risk management. He took a broader view of the benefits and wasn't focused wholly on the costs."

by Charles Ornstein

The federal government today uploaded details of an additional 70,000 problems at nursing homes nationwide, and we’ve included them in our Nursing Home Inspect tool that lets users easily examine trends at the facilities.

Nursing Home Inspect now has information on almost 217,000 deficiencies identified by government inspectors.  Until now, the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) had only put online narrative details of these deficiencies from a home’s most-recent routine inspection, called a standard survey, as well as 16 months of complaint inspections.

What’s changed is that CMS has now included the details of a home’s three most recent routine inspections. For many homes, that means results from 2009 and 2010 are now available online. Previously, they had only been available by filing at Freedom of Information request.

News organizations around the nation have used Nursing Home Inspect to identify issues at homes in their area.

Nursing Home Inspect allows users to search all inspection reports by keyword — such as injuries, MRSA or ignore— to look for problems that may appear across the country. Results can be sorted by state or severity level. Our tip sheet offers suggestions about how to get the best search results.

Nursing home industry officials have cautioned that although the reports can be of value when choosing a home, they are only a snapshot and don’t highlight good practices in the home. The American Health Care Association, a nursing home industry group, has launched a program that each year recognizes homes it says are working to improve the quality of care.

by Suevon Lee

The Supreme Court has remained a largely unspoken topic on the campaign trail — even though the Court plays a critical function in Americans' lives. (This past June's Affordable Care Act ruling, anyone?)

The next president could very well appoint one or two new justices. And who steps down first could also depend on who's elected.

Mitt Romney hasn't said much about the Supreme Court, apart from expressing disagreement with the Court's ruling on Obamacare. But his website states the candidate would nominate judges "in the mold of" the Court's conservatives — Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts (the last two of whom a then-Sen. Obama voted against confirming). It also says Romney would like to see Roe v. Wade overturned.

President Obama, of course, has appointed two liberal justices, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, the nation's first Hispanic justice. His past remarks indicate a preference for nominees who bring "common sense" and "pragmatism" to the table, who'd blend constitutional analysis with "a sense of what real-world folks are going through."

Legal challenges to such key social issues as same-sex marriage, gun rights, immigration and separation of church and state are likely to be heard by the Supreme Court in the coming years. One justice is all it may take to tip the scale in these cases.

So what exactly have the candidates said, and why hasn't the Supreme Court been a bigger issue? Let's take a look.

Mitt Romney

Romney has spoken out against the president's first-term Supreme Court picks.

In April, Romney told the National Rifle Association that he's opposed to judges "who view the Constitution as living and evolving, not timeless and defining."

"In his first term, we've seen the president try to browbeat the Supreme Court. In a second term, he would remake it," Romney said. "Our freedoms would be in the hands of an Obama Court, not just for four years, but for the next 40. That must not happen."

Romney has occasionally embraced recent Supreme Court decisions. He praised the Court's unanimous January 2012 ruling in a religious liberty case that allowed for a "ministerial exception" to employment discrimination laws. He favorably cited another unanimous March 2012 ruling that made it easier for property owners to challenge compliance orders from the Environmental Protection Agency.

The candidate has been vocal about abortion. In June 2011, Romney wrote that he felt Roe v. Wade was a "misguided ruling that was a result of a small group of activist federal judges legislating from the bench." Early this year, Romney repeated that position, and again in April during an interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer.

His running mate, Paul Ryan, also touched on the Court's role when it comes to abortion. "We don't think that unelected judges should make this decision; that people, through their elected representatives and reaching a consensus in society through the democratic process, should make this determination," Ryan said in the vice-presidential debate.

As Vice President Joe Biden pointed out during this debate, one of the people heading Romney's panel of advisers on judicial appointments is Robert Bork, a Reagan Supreme Court nominee who failed to win Senate confirmation in 1987 over fears he would vote to strike down a range of issues, including Roe v. Wade.

(Biden, then the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, helped lead the opposition. The vacancy to which Bork was nominated eventually went to Justice Anthony Kennedy, typically the Court's swing vote.)

On another note, Romney would have a deep bench from which to select judicial nominees, given Republicans' vigorous focus on this area. (CNN has compiled a list of likely nominees, including former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement — who argued the Affordable Care Act challenge — and an assortment of conservative federal appellate judges.)

"Romney would appoint people with a more conservative judicial philosophy, who are not transforming the Constitution, not sticking up for the rights of any particular group and are very neutrally interpreting the law," said Curt Levey, president of Committee for Justice, an organization that promotes conservative judicial candidates.

President Obama

If Obama is reelected, there is strong speculation that Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Court's oldest member at 79, will retire to make room for a replacement. In that event, argue some, the president would likely nominate another woman (two other justices are also approaching their late 70s: Scalia and Kennedy are both 76.)

"[Obama] would place value on racial and ethnic diversity, but it wouldn't be determinative," said Tom Goldstein, co-founder and regular contributor to SCOTUSBlog, which provides news and analysis of the Court's decisions. "President Obama hasn't really pushed for very liberal nominees."

Back in 2008, Obama shed light on his thoughts about the subject.

In remarks to the Detroit Free Press, then-Sen. Obama said he would seek Supreme Court nominees who recognize "that one of the roles of the courts is to protect people who don't have a voice," for instance, "the vulnerable, the minority, the outcast, the person with the unpopular idea, the journalist who is shaking things up."

That same year, Obama, who taught constitutional law at University of Chicago Law School, praised former Justice David Souter and current Justice Stephen Breyer — both considered liberal votes — as "very sensible judges."

"They believe in fidelity to the text of the Constitution, but they also think you have to look at what is going on around you and not just ignore real life," he said.

Obama has made clear he supports Roe v. Wade, which has been narrowed in the face of new challenges.

In 2010, shortly after Justice John Paul Stevens announced his retirement, Obama told Senate lawmakers he'd apply no "litmus test" to potential nominees.

"But I will say that I want somebody who is going to be interpreting our Constitution in a way that takes into account individual rights, and that includes women's rights," the president said, eventually nominating Kagan for the vacancy.

In February 2011, Obama spoke out against the Defense of Marriage Act, which seeks to impose a definition of marriage as a legal union between a man and a woman, and instructed the Justice Department to stop defending the law in court. (A second federal appeals court recently struck down the law as unconstitutional; some predict the issue could next be headed to the Supreme Court.)

Although the president has been criticized for taking his time with judicial appointments in the lower federal courts — a gateway to the Supreme Court — he's also named more ethnic minorities to the bench than any of his predecessors.

More Discussion?

So, why hasn't there been more discussion about the Supreme Court on the campaign trail? It's a question that's been raised again and again, especially since justices, who are appointed for life, serve on average about 30 years.

One possible explanation is that the Supreme Court strategically took itself out of the political calculus earlier this year when it narrowly upheld the health care law.

"[The issue] would have played out a little differently if the Supreme Court had struck down the health care act," SCOTUSBlog's Goldstein said. "It's really hard for the president to run against the Court that has just upheld his signature legislative achievement by a whisker."

But the silence could also just convey a perceived lack of interest among the public.

"I think the candidates realize that the Supreme Court doesn't move independent voters," said Goldstein, even though "the president makes a radical difference in the composition of the judiciary."

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

A few months after Congress passed a landmark law directing the federal government to dismantle segregation in the nation's housing, President Nixon's housing chief began plotting a stealth campaign.

The plan, George Romney wrote in a confidential memo to aides, was to use his power as secretary of Housing and Urban Development to remake America's housing patterns, which he described as a "high-income white noose" around the black inner city.

The 1968 Fair Housing Act, passed months earlier in the tumultuous aftermath of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, directed the government to "affirmatively further" fair housing. Romney believed those words gave him the authority to pressure predominantly white communities to build more affordable housing and end discriminatory zoning practices.

Romney ordered HUD officials to reject applications for water, sewer and highway projects from cities and states where local policies fostered segregated housing.

He dubbed his initiative "Open Communities" and did not clear it with the White House. As word spread that HUD was turning down grants, Nixon's supporters in the South and in white Northern suburbs took their complaints directly to the president.

Nixon intervened immediately.

"Stop this one," Nixon scrawled in a note on a memo written by John Ehrlichman, his domestic policy chief.

In a 1972 "eyes only" memo to Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, another aide, Nixon explained his position. "I am convinced that while legal segregation is totally wrong that forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong," he wrote.

The president understood the consequences: "I realize that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools."

Romney, the former governor of Michigan and father of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, held his ground. Notations and memos in his private papers show that he viewed the blighted black ghettos as a root cause of the inner-city riots of the 1960s. "Equal opportunity for all Americans in education and housing is essential if we are going to keep our nation from being torn apart," he wrote in talking points he drew up for a meeting with the president.

Romney's stance made him a pariah within the administration. Nixon shut down the program, refused to meet with his housing secretary and finally drove him from the Cabinet.

Over the next four decades, a ProPublica investigation shows, a succession of presidents — Democrat and Republican alike — followed Nixon's lead, declining to use the leverage of HUD's billions to fight segregation.

Their reluctance to enforce a law passed by both houses of Congress and repeatedly upheld by the courts reflects a larger political reality. Again and again, attempts to create integrated neighborhoods have foundered in the face of vehement opposition from homeowners.

"The lack of political courage around these issues is stunning," said Elizabeth Julian, a former senior HUD official. "The failures of fair housing are not just by HUD but by the country."

Nixon's vision for America largely came to pass and the costs have been steep. More than 20 years of research has implicated residential segregation in virtually every aspect of racial inequality, from higher unemployment rates for African Americans, to poorer health care, to elevated infant mortality rates and, most of all, to inferior schools.

HUD's largest program of grants to states, cities and towns has delivered $137 billion to more than 1,200 communities since 1974. To receive the money, localities are supposed to identify obstacles to fair housing, keep records of their efforts to overcome them, and certify that they do not discriminate.

ProPublica could find only two occasions since Romney's tenure in which the department withheld money from communities for violating the Fair Housing Act. In several instances, records show, HUD has sent grants to communities even after they've been found by courts to have promoted segregated housing or been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. New Orleans, for example, has continued to receive grants after the Justice Department sued it for violating that Fair Housing Act by blocking a low-income housing project in a wealthy historic neighborhood.

ProPublica submitted 41 questions to HUD about its failure to use its authority to promote integrated housing. It issued a statement which did not address that issue but said the agency has worked hard to enforce provisions of the law that bar discrimination against individuals.

Scholars have traced the history of housing segregation in several notable books and articles. ProPublica has obtained new documents and interviewed key figures in the four-decade battle over the Fair Housing Act.

Present and former officials in HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity said their attempts to enforce the 1968 law were met with indifference or opposition from the agency's senior officials.

The office has the smallest staff and budget of HUD's four major programs. Several officials in key positions said they had never been trained to enforce the law's requirement to "affirmatively further" fair housing. In most cases, HUD does not even check the paperwork filed by cities and states about their efforts to deal with segregation and other issues that stymie integrated housing; it simply writes checks.

"People say integration has failed," said Julian, an assistant secretary for fair housing during the Clinton administration. "It hasn't failed because it's never been tried."

The Fair Housing Act was the most contentious of the civil rights-era legislation, blocked for years by Northern and Southern senators alike. It took infernos in more than 125 cities following King's assassination to force the bill's revival.

Former Vice President Walter Mondale, the floor manager of the legislation as a freshman senator from Minnesota, said King's death provided a powerful but brief urgency to eradicate the nation's ghettos.

Other laws and presidential orders have integrated the military, opened opportunities for higher education and provided protections against workplace discrimination.

But despite the Fair Housing Act, levels of residential segregation have barely budged in many of the large metropolitan areas where most African Americans live.

Today, as in the 1960s, many argue that the separation of the races is a matter of personal choice. But numerous surveys show that African Americans, more than any other group, want to live in integrated neighborhoods.

Others say income disparities are behind the color-coded American metropolises, that lower-income African Americans simply can't afford to live in wealthier white areas. Yet black Americans earning $75,000 a year typically live in poorer neighborhoods than white Americans earning $40,000 a year, according to an analysis of census data by John Logan of Brown University.

Mondale, now 84, said the law "hasn't created this integrated vision that we were talking about. One of the great moral failings of our country, despite the Great Society and despite what we tried to do, is the deprival of justice for the people who have come from behind. It's something I worked on all of my life and I am very disheartened by it."

The Obama administration — prodded by private lawsuits — has done somewhat more than its predecessors. It has taken the unprecedented step of withholding money from Joliet, Ill., and Westchester, N.Y., for not meeting civil rights obligations.

But advocates say the administration has fallen far short of its promises to reform this broken system. After nearly four years, federal housing officials have yet to issue regulations that would precisely define what communities need to do to "affirmatively further" fair housing.

Perhaps the starkest measure of the law's squandered potential is how little the torrent of federal dollars released by its passage has done to integrate U.S. communities.

Over the last two decades, taxpayers have sent $400 million in HUD block grants to Milwaukee, to no discernible effect. Milwaukee remains locked in a tie with Detroit for the title of America's most segregated metropolitan area for African Americans.

New York City, home to the nation's largest black population, has reeled in $4 billion in block grants since 1993. Yet in that time, demographers say, racial segregation has eased by just 3 percent. Today, 80 percent of black New Yorkers would have to move to create a city in which they were evenly integrated with whites.

Myron Orfield, a professor at the University of Minnesota Law School and one of the nation's leading experts on segregation, said when the federal government abandoned Romney's efforts it turned away from a critical opportunity to reshape American life.

"Segregation would have been cut by half and possibly eliminated," Orfield said. "The country would have been very different."

Hopes of the Great Migration Quickly Fade

In the first decades of the 20th century, African Americans began to resist the brutally oppressive post-Civil War South the only way they could — with their feet. Sneaking onto trains, they traded the tobacco and cotton fields of steamy Southern towns for the cold winters and cramped tenements of the North.

When the Great Migration began in 1910, just 10 percent of black Americans lived outside the South. Six decades later, nearly half of the country's 22.5 million African Americans called other states home. In all, 6 million African Americans left the South, a flow of humanity that redrew the nation's racial map.

The migrants sought jobs in booming Northern cities such as New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. In the early years, they moved into white neighborhoods, rarely living in places that were more than 30 percent black, according to sociologists Douglas Massey of Princeton University and Nancy Denton of the State University of New York at Albany.

It didn't last.

Cities and towns began adopting zoning codes that designated neighborhoods as all-white and all-black. When the U.S. Supreme Court struck down those laws as unconstitutional, real estate agents wrote "codes of ethics" that included bans on selling homes to African Americans outside of black areas. In some cities, white residents responded to the arrival of black families with riots, home bombings, and cross burnings. They formed associations dedicated to blocking even a single black family from moving in.

White communities also embraced racial covenants — legal language in deeds that barred any subsequent purchaser from selling to African Americans.

Still, African Americans kept moving north. By 1930, the black population in Northern cities had grown by 40 percent as another 1 million left the South.

Around this time the federal government began promoting the racial division of Northern cities, primarily through New Deal loan programs.

The Home Owners' Loan Corporation, created in 1933, introduced the practice of redlining, marking in red ink swaths of cities in which it would not lend. It rated white neighborhoods as the least risky and black neighborhoods as the most. It would not lend to a black person seeking to buy in a white neighborhood, or vice versa.

When the Federal Housing Administration opened its doors a year later, it adopted the same practices. As a result, 98 percent of the loans the FHA insured between 1934 and 1962 went to white borrowers. The policies encouraged white flight as even neighborhoods with small numbers of African Americans were rated as "hazardous." White residents who didn't mind black neighbors found their home values decreasing as the government refused to insure mortgages for new buyers.

A 1938 manual for the FHA encouraged officials to avoid mixing "inharmonious racial or nationality groups" and "the occupancy of properties except by the race for which they are intended."

With the end of World War II, a grateful nation made available vast amounts of credit to returning soldiers, who could borrow money through the GI Bill to buy their dream homes in the suburbs.

But banks often refused to approve loans for black soldiers attempting to use the GI Bill to buy homes. The Veterans Administration and the FHA officially supported racial covenants banning African Americans in new suburban developments until 1950, refusing to underwrite loans that would bring "incompatible" racial groups into newly created white areas.

Federal housing and development programs worked alongside state and local governments to bulldoze black and integrated neighborhoods for redevelopment and relocate African Americans to designated city corridors.

In their place, the government built public housing towers, home to thousands and thousands of people, nearly all of whom were black.

"As the new century wore on, areas of acceptable black residence became more and more narrowly circumscribed. The era of the ghetto had begun," Massey and Denton wrote in their book "American Apartheid."

As the boundaries of black neighborhoods expanded, white residents began to abandon cities altogether. Once again, federal policies accelerated segregation.

The government built highways and mass transit systems that made it possible for millions of white Americans to work in the inner city yet live in the suburbs.

It took just 60 years — not even a lifetime — to divide communities in nearly every metropolitan area along racial lines. Northern cities had become the most segregated in the country, analysis of census data shows.

LBJ Tries to Change Minds in the '60s

When the 1960s brought protests in the South against Jim Crow laws, civil rights leaders found an unlikely ally in the White House.

President Lyndon B. Johnson brushed aside the Southern leaders of his own party, pushing through landmark legislation that outlawed discrimination in voting, employment, public accommodations and public education.

One issue remained beyond the reach of Johnson's legendary persuasive skills: housing.

The president had contemplated introducing fair housing legislation as early as 1964, but his staff advised against it.

Johnson persisted, arguing that residential segregation was the wellspring of all other racial inequities. Just as Congress was passing some of the most far-reaching civil rights laws since Reconstruction, Northern ghettos erupted. In the three years before King's assassination, African Americans took to the streets in more than 100 cities. The rioting prompted Johnson to press harder for legislation to undo the nation's segregated housing patterns.

In 1966, he turned for help to Mondale, a 38-year-old senator from Minnesota not long into his first term. A former majority leader, Johnson held personal relationships with the Senate's most powerful figures. But housing was so toxic an issue, the president couldn't find anyone else to lead the fight.

"I was young and I thought I could do anything," said Mondale, now grayer but still an optimist. "I was a bit flattered that I'd get a bill that was so important."

With the help of co-sponsors Mondale and Edward Brooke of Massachusetts, then the only African American in the Senate, Johnson proposed a bill to ban discrimination in the sale or rental of housing. It went nowhere.

Mondale understood why his liberal colleagues were discomfited by the measure. If it came to the floor, pressure from constituents would force them to vote against it, making them look like hypocrites.

"A lot of civil rights was about making the South behave and taking the teeth from George Wallace," Mondale said, referring to the famously racist governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964, 1968, 1972 and 1976. "This came right to the neighborhoods across the country. This was civil rights getting personal."

Johnson, who had considered the 1966 housing bill his most devastating political defeat, did not back down. In the summer of 1967, Mondale called a black veteran to testify. Decorated for his service in Vietnam, Carlos Campbell had been appointed to a job in the Pentagon. Standing rigid in a crisp white uniform, he told the Senate housing and urban affairs subcommittee how he and his wife were unable to rent an apartment in the white neighborhoods near his new post in Arlington, Va., even with the help of the Defense Department's housing office.

"Up until the spring of 1965 I was largely convinced that our racial problems were rapidly diminishing and that education, professional credibility, and financial integrity were the necessary vehicles for obtaining full rights as a citizen," Campbell said. Once off the military base, he said, he'd been forced to "re-examine my philosophy." The man who had, in his own words, been entrusted with "safeguarding the nation's most delicate secrets" told senators that he had been turned away from more than 36 apartments because of his race.

"I remember old Dick Russell, that old segregationist, said, 'I am for segregation, but how do we tell black Americans who have fought and died for us that they have to go back in the box?'" Mondale said. "That was always the Achilles' heel, and this helped bring that to the front."

Minds were slowly changing. But the bill died again.

Two developments revived it.

Johnson had asked a blue-ribbon panel to study the riots and make recommendations on how to prevent such violence in the future.

The Kerner Commission's searing conclusion — that the United States was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white — separate and unequal" — is enshrined in the history books.

What is less well-remembered was the basis for that finding. The commission blamed housing segregation for the riots. "What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto," the panel wrote. "White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it." The report called for a federal fair housing law.

Days later, on April 4, 1968, an assassin killed King on the balcony of a Memphis motel. Black communities again exploded in riots.

Washington, D.C., which had recently become majority black, was among the hardest hit. Mondale recalled flying over the nation's capital in a helicopter thinking, "By God, it looks like Vietnam."

"You could see the fires from the Capitol and the whole place seemed to be in flames," he said. "The city was locked down, the Capitol was under guard, and nobody knew what was going to happen. The nation came close to pulling apart."

Many lawmakers shared Mondale's fear that the horrific conditions of the nation's ghettos had set the stage for a cycle of deepening violence and confrontation.

Johnson used the shock following King's assassination to his advantage, urging Congress to pass the long-delayed housing bill as a tribute to the slain leader.

The housing legislation, Mondale said, had been the most filibustered bill in history. But when lawmakers took up the bill this time, "They didn't dare," Mondale recalled. "They didn't dare hold it up."

Just six days after King died, Congress passed Title VIII of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act. As the votes in the House were tallied — 250-171 — armed National Guardsmen ringed the Capitol to protect Congress from the rioters in burning slums just a few blocks away.

Johnson signed the bill into law April 11. "We have passed many civil rights pieces of legislation," he said. "But none is more important than this."

The law banned racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, block busting (in which real estate agents move a black family into a white neighborhood and use it to frighten white homeowners into selling, turning the neighborhood from white to black), racial steering (in which real estate agents steer home seekers to racially distinct neighborhoods), and intimidation and coercion.

Then it went a step further. The law required federal officials to do everything possible to "affirmatively further" fair housing. This odd turn of phrase, which was not further defined, distinguished the housing law from almost all other civil rights legislation. It didn't just ban discrimination. It charged the government to act to bring about "integrated and balanced living patterns," according to Mondale's statements at the time.

To accomplish this, the law directed HUD to create a civil rights office that would enforce the new law. According to Brooke, the intent was to enable the government to "withhold funds or defer action" to dismantle segregation.

By including this provision, lawmakers were acknowledging that previous statutes and presidential orders addressing housing discrimination had been ignored. President Kennedy had signed an executive order in 1962 banning discrimination in federally subsidized housing. Nothing changed. The 1964 civil rights law banned racial discrimination by any agency that received federal money. It, too, made no difference.

Mondale and the bill's floor managers made concessions to secure the law's passage that weakened HUD's enforcement powers.

One key compromise limited HUD's ability to punish discriminatory landlords and real estate agents. The original draft envisioned a mounting schedule of fines. The final version gave HUD only the authority to seek voluntary settlements. If landlords refused, the agency could do nothing but inform those complaining of discrimination to file private lawsuits. Moreover, by capping damages for successful claims at $1,000, the act made such lawsuits thoroughly impractical.

Mondale viewed the law as a first step, envisaging a succession of bills that would address weaknesses in the Fair Housing Act.

From the start, HUD was whipsawed by conflicting mandates. Cobbled together from agencies that just a few years earlier had openly pushed segregation, HUD was supposed to transform itself into a force for civil rights. Not surprisingly, the agency's predominant focus remained on creating housing as fast as possible.

"For 40 years we tried to get interest in enforcement," Mondale said. "There have been many times that I have been disappointed with federal enforcement of this law."

Nixon's 'Serious Romney Problem'

Johnson never got an opportunity to administer the law. Battered by protests over the Vietnam War, he declined to run for re-election. Hubert Humphrey, his vice president, lost a closely contested election to Richard Nixon, a Republican whose winning coalition was built around former Southern Democrats and white Northerners.

Nixon named an avowed opponent of housing segregation as his first secretary of Housing and Urban Development.

George Romney, who unsuccessfully ran against Nixon early in the presidential campaign, had championed housing integration as governor in his home state of Michigan.

The 1967 Detroit riots, which destroyed 2,000 buildings and took 43 lives, profoundly affected Romney. On the night National Guard and Army combat troops backed by tanks finally quelled the violence, Romney delivered a "Report to the People" that was broadcast statewide.

"Some already are saying the answer is brute force such as would be used on mad dogs," the governor said. "Others are questioning present social and economic programs because they claim Negroes don't appreciate what has already been done."

"Some white people and public officials will advocate the return to state's rights as a way to legalize segregation," he continued. "As citizens of Michigan, as Americans, we must unhesitatingly reject all these divisive courses."

Instead, Romney enacted a statewide fair housing law. He called for an end to local zoning that encouraged segregation and for the creation of low-cost housing throughout metropolitan Detroit and the state.

"Force alone will not eliminate riots," Romney wrote in letters responding to angry citizens. "We must eliminate the problems from which they stem."

Romney knew his ideas went against the grain of the Nixon administration, but his papers, housed at the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library, show that he viewed open housing as a moral obligation regardless of political cost.

So Romney and his staff crafted a secret agenda to use HUD's powers under the 1968 act. Romney staff members debated how much to let the White House, and the public, know about their efforts.

In a memo to Romney dated Aug. 15, 1969, HUD Undersecretary Richard Van Dusen said that federal housing subsidies, along with urban renewal policies and suburban water and sewer grants, had increased segregation. Those same programs, or the threatened loss of them, could be used to integrate suburbs that counted on the money but also blocked the construction of affordable housing.

The memo anticipated opposition from Nixon, Congress, the Republican Party and mayors.

"Judgments must be made as to what steps may be taken quietly and without formal policy announcement," the memo said. "It seems probable that a frontal attack which publicly seeks to redress the ghetto problem would arouse major political opposition."

Soon after, Romney launched his Open Communities program. Separately, he ordered his staff to draft legislation that allowed the government to override local zoning that kept out federally subsidized housing.

"Romney recognized these places got a lot of stuff from the federal government," said Orfield, the University of Minnesota law professor. "And Romney said if the federal government is going to build you a new freeway and sewer systems — the government was footing about 80 percent of the cost — you are not going to build communities at the end of those freeway and sewer systems for only affluent white people."

Romney's campaign achieved some initial successes. HUD terminated grants to the Boston, Baltimore and Toledo metro areas after they rejected low-income housing slated for white neighborhoods, and won concessions.

The program could not be kept secret for long. On June 22, 1970, Nixon's most trusted domestic adviser, John Ehrlichman, sent Romney a note.

"The White House is receiving the strongest sort of representations regarding the proposed 'open communities' policy," he wrote. "This proposal has not had the usual policy review...May I ask the present status...?"

Romney sent back a less-than-truthful reply. The department had not created a new policy, he wrote. It was merely reviewing "a range of alternatives."

A month later, the new HUD chief decided to test the program in territory he knew well — the 99 percent-white Detroit suburb of Warren. The once-sleepy town had undergone a population boom as whites fled Detroit in the '60s. Its residents were openly hostile to the idea of African Americans moving into their town. After local police failed to protect an interracial couple who'd moved there, then-Gov. Romney dispatched the state police.

Romney told Warren that HUD would withhold federal dollars if the city didn't agree to build affordable housing. Warren's mayor pleaded for leniency. Romney stood firm, saying: "Black people have just as much right to equal opportunities as we do."

Local officials in Warren complained in a letter to the White House about HUD's "integrationist misfits." The president responded immediately, denying the White House had a plan to tie HUD dollars to integration. He ordered Romney to release the money.

The confrontation over Warren marked a critical moment in the history of the Fair Housing Act. For the first time enforcement of the law collided with the political realities of a president thinking about re-election.

In the weeks after the Warren case, Southern congressmen angrily assailed Romney's plans to integrate the suburbs, particularly in metropolitan Atlanta.

Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, segregationist candidate for president in 1948, and other southern leaders took their complaints directly to Nixon. "We in the South are motivated by race," Georgia Congressman Fletcher Thompson told the president, according to notes from the session. The group warned that Nixon appeared "anti-South" because of Romney's actions. Some Southerners, they said, had derisively begun to refer to Nixon as "Mister Integrator."

Remarkably, Romney continued to press ahead with his Open Communities program. By the fall of 1970, Nixon had lost patience with his HUD secretary. A memo from Ehrlichman outlining options for Nixon's "Post-Southern strategy" for the 1972 campaign called HUD's effort to integrate the suburbs "a serious Romney problem which we will apparently have as long as he is here."

"This is no approved program," Ehrlichman wrote. "But he keeps loudly talking about it in spite of our efforts to shut him up."

Not long after, Nixon asked Romney to leave the Cabinet and become U.S. ambassador to Mexico.

Romney turned down the job. In a Nov. 16, 1970, letter, he said he understood that the president believed they were "on a collision course because of a difference in ideology with respect to the racial aspects of HUD's programs." He asked for a meeting "to discuss my views personally with you."

At the end of the letter, Romney again made his argument for integration. "It is becoming increasingly clear that the lower, middle income and the poor, white, black and brown family, cannot continue to be isolated in the deteriorating core cities without broad scale revolution." He underlined the words.

Nixon froze Romney out, refusing to meet with the HUD secretary.

Weeks later, as the year came to a close, Romney, isolated and disgruntled, prepared notes for his long-delayed conversation with the president.

"President only wants yes-man," he wrote before outlining the same concerns — suburban integration and HUD funding — that had enraged Nixon. It appears the meeting never took place.

With Romney unwilling to take the ambassadorship, Nixon decided that he, not HUD, would set the nation's policy on fair housing. The president asked his staff to figure out just how narrowly he could construe the Fair Housing Act. He began referring publicly to Romney's approach as "forced integration."

Nixon's special counsel, Leonard Garment, tried to craft a strategy consistent with both the courts' interpretations of the law and Nixon's political needs. White House aides hoped that Garment would come up with a rationale for confining the fair housing law to overt acts of discrimination. But when Garment studied the court cases, he concluded this was not possible. Again and again, federal judges had interpreted the "further fair housing phrase" to mean that the federal government had an active role to play in desegregation.

Ehrlichman shopped for another opinion, turning to Tom Stoel, a lawyer who worked in the president's executive office. Stoel argued that the government could restrict enforcement of the law to "cases of individual discrimination" and need not get involved in zoning issues or press communities to build affordable housing. This would "avoid any hint of 'forced integration'" but, he warned, "may not fulfill the Government's obligation under the law."

Ignoring Stoel's caution, Nixon ordered HUD to stop all efforts to pressure cities and states to foster integrated housing.

As the Nixon White House geared up for the 1972 re-election campaign, Romney gave up. "Developments in recent months and days have convinced me that you are no longer interested in my counsel and advice before making policy and operating decisions directly affecting the activities of the Department I head," Romney wrote to Nixon in August 1972. "Consequently, I have concluded more can be accomplished in the future if the Department is headed by someone whose counsel and advice you want."

Though Romney's formal resignation letter in November 1972 made no reference to the civil rights battle that had been his downfall, insiders may well have detected an ironic turn of phrase in the words he chose.

"I want to thank you for the privilege of serving the nation under your great leadership," Romney wrote. "The experience has been a rewarding and invaluable one that, among other things, has deepened my understanding of our country's political processes."

With that, the federal government's only large-scale effort to integrate the segregated suburbs it helped create sputtered to a close. The Fair Housing Act was just four years old.

Block Grants: Another Missed Opportunity

In the last years of the Nixon presidency, HUD officials drew up plans to consolidate the agency's array of programs into a single block grant that would automatically flow to communities. Previously, cities and states had to apply for money to pave a road or build a sewer. Under what Nixon called "The New Federalism," local officials would decide how to spend the federal aid they received.

This approach should have been a boon for enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. Block grants gave HUD a single choke point to cut off money to recalcitrant communities.

But that's not what happened.

The bill drafted by the Nixon administration required localities accepting block grants to comply with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which banned racial discrimination by entities receiving federal dollars. The draft made no mention of the 1968 fair housing act or its mandate for the government to "affirmatively further" fair housing.

This angered HUD officials charged with enforcing the Fair Housing Act. Samuel Simmons, HUD's assistant secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, sent a memo to HUD's general counsel noting that the omission "is poor policy and will certainly be cited as evidence that the administration is not concerned with effective civil rights enforcement."

After the Watergate scandal forced Nixon out of office in 1974, Congress passed the Housing and Community Development Act as conceived by Nixon's aides.

"The zeal with which Federal officials carried out policies of discrimination in the early days of the Government's housing effort has not been matched by a similar enthusiasm in carrying out their current legal mandate of equal housing opportunity," the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights wrote in its assessment of the fifth anniversary of the Fair Housing Act. "Residential segregation, which the Federal government helped to foster, remains a fact of life in the Nation's metropolitan areas."

HUD did not withhold a block grant from a single community between 1974 and 1983.

That year Congress passed a law directing HUD to release money only to communities that documented their compliance with the requirement to "affirmatively further fair housing." It took five more years before that law became part of the regulations for block grants.

HUD could provide no records on how many times the agency has withheld grants from communities for violating the housing act since then. As best as can be determined from interviews with longtime staff, HUD secretaries used their new powers twice from 1988 to the present.

Through the 1980s, federal judges lambasted HUD for maintaining segregated housing and using its housing dollars to maintain segregation.

"It has been clear at least since the passage of Title VIII(1968) — if not from the date of Executive Order 11063 (1962) and HUD's inception as a federal agency (1965) — that HUD has had an affirmative duty to eradicate segregation," one particularly irate judge ruled in a Texas case accusing the agency of financing segregated public housing. "HUD has a duty to know how its money is spent, and in fact has known that it is supporting segregated housing in East Texas. Notwithstanding, it has continued to actively support the system in perhaps the most effective possible way — by paying for it."

In 1988, on the 20th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act's passage, Congress gave HUD the authority to impose tougher penalties on landlords caught discriminating. But on the crucial issue of what Congress meant by the phrase "affirmatively further fair housing," lawmakers made no changes.

The Wealthy County That Could

Just a few miles north of the White House, one of the nation's wealthiest and whitest suburbs charted a different course.

Without prodding from HUD or federal officials, the council for Montgomery County, Md., moved in the 1970s to enact a zoning ordinance that required developers to include affordable units in each large development.

Montgomery County seemed an implausible place for such a move. The 92 percent-white suburb bordered on 65-percent black Washington, D.C. and had desegregated its schools just a decade before. But the civil rights struggles of the 1960s brought a new generation into local government. They were shocked when a study found that many African Americans in the county lived in shacks that lacked running water or sewer connections.

"We saw the segregation," said Joyce Siegel, county housing commissioner at the time. "It was a fairness issue — that one part of the county wasn't going to have more affordable housing than another. We had to be fair."

The Suburban Maryland Fair Housing group, which had been fighting real estate covenants, joined forces with the League of Women Voters. They championed an ordinance that would ensure decent housing for African Americans and lower-income people and bar the county from concentrating its affordable housing in desolate pockets.

The proposed law said any development of more than 50 units (it has since been lowered to 20) must set aside no less than 15 percent of the housing for lower-income residents. Even more radical, the ordinance allowed the county to purchase up to a third of the affordable units for use as public housing.

No community within the county's jurisdiction was excluded.

The measure met fervid resistance from many suburban communities within the county. At one point, Siegel said, she needed a police escort. It took six years to pass the law. One advocate brought a birthday cake before the council each year to mark its failure.

When the council finally approved the legislation in 1973, the county executive vetoed it, only to see his veto over-ridden. The ordinance became law in January 1974, a time when other cities and towns were rushing to put up zoning barriers to keep out lower-income housing. Montgomery County's law was the first such zoning ordinance in the country, and it has spurred construction of more than 13,000 affordable housing units tucked into some of the county's most exclusive zip codes.

From the standpoint of desegregation, Montgomery County has become a model of what could have been.

Over three decades, its black population more than tripled to 18 percent. It remains one of the nation's richest counties, yet segregation has fallen well below the national average.

Committed to Change, Resigned to Concessions

Bill Clinton was 11 when President Eisenhower sent federal troops to protect black students attempting to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Ark. He came to Washington in 1992 vowing to take a more assertive stance on civil rights.

To transform HUD, he turned to Henry Cisneros, a former four-term mayor of San Antonio committed to making full use of the powers provided under the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

Cisneros had grown up in a working-class San Antonio neighborhood of bungalows and tidy yards that he says resembled Norman Rockwell's paintings in every way but one: All the faces were brown. He remembers riding through the city with his mother as she pointed out water fountains and restrooms designated "colored" and "white."

In April 1992, Cisneros sat watching a Lakers game from his Texas home when images of burning Los Angeles neighborhoods flashed across his screen. Black residents in Watts rioted following a jury's acquittal of three white cops in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, a black motorist. Cisneros immediately phoned L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley, offering to help.

The next day, Cisneros flew past the billowing smoke that darkened Los Angeles' skies, witnessing a scene similar to what Mondale glimpsed in 1968 as he flew over the nation's capital. Cisneros went on television, pleading for peace between Latinos and African Americans who were battling police and, sometimes, each other. Broom in hand, he urged people to stop destroying their own neighborhoods and start cleaning up. Fifty-three people died in the riots. Like Romney a quarter century earlier, Cisneros was deeply affected.

"It was a very profound moment for me. Anger. Pain. Desperation," Cisneros recalled in an interview. "It touched me that these emotions would be so raw in our country, that despite all of the efforts to put out programs in housing and entrepreneurship and health, that we weren't really making enough of a difference to prevent that level of desperation."

Cisneros saw HUD's failure to fight segregation as a cause of the riots. He told the senators at his confirmation hearing that if he became HUD secretary, the agency's passivity would end.

Underscoring his commitment to demolishing HUD's existing culture, he named two civil rights attorneys to lead the agency's fair housing efforts. Elizabeth Julian had spent years suing the agency for fostering segregation. Roberta Achtenberg was a co-founder of the National Lesbian Law Center and had served on San Francisco's Board of Supervisors.

Cisneros met with Massey and Denton, two scholars whose account of the government's role in residential segregation had just been published. His aides contacted others who had documented the perils of ghetto life, including Alex Kotlowitz, whose 1992 book "There Are No Children Here" exposed the plight of families in Chicago's segregated housing projects.

The team knew it would face political headwinds from both Capitol Hill and local government. But they were taken aback by the fierce resistance from the ranks of HUD's career officials.

"Until we got inside and started poking around, nobody realized that HUD had either been asleep at the wheel for a number of years, or in some cases some things were known about and allowed to take place because nobody had the courage to intervene," Achtenberg said. "We had problems in all our departments."

Much of HUD's staff and budget was devoted to building new housing units. Success was measured in the billions of dollars of grants and loan guarantees that flowed to cities. The civil rights lawyers looked at projects through the lens of race and the 1968 act. Their job was to say no.

"There was often conflict around whether we were enforcing the laws and regs as strenuously as Fair Housing thought we should be," said Bob Berlan, who retired from HUD in 2008 after 37 years in community development. "That was the case from the day I entered HUD to the day I left."

Robbie Herndon, who retired from HUD in 2006 as regional fair housing director based in Kansas, saw the issue from the other side of the table. Development officials in the department, she said, "would tell recipients they didn't have to comply with fair housing regulations — I know this because some of the recipients were bold enough to tell us."

Herndon joined the agency in the '70s to advance civil rights but left disillusioned. "It was a battle throughout my whole career, and it saddened me that these communities receive millions and have received millions and have not been held accountable for not serving all their constituents," she said. "We used to call it the Title VI blues. It's like you're swimming with sharks and many of the sharks were HUD people."

Some say that HUD had created its own caste system. The Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Office, HUD's civil rights arm, has traditionally been more heavily African American than the other HUD offices. Currently, the office is 57 percent black and 27 percent white. By contrast, the Community Development division, which disburses grants, is 51 percent white and 32 percent black.

In conversations with HUD officials, the fair housing office is frequently referred to as a "stepchild." Achtenberg said this was evident even in the agency's pay structure, in which staffers in the fair housing office earned less than comparably experienced counterparts elsewhere in the agency.

Achtenberg said she tried to erase the disparity but was unsuccessful.

"HUD is considered the most disfavored of all agencies," she said. "And FHEO is the most despised of all."

A list of HUD employees by pay grade shows the fair housing office has a smaller percentage of employees at the highest pay grade than the agency's three other large programs. It is unclear from the data, which ProPublica obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, why this would be.

"I think it's more they weren't respected," said Manuel Ochoa, a former HUD deputy assistant secretary under President George W. Bush. "There was a lack of professionalism" and other HUD programs "didn't feel they had a capable partner."

He paused, then added, "That sounds hurtful."

When Cisneros arrived, the agency was defending itself in court against a swarm of civil rights lawsuits. HUD's standard response was to argue that law was a general statement of principles which did not require the agency to take any specific steps to foster integrated housing. Cisneros looked at the cases and concluded that the government was wrong.

"We were complicit in discrimination, and I gave instructions to fix it," Cisneros said. "That put us in the position of the department having to admit that what we had done before was inadequate, it was wrong."

One long-running confrontation over fair housing centered on Vidor, a small Texas town that had been ordered to desegregate its all-white public housing as part of a class-action suit filed against HUD. Vidor, a historic center of Klu Klux Klan activity, had defied the order for a decade.

Cisneros decided it was time for HUD to do its job. When his attempt to move in black families crumbled under threats and harassment from local residents, Cisneros called in the U.S Marshals, the FBI and police to escort four black adults and seven children into the buildings.

When he took over Vidor's public housing authority, it marked the first time HUD had ever taken control of a local housing agency for civil rights violations. Yet even in this case, HUD didn't withhold funding to the city.

Cisneros did order sweeping changes to other HUD housing programs. He oversaw the new Hope VI program, which knocked down housing projects and replaced them with mixed-income developments. He provided vouchers that allowed poor African Americans and Latinos to move to better communities. He cracked down on predatory lending and moved to expand homeownership among racial minorities.

Clinton, whose press office said he would not agree to be interviewed for this story, backed his HUD secretary, emerging as the first president to openly press for integrated housing since LBJ.

"Racial and ethnic segregation, both in the private housing market and in public and assisted housing, has been well documented," Clinton wrote in a 1994 memo to agency heads announcing a new executive order. "We can do better."

The president's executive order established the Cabinet-level President's Fair Housing Council. The council was to assess federal programs with an eye toward promoting integrated housing. Clinton ordered it to design a pilot program that would help inner-city families move to the suburbs.

Housing advocates applauded the initiatives. But officials overseeing HUD's development and housing programs often opposed them.

Many in Community Planning and Development, which administers the block grant program, viewed the agency's civil rights efforts as an irritating nuisance, current and former HUD officials say.

"CPD did not see itself as having civil rights responsibilities — they saw themselves as getting the money out and keeping the mayors happy," Julian said. "I liked those folks, but I always felt like when I walked in a room I was a thorn in their sides because I was asking them to do something that made their jobs more difficult."

The fair housing push also didn't sit well with congressional Republicans, who held a dim view of the agency. When the GOP took control of the House in the 1994 midterm elections, it slashed HUD's budget and threatened to do away with the agency altogether.

Still, Cisneros, Achtenberg and Julian pushed forward. In 1996, they released the Fair Housing Planning Guide. For the first time, HUD gave communities receiving block grants some advice on how to comply with the fair housing law. It urged local communities to prepare a report every three to five years detailing impediments to fair housing and suggested that block grant recipients set measurable goals and study the effect of local zoning laws.

The guide came with significant shortcomings. It set no requirements and provided no specific examples of actions — such as locating all affordable housing in predominantly black or Latino areas — that would lead to the withdrawal of HUD funds. It said that unless someone raised a concern, HUD would assume its grantees weren't violating any civil rights laws.

Even as the work inched forward, Cisneros was in trouble. An independent prosecutor was examining whether he had lied about payments he made to a former mistress. With his legal fees mounting, Cisneros stepped down. He ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor count of lying to the FBI.

By 1997, Cisneros, Julian and Achtenberg had all resigned.

"It's hard to get anything done in a federal bureaucracy, but particularly anything fair housing and anything dealing with race," Julian said. "I never felt so ineffective at achieving things that I felt were important than when I was at HUD."

As Andrew Cuomo Steps Up, Mayors Stomp Down

To replace Cisneros, Clinton named Andrew Cuomo, the son of former New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who had founded a nonprofit to develop low-income housing called Housing Enterprise for Less Privileged.

In 1998, Cuomo proposed a regulation that defined what it meant to "affirmatively further fair housing."

The rule made clear that HUD would deny funding if it found a community's efforts "did not result in meaningful and measurable progress," or if HUD or the Justice Department had charged the community with violating the Fair Housing Act.

Local leaders, used to receiving HUD's billions with no strings attached, raised a hurricane of opposition, enlisting members of Congress and complaining vociferously to agency officials.

Three decades earlier, the U.S. Conference of Mayors had pushed for such measures, saying "for the Federal government to proceed otherwise would be to publicly sanction and perpetuate patterns of residential segregation."

Things had changed.

In March 1999, the conference sent Cuomo a letter saying the "proposed rule would have a devastating impact on a city's ability to achieve housing, economic development and fair housing goals."

"The threat of withholding critical HUD funding should not be the standard for affirmatively furthering fair housing," the group wrote.

It had taken HUD a year and half of internal wrangling to release the rule to the public.

The cities and counties killed it in just a few weeks.

In a letter to the mayors' group a few weeks later, Howard Glaser, a senior aide to Cuomo, wrote, "HUD has not only heard but listened to the issues you and the USCM leadership have raised."

Hobbled by the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Clinton administration had little appetite for a public fight over integration. The President's Fair Housing Council, as far as anyone can recall, met only once. It took no action.

The election of George W. Bush once again pushed civil rights issues aside at HUD, according to three high-ranking officials who served at the agency during his administration. No one talked about what it would take to affirmatively further fair housing. Segregated communities continued to receive billions in HUD dollars without even pretending to take steps to address fair housing issues.

New Hope Under Obama, Same Dim Prospects

In 2007, a decade after leaving HUD, Cisneros joined another former HUD secretary, George H.W. Bush appointee Jack Kemp, to lead a seven-member commission assessing the enforcement of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.

On the 40th anniversary of the act's passage, the panel delivered a blistering indictment.

"The current federal system for ensuring fair housing compliance by state and local recipients of housing assistance has failed," the report found. "HUD requires no evidence that anything is actually being done as a condition of funding, and it does not take adverse action if jurisdictions are directly involved in discriminatory actions or fail to affirmatively further fair housing." The election of Barack Obama as president in 2008 raised hopes that HUD might finally assert its powers.

As his HUD secretary, Obama tapped an affordable housing advocate, Shaun Donovan, who had done graduate work on federal housing vouchers and integration. Donovan turned to John Trasvina, a civil rights lawyer and head of the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, to lead HUD's fair housing office.

Top HUD officials began publicly talking about segregation for the first time in years.

"The folks fighting segregation aren't social engineering. Segregation was created by social engineering," Donovan said in speeches across the country. "Far more often than not, segregation, isolation and poverty don't occur in spite of government. They happen because of government — by government dollars and government decisions made with government authority."

The issue of HUD's complicity in housing segregation hit the headlines just a few weeks after Obama took the oath of office. Ruling on a lawsuit brought by a nonprofit, a federal judge concluded that under HUD's watch Westchester, a wealthy county just outside New York City, had "utterly failed" to live up to its fair housing obligations.

Westchester moved to settle the suit and HUD agreed to oversee the terms of the deal, which required the county to attack exclusionary zoning and create housing affordable to low and moderate income African Americans and Latinos in its whitest communities.

The department also settled a lawsuit brought during the Bush administration that had accused HUD and the state of Louisiana of discriminating against African American homeowners in the post-Katrina rebuilding program. It agreed to pay $62 million to 1,300 victims.

The administration made other inroads as well, nearly doubling the funding for private fair housing enforcement agencies to $42.5 million. In November, HUD threatened to cut off more than $10 million in block grants targeted for hurricane recovery in St. Bernard Parish, La. Civil rights advocates had accused the parish of trying to keep out African Americans by restricting rentals. That same month, the department rejected Texas' proposal to use $1.7 billion in block grant funds for hurricane repairs, in part because of civil rights concerns.

Meanwhile, a series of government studies documented the extent to which the law's requirements had been ignored.

A 2009 internal HUD study found that many communities were not even bothering to complete the required fair housing paperwork when they applied for block grants. In a sample of 70 applicants, 35 had not provided an "analysis of impediments" to fair housing, prompting HUD to conclude that they were "apparently not performed at all." Nearly all of the reports received were considered substandard, the review found.

A year later, investigators from the Government Accountability Office confirmed what civil rights advocates had long known: HUD's system for ensuring compliance with the fair housing law was a sham.

GAO officials reviewed documents filed by 441 recipients of block grants, a step HUD officials do not routinely take.

They found that about one-third of the fair housing materials were out of date. More than one in 10 hadn't been updated since the '90s. Communities in the Midwest and Northeast — the most-segregated regions of the country — performed the worst.

The GAO dismissed the analyses of impediments to fair housing that some communities provided as worthless because of their "brevity and lack of content." Most did not offer time frames for when the communities would eliminate barriers to integration or include the required signatures of the relevant elected officials.

Investigators noted that 25 recipients of block grants had filed no analysis, "raising questions about whether some jurisdictions may be receiving federal funds without preparing the documents required to demonstrate that they have taken steps to affirmatively further fair housing."

According to the GAO, HUD staffers in seven regions had read the key documents for just 17 of 275 block grant recipients. Efforts to ensure "the integrity of the AI process...were not common," the report said.

The GAO made a number of recommendations. But HUD didn't even adopt the simplest one: to require that grantees submit their analysis of impediments for HUD to review.

In interviews, many HUD officials acknowledged they have no idea how to enforce the provision for affirmatively furthering fair housing. Already overstretched, they focus on what is clear: the disability accommodations provision of the Fair Housing Act. It's simple, they say, to check off whether an apartment door is wide enough for a wheelchair or if a parking lot has enough handicapped spots.

But compliance officers stumble when it comes to race and segregation.

One said she received little training on how to apply the 1968 act to block grant recipients. "The one week of training I was sent to, you focus on the civil rights law as a whole," she said. "You're not focused per se on segregation." The official said she did not review broader issues such as the impact of discriminatory zoning "because I don't even know what they are."

Rolando Alvarado supervised fair housing enforcement for HUD in New Jersey for more than a decade. When asked to define "affirmatively furthering fair housing," he exhaled and then paused. Ten seconds passed.

"That is tricky. There is no exact regulation, it's a gray area," said Alvarado, who retired in 2009. "I've never seen anything that clearly defines that in my time at HUD."

Alvarado said he relied on his staff to ensure enforcement of the mandate. But how could his subordinates enforce something he himself could not explain?

"You are right. I don't know," he said. "It was reliance on if staff had conducted enough investigations and compliance reviews they would have an inkling of what to look for."

Alvarado said he could not recall a single instance in which he challenged a community's assertions about its efforts to further fair housing. When it comes to these issues, he said, "You are basically taking them at their word."

After the Westchester settlement, in which the judge criticized the department for failing to enforce the law, the word came down from HUD leaders that there should not be a recurrence. Officials say that directive was not accompanied by any training, additional staff or instructions on what practices should be examined.

"The message is that we need to be more aggressive but absent the new rule, there is very little guidance as to what would constitute a failure to affirmatively further fair housing," said a senior fair housing official. "There's a car here and nobody knows how to drive it."

Trasvina promised Congress in January 2010 that by the end of the year the agency would release a rule requiring communities that receive money from the agency to "promote integration." More than two years later, those regulations have not been issued. HUD has declined to say when they might appear or give a reason for the delay.

The focus of HUD's civil rights work appears to have veered away from race. In March, the department issued a rule banning discrimination against gay and transgender people in HUD-assisted housing and by lenders receiving guarantees from the Federal Housing Authority.

Asked what they are doing to fulfill the Fair Housing Act's mandates, HUD officials pointed to Joliet, Ill., where HUD has withheld block grant funds over the city's attempt to demolish a mostly black federally subsidized apartment complex. HUD also has withheld block grant money from Westchester County, which the Justice Department says has failed to live up to the terms of its settlement agreement.

Brian Sullivan, a spokesman for the housing agency, said in an email that HUD "very nearly" cut off block grant money for Galveston, Texas, and threatened to do so in Delaware's Sussex County.

But other communities with serious questions about fair housing continue to receive federal housing dollars, and fair housing officials say the agency still brushes civil rights concerns aside. One senior housing official pointed to New Orleans, which hasn't lost its block grant despite the Department of Justice lawsuit. "If that's not enough to reject a grantees' funding," he said. "Any finding from the fair housing office will not ever be sufficient."

Another example is Waukesha County, Wisc. HUD launched an investigation of the 90 percent-white county last year following a complaint from a fair housing group. The group accused the county of allowing its nearly all-white communities to block rental housing to keep out African Americans and Latinos from neighboring Milwaukee. African Americans and Latinos account for 57 percent of the city's population.

Yet the agency treats Waukesha County no differently from racially integrated Montgomery County, which has a 30-year track record of placing affordable housing in its most prosperous neighborhoods. Waukesha still receives its automatic influx of HUD dollars.

"It is fair to say, it is accurate to say, that the only situation in which HUD is doing anything effectively to affirmatively further fair housing are situations where there has been litigation," said Florence Wagman Roisman, a law professor at Indiana University. "Then it does as little as possible, as grudgingly as possible."

Prospects for substantial change appear dim.

Obama administration officials say that if the president is re-elected, they will complete work on the long-delayed rules defining what it means to "affirmatively further fair housing."

At a private fundraising event in Florida in April, Mitt Romney said he would consider closing down HUD if he wins the election.

"I'm going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them," he said. "Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later."

Have you experienced discrimination under the Fair Housing Act? Share your story with us.

by Kim Barker, ProPublica, and Rick Young and Emma Schwartz, Frontline

This post was co-published with PBS' Frontline.

The boxes landed in the office of Montana investigators in March 2011.

Found in a meth house in Colorado, they were somewhat of a mystery, holding files on 23 conservative candidates in state races in Montana. They were filled with candidate surveys and mailers that said they were paid for by campaigns, and fliers and bank records from outside spending groups. One folder was labeled "Montana $ Bomb."

The documents pointed to one outside group pulling the candidates' strings: a social welfare nonprofit called Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP.

Altogether, the records added up to possible illegal "coordination" between the nonprofit and candidates for office in 2008 and 2010, said a Montana investigator and a former Federal Election Commission chairman who reviewed the material. Outside groups are allowed to spend money on political campaigns, but not to coordinate with candidates.

"My opinion, for what it's worth, is that WTP was running a lot of these campaigns," said investigator Julie Steab of the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, who initially received the boxes from Colorado.

The boxes were examined by Frontline and ProPublica as part of an investigation into the growing influence on elections of dark money groups, tax-exempt organizations that can accept unlimited contributions and do not have to identify their donors. The documents offer a rare glimpse into the world of dark money, showing how Western Tradition Partnership appealed to donors, interacted with candidates and helped shape their election efforts.

Though WTP's spending has been at the state level, it's best-known nationally for bringing a lawsuit that successfully challenged Montana's ban on corporate spending in elections, extending the provisions of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Citizens United decision to all states.

The tax code allows nonprofits like WTP to engage in some political activity, but they are supposed to have social welfare as their primary purpose. As reported previously by ProPublica and Frontline, when WTP applied for recognition of its tax-exempt status, it told the IRS under penalty of perjury that it would not directly or indirectly attempt to influence elections — even though it already had.

The group is now locked in an ongoing dispute with Montana authorities, who ruled in October 2010 that the nonprofit should have registered as a political committee and should have to disclose its donors. WTP sued. A hearing is set for March.

In the meantime, the group has changed its name to American Tradition Partnership, reflecting its larger ambitions. This month, it sent Montana voters a mailer in the form of a newspaper called the Montana Statesman that claimed to be the state's "largest & most trusted news source."

The front page accused the Democratic gubernatorial candidate of being soft on sex offenders.

Donny Ferguson, American Tradition Partnership's spokesman and executive director, did not specifically address the documents found in Colorado or allegations of coordination made against WTP.

"American Tradition Partnership always obeys every letter of every applicable law," he wrote in an emailed response to questions. "ATP does not, and never will, endorse candidates or urge voters to vote for or against candidates. ... These false allegations are old hat."

On its website, the group says its primary purpose is issue advocacy and combating radical environmentalists, whom it sometimes calls "gang green." It describes itself as a grassroots group backed by a broad membership of small donors.

When asked about the documents found in Colorado, Jim Brown, a lawyer for the group, said he was unfamiliar with them.

After being shown some of the documents by Frontline, Brown, in a follow-up email, said his review indicated that they appeared to belong to a company called Direct Mail. Direct Mail and Communications is a print shop in Livingston, Mont., run by a one-time key player in WTP and his wife.

Brown urged Frontline to turn over the documents. "If the documents are purported to be what you say they are, then you may knowingly be in possession of stolen property," Brown wrote.

The records are in the hands of the Montana Commissioner of Political Practices, which considers them public and reviewable upon request.

* * *

In the anything-goes world of modern campaign finance, outside groups face one major restriction: They are not allowed to coordinate with candidates. That's because contributions to candidates and parties are still capped to limit donors' direct influence, while contributions to outside groups are unlimited.

The Federal Election Commission has a three-pronged test for proving coordination: Did an outside group pay for ads, phone calls or mailers? Did these materials tell people to vote for or against a candidate, or praise or criticize a candidate in the weeks before an election? Finally, did the candidate, or a representative, agree to the expenditure?

Many concerns have been raised about coordination in this election because of close ties between outside groups and campaigns. Super PACs supporting President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney are run by their former staffers. Super PACs and campaigns have used the same consultants, who insist in interviews that they have firewalls.

Proving coordination is extremely difficult, however. Since 2007, the FEC has investigated 64 complaints of coordination, but found against candidates and groups only three times, fining them a total of $107,000, a review of FEC enforcement actions shows.

Montana, which has similar rules, also receives few complaints about such activity, Steab said.

The boxes from Colorado contained a mixture of documents from candidates and outside groups.

Folders labeled with the names of Montana candidates held drafts and final letters of support signed by candidates' wives and drafts and final copies of mailers marked as being paid for by the campaigns. The folders often appeared to have had an accounting of what had been sent and paid for scrawled on the front.

Several folders included copies of the signatures of candidates and their wives. "Use this one," someone wrote in red pen next to a cut-out rectangle on a page with five signatures from one candidate.

Steab, the Montana investigator, said she believed these cut-out signatures were then affixed to fliers from the candidates.

Besides material from the campaigns, the boxes also contained mailers on 2008 and 2010 races in Colorado and Montana from Western Tradition Partnership and six other groups. There were bank statements for several groups, including the Coalition for Energy and the Environment, the Alliance of Montana Taxpayers and the Conservative Victory Fund.

In all the documents, one name repeatedly popped up: Christian LeFer. Even though two Montana Republican politicians founded WTP, investigators determined that LeFer was the man behind the scenes.

LeFer, who is described as WTP's director of strategic programming in memos in 2009, said in an email that the documents "appear to be stolen property" and that, as he'd had no access to them, he couldn't respond to most of ProPublica's questions, "which seem to be based on an erroneous and fanciful interpretation of what they mean."

LeFer did not address whether WTP had coordinated with candidates. Although former employees and candidates said LeFer helped his wife run Direct Mail and Communications — the printing company that Brown, the lawyer, suggested was the owner of the boxes of documents found in Colorado — LeFer said he did not "run or direct the activities" there.

Direct Mail listed its principal office address in Montana filings as being the same Colorado address WTP initially used.

Two outside groups with documents in the boxes — the Montana Committee to Protect the Unborn and Montana Citizens for Right to Work — listed their addresses on bank statements as the same post-office box in Livingston used by LeFer and Direct Mail. LeFer was also the executive director of Montana Citizens for Right to Work, an anti-union group.

Former state Rep. Ed Butcher said LeFer and Western Tradition Partnership aided candidates with no experience.

"They'll come in, if candidates want some help, they'll come in and help them," said Butcher, who described LeFer as "a Karl Rove type political strategist" who "stays in the background."

Butcher's file in the Colorado boxes was labeled "Butcher Primary '08 mail samples." It included an email from LeFer to Butcher with a survey about unions. There was a campaign donation form, and drafts of fliers and a letter from Butcher's campaign.

A "wife questionnaire" for Butcher's wife Pam said she met her husband "on a blind date arranged by his buddy that neither of us wanted." The questionnaire listed her children's names and that she had been taking care of her disabled mother for five years.

A letter on pink paper from Pam Butcher was in a file marked "wife letters." The letter, which contained much of the information in the questionnaire, was marked as being paid for by Butcher's campaign.

Butcher said his wife might have run her letter past LeFer. "He may have asked, 'Do you need any help?' and she said, 'Yeah, I need to get this family letter out,'" said Butcher, who won the Republican primary in 2008 by 20 votes.

A folder for another successful candidate, Mike Miller, included a fax cover sheet from Miller to LeFer, forwarding Miller's filled-out Montana candidate surveys for two outside groups, the National Gun Owners Alliance and the National League of Taxpayers. It also held a candidate survey asking Miller if he had any research about his opponent, including "any recent scandals."

Miller confirmed to Frontline that LeFer was an unpaid adviser on his campaign, but would not elaborate further.

Trevor Potter, a former federal election commissioner who now runs the Campaign Legal Center, a watchdog group that advocates for more restrictions on money in politics, reviewed the documents found in the boxes.

"This is the sort of information that is, in fact, campaign strategy, campaign plans that candidates cannot share with an outside group without making it coordinated," Potter said.

"You need to know more, but certainly if I were back in my FEC days as a commissioner, I would say we had grounds to proceed with an investigation and put people under oath and show them these documents, and ask where they came from and where they were."

* * *

After the 2008 election, Montana started investigating whether WTP should have disclosed its donors.

The inquiry progressed slowly until 2010, when a former WTP contractor handed over internal fundraising records, saying she was worried about what the group was doing.

The documents showed that the group raised money specifically by telling people and corporations that they could give unlimited amounts in secret.

"The only thing we plan on reporting is our success to contributors like you who can see the benefits of a program like this," said one document, a 2010 election briefing to read to potential donors. "You can just sit back on election night and see what a difference you've made."

A target list of potential donors included an executive at a talc mine, the Montana representative of an international mining group and a Colorado executive for a global gold-mining company.

One note about a potential donor advised: "Married rich, hard to get a hold of. Have a beer with him." Another said: "Owns big ranch, signed a hit piece I wrote on cty cmms'r last year (don't mention), should give $$ $10,000 ask."

Other notes suggested that solicitors "See Christian" or "Talk to Christian," apparently references to LeFer.

The documents cited the group's success in 2008, saying in a confidential grassroots membership development proposal that 28 Montana state legislators "rode into office in 100% support of WTP's responsible development agenda."

By 2010, the partnership was active in state races in Montana and Colorado.

That October, Montana authorities said Western Tradition Partnership had violated campaign-finance law and should be fined. They said the group's purpose in 2008 was "not to discuss issues, but to directly influence candidate elections through surreptitious means."

The Montana investigation also said the evidence was overwhelming that WTP had established the Coalition for Energy and the Environment, known as CEE, as a "sham organization" to act as a front for expenditures actually made by WTP.

But the investigation also found that "sufficient evidence has not been disclosed to establish coordination between WTP/CEE and any candidate. Concern and healthy skepticism is warranted, however."

That was before the boxes from Colorado turned up.

A convicted felon named Mark Seibel said he stumbled on them inside a known meth house near Denver at some point in late 2010.

It's not clear how they got there. Seibel said a friend found them in a stolen car. After reading through some of the documents, he reached out to people he thought might be interested in them — primarily Colorado candidates attacked by Western Tradition Partnership. A lawyer married to one of the candidates shipped the boxes off to Montana investigators.

By that time, however, the Montana probe into the group's activities in the 2008 election was over. Steab also said that there was no way to determine for certain where the documents were from and who owned them. There was no whistleblower, and no information about how the records ended up in Colorado.

Despite this, Steab said, she found the documents very telling.

"It looks to me that there was a lot of coordination — but I don't know that it's coordination that everyone is aware of in all cases," she said. She said she spoke to one candidate who told her he was upset about all the negative mailers against his opponent.

This year, American Tradition Partnership is as active as ever. It's suing to try to overturn contribution limits in Montana, so far unsuccessfully. The group sent out mailers attacking candidates before the June primary in Montana, reporting none of them to the state as political expenditures. It later put out a press release saying that 12 of the 14 candidates it backed had won.

For the general election, the group appears to be targeting Montana's attorney general, Steve Bullock, the Democratic candidate for governor. As attorney general, Bullock fought the partnership's lawsuits against the state, including the one that ended up in the Supreme Court.

The first issue of the partnership's Montana Statesman newspaper, dated Oct. 7, which a group press release said was sent to 180,000 voters, featured four photographs on the front page: Three of registered sex offenders, and one of Bullock, accusing him of allowing one in four sex offenders to go unregistered. "Bullock admits failure," the headline announced. A full-page ad accused Bullock of taking illegal corporate contributions and of "criminal hypocrisy."

The Statesman's editor and publisher is none other than Ferguson, the partnership's executive director, described as an "award-winning newspaper veteran" who has been "commended by other newspapers for his 'honest, intelligent and issue-oriented' approach."

Ferguson didn't respond to a question about his journalism credentials.

"Conservative group American Tradition Partnership now one of nation's biggest media outlets," said a press release on the group's website, adding that the newspaper would publish "several" editions through Election Day and into 2013.

An overview of the U.S. government's many failed attempts to promote integrated housing since the Fair Housing Act was passed in 1968.

Fair Housing Act Born in Heat of Civil Rights Movement

In wake of the race riots of the 1960s, the Kerner Commission implicated whites for promoting housing segregation that fueled the riots. “White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it,” the commission found. The panel recommended a fair housing law, and on the heels of Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, Congress passed the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The law mandates that the federal government “affirmatively further” fair housing. George Romney, father of Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, was an early champion of the law as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. But his efforts to promote fair housing were stymied by President Richard Nixon and subsequent administrations. 

“Stop this one,” Nixon scrawled in a note on a memo written by John Ehrlichman, his domestic policy chief. In a 1972 “eyes only” memo to Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman, another aide, Nixon explained his position. “I am convinced that while legal segregation is totally wrong that forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong,” he wrote.

Read: Living Apart: How the U.S. Government Betrayed a Landmark Civil Rights Law

HUD: Beleaguered Enforcer of Fair Housing

As signed into law, the Fair Housing Act banned racial discrimination in the sale or rental of housing, block busting (in which real estate agents move a black family into a white neighborhood and use it to frighten white homeowners into selling), racial steering (in which real estate agents steer home seekers to racially distinct neighborhoods) and intimidation and coercion. It also required federal officials to “affirmatively further” fair housing, but didn’t detail what that meant. HUD was charged with enforcement and empowered to withhold federal funds from communities that violated the law. 

In 1988, Congress expanded HUD’s authority in dealing with discriminatory landlords, but did nothing to clarify what it meant to “affirmatively further” fair housing. 

What Does It Mean to “Affirmatively Further” Fair Housing?

Under the Clinton administration, HUD began to provide more guidance to communities receiving block grants. The agency released a Fair Housing Planning Guide in 1996, urging local communities to track impediments to fair housing and suggesting that block grant recipients set measurable goals and study the effect of local zoning laws. But it still didn’t give specific examples of what actions would compromise a community’s HUD funds. In 1998, HUD secretary Andrew Cuomo proposed a rule making clear that HUD would withhold funds if it found a community’s efforts “did not result in meaningful and measurable progress.” But the proposal died amid opposition from mayors and county governments.

The 1974 Housing and Community Development Act had created a single choke point – the Community Development Block Grant program -- for HUD to withhold funds from communities that blocked integrative housing. But HUD did not withhold a block grant from a single community between 1974 and 2008 for fair housing violations despite giving out more than $137 billion to 1,200 states, counties and cities across the nation – including the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country. In several instances, records show, HUD has sent grants to communities even after they’ve been found by courts to have promoted segregated housing or been sued by the U.S. Department of Justice. 

Fair Housing Efforts Under Obama, But...

Forty years after the initial passage of the nation’s fair housing law, the Obama administration renewed HUD’s focus on segregation. The agency oversaw the terms of a settlement with New York’s Westchester County after a federal judge found that it had “utterly failed” to live up to its fair housing obligations. In a separate lawsuit, HUD agreed to pay $62 million to 1,300 complainants to settle charges that the agency’s post-Katrina rebuilding program discriminated against African American homeowners. HUD also boosted funding for private fair housing enforcement agencies.  

But, according to a 2010 investigation of the Government Accountability Office, the agency was still not performing its duty to enforce the fair housing law. Among the GAO’s findings:

• One-third of HUD’s fair housing materials were out of date. More than one in 10 hadn’t been updated since the ’90s. 
• The “analyses of impediments to fair housing” provided by some communities to show compliance with the law were found to be worthless because of their “brevity and lack of content.” Most did not offer time frames for when the communities would eliminate barriers to integration or include the required signatures of elected officials.
• 25 recipients of block grants had filed no analysis at all, “raising questions about whether some jurisdictions may be receiving federal funds without preparing the documents required to demonstrate that they have taken steps to affirmatively further fair housing.”
• HUD staffers in seven regions had read the key documents for just 17 of 275 block grant recipients. Efforts to ensure “the integrity of the AI process ... were not common.” 

Under Obama, HUD has taken the unprecedented step of withholding block grant money over fair housing concerns from two communities in Louisiana and Texas. Yet HUD is still funding communities such as New Orleans – currently being sued by the Justice Department for fair housing violations – and Waukesha County, W.I. – currently under investigation by HUD for fair housing violations. 

Some veteran HUD officials say they do not even understand how to implement the Fair Housing Act. Rolando Alvarado, who supervised fair housing enforcement for HUD in New Jersey for more than a decade, offered a long pause before attempting to define what it meant for the agency to “affirmatively further” fair housing: 

“That is tricky. There is no exact regulation, it’s a gray area, I’ve never seen anything that clearly defines that in my time at HUD,” Alvaro said.

The Obama administration said it would release new proposed regulations to reform the “affirmatively furthering” fair housing process by 2010. As the President's first term comes to an end, the regulations have yet to be released. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, has said he may disband HUD altogether if elected.

Have you experienced discrimination under the Fair Housing Act? Share your story with us.

by Kim Barker, ProPublica, and Rick Young and Emma Schwartz, Frontline

This story is being co-published with Frontline, which is also airing a documentary on the group tonight. Check your local listings.

New signs emerged Monday that a controversial nonprofit may have misled the Internal Revenue Service not only about its political activities but also about support from a purported donor.

Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP, sent the IRS a letter in 2008 asking the agency to expedite the group's request for recognition of its tax-exempt status. The letter said that without it, the group's principle donor, Jacob Jabs, would pull a planned grant of $300,000.

But Jabs, who runs Colorado's largest furniture retailer, said on Monday he had never pledged money to the group, and never even been in contact with them until press stories appeared naming him.

"I think they just grabbed my name out of a hat to forward their agenda," Jabs told us. "I know nothing about the group, never heard of them, never have heard of them until the last few days, and I did not, absolutely did not, commit $300,000 to start this company." (Jabs also spoke with the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, again denying any connection to the group.)

Although operating at the state level, WTP has won national attention for its attempts to fight campaign-finance restrictions. It successfully sued to overturn Montana's ban on corporate spending in elections, extending the provisions of the U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens United decision to all states. It has also sued Montana investigators over the state's ruling two years ago that the group is a political committee and should have to report its donors.

Documents obtained by Frontline on WTP offer a rare look into the inner workings of dark money groups, tax-exempt organizations that can accept unlimited contributions and do not have to disclose their donors for political ads.

On Monday, we detailed how some of those documents pointed to WTP actively shaping the campaigns of candidates for state office in Montana. The documents, found in a meth house near Denver by a convicted felon in late 2010, indicate possible coordination between candidates and outside groups. Outside groups and candidates are not allowed to coordinate.

Social welfare nonprofits like WTP are allowed to engage in some political activity, but IRS regulations say they must have social welfare as their primary purpose. ProPublica has extensively reported on how some of these nonprofits, known as 501(c)(4)'s after their section of the tax code, appear to exploit gaps in enforcement between the Internal Revenue Service and election authorities so they don't have to disclose where they get their money.

As ProPublica and Frontline have previously reported, when WTP applied for recognition of its tax-exempt status, the group also told the IRS under penalty of perjury that it would not directly or indirectly attempt to influence elections. Yet even before its application, the group sponsored mailers that criticized politicians in the 2008 Republican primary.

The IRS approved WTP's tax-exempt status three days after it received the group's request for expedited review.

Jabs said he only first spoke with WTP earlier this month, after seeing reports that he was the primary donor. Jabs said he reached a WTP official, Athena Dalton, who signed the IRS letter citing him. According to Jabs, Dalton told him she was WTP's secretary and had been instructed to send the letter by two other WTP officials, Christian LeFer and Dan Reed.

"I did talk to Christian LeFer," Jabs said. "They basically admitted they used me to get their 501(c)(4) status." Jabs said he also contacted Reed, who did not call him back.

In an email responding to a ProPublica question about Jabs, LeFer wrote: "Your facts are wrong, I 'admitted' no such thing; that doesn't even sound plausible. Further, what significance this issue might hold escapes me. I don't discuss donors, and I can see that your story line does not need my help."

Reed did not respond to a phone call.

On Monday, LeFer also confirmed the documents found in a meth house were stolen from his wife's car and belonged to him and his wife, Allison. The documents included material from outside groups and candidates, and communications between LeFer and candidates. There were surveys of candidates by outside groups and drafts and final copies of mailers marked as being paid for by the campaigns.

LeFer, described as WTP's director of strategic programming in memos in 2009, said in an email that the boxes of documents were stolen in Colorado in June 2010.

"These stolen documents appear to be a mix of those from my consulting and volunteer work and from my wife's independently owned and operated mail and printing shop," wrote LeFer, whose wife runs a company called Direct Mail and Communications in Livingston, Mont. "Both my wife and I have scrupulously endeavored to avoid any possibility of illegal coordination.

"The stolen documents, which were in the process of being transferred to storage when the theft occurred, have been mingled to infer that the work of two separate people is in fact the work of one person and therefore improper. This is false." (Here is LeFer's full response.)

Candidates have confirmed that LeFer worked with Direct Mail. They have also said LeFer was an adviser on their campaigns.

There is also other evidence LeFer worked with the firm.

On Tuesday, a woman named Elizabeth Sheron said that when she briefly worked for Direct Mail in 2010, LeFer welcomed her to the company. She provided us a check from Direct Mail and an email from LeFer in which he asked her to elaborate on her abilities and experience. LeFer also wrote that he hoped to increase the membership of one of his social welfare nonprofits to 250,000 people in two years.

Sheron said she did work for Direct Mail, WTP and other related groups. “They kind of had you involved with every project…no matter who was paying you," she said. “I was paid by Direct Mail but I was doing stuff for other groups." Sheron worked there only briefly before quitting.

In an email, LeFer said he didn't think it was useful to try to recall “snippets of information from years back." He said if reporters sent “the entire file of materials you have and you want to discuss at a later time, please do so."

The documents from the meth house eventually landed in the office of Montana investigators, who couldn't do much with them because they couldn't definitively prove they were real, or how they ended up in a meth house.

On Monday, a lawyer for LeFer confirmed them by sending a letter to Montana authorities explaining that the car was stolen from a homeschooling conference in Denver. The lawyer said the documents were stolen property and “evidence regarding the criminal investigation of the car theft in Colorado." The lawyer also said the documents contained sensitive information, and demanded that the documents be turned over to LeFer.

Montana investigators have sealed access to the documents, saying that now that someone has asserted ownership, they are unable to further discuss or release them until a court rules on the matter.

Western Tradition Partnership is now known as American Tradition Partnership. So far this election season, the group has advocated for candidates in Montana's Republican primary, putting out a press release announcing that 12 of those candidates won. It also has launched a newspaper called the Montana Statesman, which claims to be the state's "largest & most trusted news source," to be the state's "only non-partisan newspaper" and to have been founded in 1889.

A second edition of the purported newspaper was mailed to voters in Montana last week. Like the first edition, the 12-page paper contains many articles attacking Steve Bullock, the Democratic candidate for governor who as attorney general fought the partnership's lawsuits against the state. One on the front page accused him of being soft on child molesters.

Other stories attacked the state auditor, a Supreme Court candidate and the secretary of state.

On its website, the group describes itself as a “no-compromise grassroots organization dedicated to fighting the radical environmentalist agenda."

In a statement responding to the story Monday by ProPublica and Frontline, American Tradition Partnership, or ATP, said it had not coordinated with candidates. "I have never met or spoken to virtually all the candidates on the ballot," wrote Donny Ferguson, the executive director of the partnership and the editor of the Montana Statesman, on the Statesman website.

Ferguson also said the law was always on the group's side, and that the nonprofit had always obeyed every applicable law. He denied that the group told people how to vote. “ATP does not, and never will, tell voters which candidates to vote for," he wrote. “ATP speaks on the issues, informing voters where candidates stand and of their public records."

The IRS defines political advertising much more broadly than election authorities, asking whether social welfare nonprofits directly — or indirectly — engaged in campaign activities.

by Cora Currier and Blair Hickman

This week, our colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones offered an in-depth look at the many ways the U.S. government has failed to enforce the Fair Housing Act to fight segregation over the last 40 years. As Hannah-Jones reports, segregation levels have barely budged in many major metropolitan areas despite a government mandate to “affirmatively further” fair housing.

So what continues to drive housing segregation? What are the consequences? We rounded up some of the best reporting on the subject below. Did we miss any? Leave a link in the comments.

Public Housing: Government-Sponsored Segregation, The American Prospect, October 2012
Starting around the New Deal, “racially restrictive” deeds, federally-insured mortgages and little to no down payments enticed whites to the suburbs and left blacks in the projects. It kicked off decades of government policies that encouraged housing segregation. Housing authorities nationwide no longer recognize the policies, but few have done anything in terms of retribution.

The Last Tower: the Decline and Fall of Public Housing, Harper’s Magazine, May 2012
In March 2011, Chicago knocked down the last tower of Cabrini-Green, the notorious, crime-ridden public housing that had come to stand as a failed experiment in urban planning. The demolition signaled Chicago’s effort, encouraged by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to replace the “projects” with mixed-income developments. This article follows people forced to leave Cabrini, showing how its replacements have fallen short, with tens of thousands on the waiting list for public housing and many people “replanted in unfamiliar areas no less uniformly poor and black.”

Separate, Unequal, and Ignored, The Chicago Reader, February 2011
Chicago’s severe segregation has persisted for decades – (see WBEZ’s time lapse of an end-to-end ride on the Red Line for a powerful visual representation) – but according to the Reader, mayoral candidates rarely acknowledge the issue. This piece explores why Chicago politics seem to gloss over desegregation, and highlights how one area has tackled the issue with some success – the Twin Cities in Minnesota.

Segregation: The Invisible Elephant in the Foreclosure Debate, Doug Massey and Gregory Squires, November 2010
Two top sociologists who have studied segregation for decades run through the research showing how the foreclosure crisis relates to race. Studies (as well as several more recent lawsuits) have shown that African American and Latino borrowers were targeted for subprime loans, even when they could have qualified for regular loans. They’ve also shown that the rate of segregation is the single best predictor of the rate and number of foreclosures in a given metropolitan area. Also see the Washington Post’s recent piece on the lasting impacts of credit scars on black communities.

A System Divided: ‘Why Don’t We Have Any White Kids?’, New York Times, May 2012
A side-effect of housing integration failures: segregated schools. Many researchers point out that schools today are more segregated than they were in the ‘60s; this pieces takes a deep look at Explore Charter School in Brooklyn, part of a public school system where more than half the schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic, and the effects of segregation. A major voice in the story: students themselves.

Empty Cradles, Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, 2011
Segregated neighborhoods often translate to pockets of alarming public health statistics. In some African-American neighborhoods in Milwaukee, babies die at a yearly rate greater than in Botswana. This series explores why there is such a racial disparity in infant mortality rates in Wisconsin, and why efforts to combat it have had limited success.

N.C. school board backed by tea party abolishes integration policy, The Washington Post, January 2011
Wake County school district in North Carolina overhauled its long-standing practice of busing students to schools outside their neighborhood to ensure socioeconomic (and racial) diversity. This article delves into the fraught politics of busing, where both sides claim they are doing what’s best for disadvantaged children (Atlantic Cities also explores Boston’s current debate on busing).

A Million-Dollar Wasteland Revealed, The Washington Post, 2011-2012
The Post’s investigation into major projects funded by HUD found hundreds of millions of wasted dollars on “stalled or abandoned projects.” Their story on the HOME program for low-income housing prompted an agency review – but even then, “discrepancies and contradictions that suggest continuing problems with the program.”  

by Charles Ornstein

It is a hospital's nightmare: The power goes out and backup generators don't kick in, leaving critically ill patients without the mechanical help they need to breathe.

It happened in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, when hospital staff were on their own when electricity and water cut out. Some died.

It happened last year in San Diego, when generators at two hospitals failed during a blackout.

And it happened last year in Connecticut, when a hospital had to be evacuated during Hurricane Irene when its generator failed.

As Hurricane Sandy headed toward the East Coast, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg said Sunday, he was assured that hospitals were ready. "The teams from the City Health Department are at these facilities making sure that the emergency generators are working and that they have back-up fuel supplies," he said at a news conference before the storm.

In spite of this confidence, the generators at some hospitals did not work as expected. In the most high-profile case, New York University Langone Medical Center had to evacuate all 215 of its patients when its power went out and both of its backup systems didn't work. Staff had to hand pump oxygen to critically ill patients until patients could be taken by ambulance to another hospital.

In New Jersey, patients at Palisades Medical Center had to likewise be evacuated in recent days after two generators failed. A hospital spokesman said today that officials were working to bring the "plant up to speed" and could not immediately answer questions about the generators.

And this afternoon, Bellevue Hospital in New York City said it is evacuating hundreds of patients because of failing power and deteriorating conditions. "It's Katrina-esque in there," one nurse told ABC News.

Experts say such failures are troubling but not entirely surprising. Dr. Arthur Kellermann founded the emergency department at Emory University and headed it from 1999 to 2007. Now, he's Paul O'Neill-Alcoa Chair in Policy Analysis at RAND Corporation think tank.

The other night, as the NYU evacuation was unfolding, he tweeted, "Hospital preparedness and well-functioning backup systems are a costly distraction from daily business, until they are needed. Like now."

In an email interview with ProPublica, Kellermann elaborated: "I have no doubt when the hospital assured the Mayor that their backup systems were ready, they believed they were. They were wrong. What I find most remarkable about this story is that [more than seven] years after Hurricane Katrina, major hospitals still have critical backup systems like generators in basements that are prone to flooding."

Bruce Altevogt, a senior program officer at the Institute of Medicine who has studied crisis standards of care, lauded NYU for safely evacuating patients. But he said the incident should prompt a new discussion about where hospitals place generators and how to ensure they work when they're needed.

Newly constructed hospitals are supposed to place their generators and fuel in adjacent locations above flood level. But the location requirements do not apply to already-built hospitals.

"These older facilities, it's just an economic issue," Altevogt said. "They don't have the resources, or they haven't devoted the resources to moving the equipment to locations that would be less prone to disasters or flooding in these cases."

An NYU spokeswoman told Modern Healthcare magazine Tuesday that "part of the generator is on the roof and part in the basement, which she said took on 8 feet of water. The reason for the failure, she said, is being investigated."

New York hospitals have had experiences with generator failures before and have seen the consequences firsthand.

In 1987, a 22-minute power failure led to the death of a 40-day-old infant at New York Hospital. "The prematurely born infant, whom officials declined to identify, died after his electric respirator stopped and efforts to help him breathe with a manual air pump failed," the New York Times reported at the time.

A decade before that Bellevue Hospital lost all power during the massive New York City blackout in 1977. The Times reported at the time: Doctors and nurses squeezed bags of air with their hands to resuscitate patients when respirators stopped, and emergency generators were brought in."

During another New York City-wide blackout in 2003, an official report later said, "Despite prior testing according to applicable State and accreditation standards, [some] generators malfunctioned, experiencing, for example, problems with switches and overheating. ...In a few cases hospitals reported that fuel supplies for generators fell to dangerously low levels, in part because of transportation difficulties encountered by fuel delivery trucks."

Back at NYU, a hospital trustee, Gary Cohn, said that the board knew the facilities' generators were outdated and at risk, according to Bloomberg Businessweek.

"The infrastructure at NYU is somewhat old," Cohn said in a television interview. The backup generators "are not state-of-the-art and not in the most state-of-the-art location."

A hospital spokeswoman defended its systems to the Huffington Post.

"Our generators are fully compliant with all state and federal regulations and, using good prudence, we test them all the time as we have to do anyway," Lisa Greiner said.

Emails to NYU staff by ProPublica were not returned prior to publication.

Another expert in disaster planning, Dr. Dan Hanfling, said in an email that the failure of the back-up power at NYU Langone "is certainly unexpected."

Hospitals, he said, are required by the Joint Commission, a hospital accreditor, to have back-up power capabilities. They are required to "load test" those systems a few times each year. (Update 10/31: The Joint Commission says it requires tests 12 times a year for 30 minutes and once every three years for four hours.)   

"Evidently, the catastrophic failure must be explained by something else," wrote Hanfling, a special adviser for emergency preparedness and response for Inova Health System in Virginia.

In his email to ProPublica, Kellermann wrote that the irony of the NYU generator failure is that New York City's hospitals and health department "have taken preparedness more seriously than nearly everyone else in the country, particularly since 9/11/01." RAND tested a novel, no-notice disaster drill at a different city hospital a few months ago and it performed very well.

The situation at NYU should be a lesson for all.

"Preparedness is not simply a hoop to jump through to satisfy the Joint Commission, or to keep the Fire Marshall off your back," Kellermann wrote. "It is a fundamental duty to the community, state and country. Assuming nothing will ever happen, or counting on your staff to 'rise to the occasion' is not a plan, and it is not preparedness."

Hanfling went a step further. "Lesson to learn: hospitals must be prepared to evacuate patients. This may be the 'new normal' for hospital preparedness efforts," he wrote.

by Mike Webb

On Monday, ProPublica published a major look at how the Department of Housing & Urban Development has failed to enforce the Fair Housing Act's requirements for cities to create integrated neighborhoods. The in-depth piece shows how the agency has never been able to define the law's mandate to "affirmatively further" fair housing so that communities would know what they have to do to be in compliance with the law.

Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones joins the podcast and walks us through the history of the Fair Housing Act, George Romney's efforts to enforce the law, and how President Nixon stopped him at every turn. She also discusses HUD's conflicting mandate and why the agency has chosen not to withhold block grants from cites in order to get them to abide by the law. Ultimately, no president has had the will to force cities to integrate.

"Obama's record is very mixed," said Hannah-Jones in responding to a question about what the current president is doing to enforce the law. "There were lots of high hopes when he first came into office. He really strengthened the Civil Rights department at the Justice Department. And when he got involved with a landmark fair housing settlement out of Westchester (County, New York), people believed there was going to be a big change in fair housing for the first time in decades. But, in the end, you haven't seen the strong enforcement of the Westchester court order. And the Obama administration also promised that they would release regulations on affirmatively furthering fair housing. Two years past the time they said they were going to do it, they haven't. And, of course, if he's not re-elected it's unlikely that it's going to happen at all."

by Nikole Hannah-Jones

Nov 2: This post has been updated.

The city of Rye, nestled along the scenic Long Island Sound in affluent Westchester County, N.Y., represents the best of suburban living. Sprawling mansions perch atop rolling hills. Children attend top-notch schools. Residents browse tony boutiques and sun themselves on café patios in a downtown that manages to be both quaint and chic.

It also happens that nearly everyone who lives in Rye is white.

Drive down the road a bit, cross two four-lane highways and you're in working–class Port Chester. Turn near the aging strip mall with the 99-cent store and head onto a street of down-on-their-luck apartments where brown and black children speed past on bicycles.

Here, you'll find a tiny sliver of Rye, cleaved from the city years ago when interstates 287 and 95 came through. This is where Westchester County has chosen to put 18 units of affordable housing, part of a deal settling a lawsuit over the county's failure to promote integration as required by the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

The goal of the settlement — dismantling the county's pattern of segregated housing — seems at odds with the choice of this site. The only road to these apartments slices through Port Chester, a city that is majority black and Latino, and significantly poorer. Anyone who lives here won't be able to walk or drive directly to the rest of Rye.

The Obama administration cites the Westchester lawsuit as evidence it has taken a more assertive approach than its predecessors to enforcing the fair housing law, which requires communities receiving federal development money to "affirmatively further" integrated housing.

"Until now, we tended to lay dormant," Ron Sims, the deputy secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, said in August of 2009 as HUD announced the decree settling the case. "This is historic, because we are going to hold people's feet to the fire."

But that is not what happened.

Far from being a new chapter, the tale of Westchester replicates the long history of the Fair Housing Act, in which federal officials have repeatedly backed down from strong enforcement when confronted by determined local opposition.

HUD, for example, raised no objections when Westchester proposed counting the Rye apartments — one-bedroom condos originally designed for seniors — as part of its pledge to build 750 units of affordable housing. Under the terms of the settlement, the site should have been rejected because it sits in a heavily black and Latino census tract.

HUD officials said the department's senior leadership had little appetite for a confrontation over race with the county, which is home to prominent Democrats such as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

As we reported Monday, a series of Democratic and Republican administrations have declined to wield their powers under the Fair Housing Act. The authors of the legislation wanted agencies to withhold federal grants from communities that did not work to dismantle the legal and practical impediments to integration. But over the next four decades, HUD dispersed tens of billions to local communities that did little or nothing to adhere to this part of the law.

ProPublica interviewed former and current HUD officials, Westchester officials and civil rights advocates to chronicle the county's response to the landmark 2009 settlement, as well as its long-term compliance with the fair housing law. We combed through thousands of documents received through public records requests.

In the decades after the Fair Housing Act was passed, documents show, HUD did not challenge Westchester when local officials certified they were working to undo segregation while not even considering race as a factor in housing policy. It fell to a private civil rights group to question Westchester's written assertions.

The county settled the case after a judge ruled that its statements to HUD on fair housing amounted to a multi-year fraud, raising the possibility of as much as $150 million in fines.

Rob Astorino, the current Westchester County executive, campaigned against the deal, ousting the Democrat who signed it. Since then, the county has failed to meet several key provisions. Among them: It has not adopted legislation that bans discrimination against residents who pay their rent with government vouchers. It has not produced a HUD-approved analysis of obstacles to fair housing. It has not drawn up a strategy to eliminate local zoning laws that make it harder for African Americans and Latinos to find housing. And it has not launched marketing campaigns to promote integration in the county.

The federal government has raised few objections. Government attorneys told a federal judge in July that the county's continuing resistance placed the deal, called a "consent decree," in danger of collapse. But they have not yet moved to hold the county in contempt.

Craig Gurian, the lawyer who brought the suit, fears that after the initial hope, the Westchester case has set a troubling precedent for other communities weighing whether to follow the housing law.

"I've been waiting for more than three years for the Obama administration to take the decree seriously. I have been waiting for the HUD Secretary to speak forcibly and direct enforcement for all the provisions of the decree. I've been waiting for various Democratic politicians to stand with civil rights principles when it applies close to home. And I've been repeatedly disappointed," he said. "The promise of the consent decree has been squandered."

ProPublica submitted a list of questions to HUD about its failure to use its authority to promote integrated housing nationally and in Westchester. The agency issued only a general statement that said it has worked hard to enforce provisions of the law that bar discrimination against individuals.

The consequences of the county's conduct can be seen at the border between Rye and Port Chester.

Cherie Michaux lives on the Port Chester side of the line but would love to move to Rye. That would allow her 9-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter to attend one of the best school systems in New York.

The Westchester settlement was supposed to tilt the scale in the direction of people like Michaux, who has worked all her adult life but has never been able to move into more prosperous parts of the county.

Instead, the one-bedroom apartments being built in Rye are not appropriate for a family of three, and the starting price of $150,000 is well beyond her reach. Just 14 steps from the Port Chester line, it does not provide any escape from the problems of the neighborhood.

Michaux, a single mother who works as an assistant teacher, has resigned herself to staying in Port Chester.

"Port Chester is that big old melting pot of those who can't make it," she said.

* * *

Gurian, the civil rights lawyer who brought the case against Westchester, grew up in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, then a working-class Irish, Italian and Jewish neighborhood.

His neighborhood was part of a 60-year shift beginning in the 1910s in which millions of African Americans traveled north in what became known as The Great Migration. Arriving in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Newark and elsewhere, the new residents were crowded into ghettos by discriminatory landlords and by the policies of local and federal governments.

The forces that transformed New York into one of the nation's most segregated metropolitan areas came late to Flatlands, a densely packed urban area near Brooklyn College. Gurian, who was born in 1959, said his landlord, like many others in the city, did not rent to African Americans.

The apartment building had been all white throughout his childhood. But when Gurian's father died in 1988, he was the last white tenant.

Long troubled by the segregation around him, Gurian decided to become a civil rights lawyer. After graduating from Columbia University's law school, he found a job at the New York City Commission on Human Rights. As he handled individual cases of housing discrimination, he was struck by the failure of government to address the root causes of the racial divide.

"New York likes its segregation just like it is," Gurian said from his small Manhattan office. "It's just something that is an open secret, the phenomenon that dare not speak its name."

In 2003, he set out on his own, creating a nonprofit group called the Anti-Discrimination Center. He began to wonder whether he could file a lawsuit that would challenge New York's prevailing housing pattern: A predominantly African-American and Latino inner city bordered by overwhelmingly white suburbs.

"You have all these communities that I describe as white, super-white and ultra-white," he said, referring to the New York suburbs. Looking at the non-action of cities and counties, "it was clear there was a massive collaboration with this status quo."

And then it hit him.

Each year, communities applying to HUD for block grants certified that they were complying with civil rights laws and doing all they could to "affirmatively further fair housing."

But if those signed statements were lies, the federal government had been victimized by fraud. And that would make local governments vulnerable to a lawsuit under the False Claims Act, which allows private citizens to bring court actions against companies or people who cheat the government. (They get a share of the money recovered.)

These days, the false claims law is primarily used against military contractors and health care companies with Medicare contracts. But Gurian thought it could work in a civil rights case.

As far as anyone knew, HUD hadn't stripped grant money from a single community for failures to "affirmatively further" fair housing since the early 70s — even when judges found those communities had violated the law. Under the False Claims Act, Gurian didn't need HUD's support to sue on its behalf.

The lawyer needed a place to test his idea. Westchester County, the segregated homestead to some of New York's most prominent liberals, felt irresistibly symbolic.

So Gurian began asking officials in Westchester to document their fair housing efforts. The county had little to show.

“It was unusually thin and unusually unconnected with questions of segregation,” said John Logan, a Brown University sociologist who later reviewed Westchester's "Analysis of Impediments," the document that communities file to show Fair Housing Act compliance when they seek block grants.

Gurian believed he had enough to go to court. “There wasn’t any question that Westchester wasn’t affirmatively furthering fair housing, that it had no intention of affirmatively furthering fair housing, and every single time it promised the federal government it would do so it was lying,” Gurian said.

Gurian's small firm only brought in less than $100,000 a year at the time, according to his filings with the government. He pleaded with HUD and the Justice Department to join his suit against the county, but they declined.

In December 2006, the Anti-Discrimination Center went it alone and sued one of the nation's wealthiest counties.

* * *

The case landed in the courtroom of Judge Denise Cote, a former prosecutor whose background made her familiar with the issues of the case, in the Southern District of New York in Manhattan.

Born in Minnesota, Cote earned a master's degree in history at Columbia University. After graduating, she taught black history at a Catholic school in Manhattan. She came to see the law as a means of addressing society's inequities and headed to law school. "When I came to New York City and saw the poverty and the racial tension and the victims of crime, especially in the poorest neighborhoods, I wanted to use my talents in whatever way I could to help," she wrote in her Columbia Law School alumni profile.

Gurian began taking depositions from Westchester officials. Norma Drummond, who supervised the county's block grant program for more than a decade, acknowledged that the county did not consider race when it assessed obstacles to fair housing. The county "sees discrimination in terms of income, rather than in terms of race," she said.

Drummond said she was aware that HUD had told block grant applicants to consider race and segregation when drafting the key document for block grants — the "analysis of impediments." But the county did not address race in the documents it filed for HUD grants in 2000 and 2004.

The county's chief executive, Andrew Spano, testified that race had nothing to do with where people lived in Westchester County.

That assertion was at odds with three centuries of history.

The Dutch brought enslaved Africans to Westchester in the early 1600s, before the first British colonists arrived on American soil. On the eve of the Revolutionary War, John Jay, a founding father who grew up in Rye, worked his land with slaves.

After the war ended, Jay became an abolitionist and opened the first of several African Free Schools for the children of former slaves. Forty-five students attended that school, 24 more black students than in the entire 3,300-student Rye school district during the 2010-2011 school year.

As the Great Migration brought thousands of black Southerners to New York City in the 20th century, Westchester's towns and cities snatched up the welcome mats.

White Plains and Scarsdale took the lead. In 1920 and 1922, both adopted zoning codes to keep out lower-cost housing. Within a few years, every incorporated community in the county had similar ordinances.

Many people in Westchester attached real estate covenants to their properties that barred homeowners from selling to African Americans.

Developers proudly advertised their efforts. "Restrictions? Yes!" a Bronxville developer proclaimed in a 1925 "Home and Garden" magazine.

By 1947, the majority of houses in Westchester, Queens and Nassau counties had covenants prohibiting sales to African Americans, according to a study that year by the Journal of Land and Public Utility.

"The segregation patterns were laid down early in Westchester County, were certainly set by the 1950s, and they continue today," said Andrew Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College in New York who was called by Gurian as an expert witness. "Very few African Americans live in other parts of the county, regardless of income."

Beveridge said Westchester County's racial divisions cannot be explained by benign settlement patterns. The county includes heavily black and Latino cities such as Mount Vernon (63 percent black and 14 percent Latino), Yonkers (19 percent black and 35 percent Latino) and New Rochelle (19 percent black and 28 percent Latino) and it borders on the Bronx (43 percent black and 54 percent Latino).

Bordering these cities are Scarsdale (1.5 percent black and 4 percent Latino), Bronxville (1.4 percent black and 4.4 percent Latino) or Eastchester (1.3 percent black and 7 percent Latino).

The county's political leaders insist these statistics reflect class, not race; African Americans and Latinos cannot afford to live in towns like Scarsdale, one of the nation's wealthiest suburbs, they say.

But the connection between race and class can be nearly inextricable, particularly when certain zoning requirements — called "exclusionary zoning" by fair-housing advocates — are present, as they are in Westchester County.

After the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed explicitly racial zoning in 1917, many affluent communities limited the amount of land that could be used for multi-family dwellings, such as apartments or condos, or increased minimum lot sizes for new single-family homes. These requirements curtailed the availability of the most affordable housing, while boosting the prices of existing homes.

The net effect was to block access to black and Latino families. Even those with substantial incomes lagged behind whites in wealth, both inherited and accumulated. As recently as 2009, the U.S. Census Bureau found that the median wealth of white families was roughly 20 times that of black families, a gap produced in part by generations of biased lending practices. One example: For most of the 20th century, federal and local housing policies provided whites access to home ownership, one of the largest generators of family wealth, while systematically excluding African Americans.

Numerous studies, including one published this year in the Urban Affairs Review, have concluded that exclusionary zoning similar to Westchester's increases segregation by eliminating affordable housing options.

In the 15 Westchester communities with black populations smaller than 2 percent, only 1.6 percent of available land is set aside for apartments or condos. By contrast, some of the county's most diverse communities, Peekskill, Tarrytown and Mt. Vernon, combine to designate 11.7 percent for multi-family buildings.

Census data shows that the small amount of affordable housing available in wealthier white communities tends to be occupied by lower-income whites. Such white families typically live in wealthier neighborhoods than even middle-class African Americans, according to research by Brown University's Logan.

This suggests that discrimination plays a factor as well. Indeed, when a Westchester fair housing group sent African American, Latino and white actors to pose as apartment seekers in the county last year, they found evidence of discrimination against the black and Latino "renters" in almost 20 percent of the tests.

Beveridge, who is white, lives in an upscale, nearly-all-white neighborhood along the Yonkers/Bronxville border. He said his white neighbors have openly balked at the prospect of African Americans moving into homes on the market. When Beveridge analyzed the impact of race and income on living patterns in Westchester, he found that race trumped income and that affluent African Americans were nearly as segregated from white residents as poorer ones.

In the 1980s, Gene Capello, then a vice president and assistant general counsel at J.P. Morgan & Co., started looking for a house to buy in Yonkers. Over the phone, real estate agents recommended that he look east of the Saw Mill River Parkway, an area that was almost all white, he recalled. But when they met Capello — and realized that he is African American — they told him the best options for him were on the west side. That's where most of the city's African Americans lived.

"There was a whole expanse of East Yonkers I never saw," he said. "Sure it's a question of whether you can afford things, but what if you don't even have the opportunity to see them?"

Capello, who eventually bought a home in a mostly white area of Westchester, is now president of the Fair Housing Justice Center in Manhattan. HUD research shows the same type of racial steering that Capello said he experienced continues nationally.

Since, 1976, HUD has pumped $187 million in block grants into Westchester, conditioned on compliance with the Fair Housing Act. Despite the requirement not to spend federal dollars in communities that resisted integrated housing or took other actions in opposition to the Fair Housing Act, county officials said in depositions that they did not push back when the wealthier towns fought housing that would make their communities more diverse.

As a result, 73 percent of the affordable housing built by the county over the past two decades ended up in the 11 jurisdictions with disproportionate numbers of African Americans and Latinos.

The 12 whitest municipalities — including Bronxville and Scarsdale — did not add a single unit of affordable housing during those years, even though Westchester's 1993 fair housing plan called for 5,000 new affordable housing units countywide within a decade.

When Gurian filed his lawsuit, Westchester fought back vigorously, denying it had made any false claims. HUD officials, the county argued, were well aware Westchester officials were ignoring race but had never threatened to withhold the block grants. In addition, the county contended, HUD had never made clear what it wanted in the required certifications.

At HUD, officials worried that the county might defend itself by suing them.

In her first ruling in July 2007, Cote slapped down the heart of Westchester's defense. Any interpretation of the housing act that excluded race was "absurd," she ruled, since Congress' intent in passing the law was to address racial segregation and discrimination. The judge said Drummond's admission that the county had ignored race in preparing its certifications would likely be seen by a jury as strong evidence that officials had knowingly violated the housing law, a key element in proving a case under the False Claims Act.

Cote delivered the knockout blow in February 2009, ruling that each of the county's requests for payments from HUD was a separate act of fraud. Westchester had made hundreds of requests.

The judge was unmoved by HUD's acquiescence in Westchester's conduct. The decision by "certain HUD bureaucrats" to continue sending the county money did not erase the damage caused by the false statements, she ruled.

The certification that the county was "affirmatively furthering" fair housing "was not a mere boilerplate formality, but rather was a substantive requirement, rooted in the history and purpose of the fair housing laws and regulations," Cote wrote.

The judge noted that the county had used grants from HUD to build housing that had actually "increased segregation."

Cote's ruling left Westchester facing as much $150 million in fines. The county's Democratic leadership called on the newly elected Obama administration to enter the case and help work out a settlement.

HUD was eager to set a new tone. "The judge spanked HUD and Westchester County for our non-compliance with the Fair Housing Act," Ron Sims, HUD's deputy secretary at the time, said in an interview. "We set to the task of trying to establish the civil rights presence in the Obama administration."

Gurian, vindicated, set out to craft an agreement that developed more affordable housing and dismantled the zoning policies that he believed had served to exclude African Americans and Latinos.

He did not get everything he wanted, but under the settlement, Westchester County agreed to:

• Acknowledge racial segregation in the county.
• Draft an analysis of impediments that addressed race and segregation and draw up a detailed plan within four months to implement the deal.
• Spend $51.6 million to build 750 units of affordable — not public — housing within seven years in the 32 whitest jurisdictions. No less than 630 of the 750 units would be put in communities that were less than 3 percent black and 7 percent Hispanic.
• Market that housing to African Americans and Latinos through the New York City metropolitan area.
• Assert its authority over exclusionary zoning and take legal action against communities that refuse to eliminate it.

Gurian's nonprofit received $7.5 million from the county as payment under the False Claims Act and another $2.5 million in attorney's fees.

By agreeing to the settlement it signed away any claim to file further court challenges. The settlement and its implementation would be strictly between Westchester County and the federal government. Government officials, he said, assured him they would aggressively enforce the terms.

HUD's officials spoke proudly of their role in bringing about the deal. Sims, then HUD's deputy secretary, called it "a new era" for the housing agency. "This agreement signals a new commitment by HUD to ensure that housing opportunities be available to all, and not just to some," declared Shaun Donovan, the HUD secretary and former commissioner of the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

Fair housing advocates celebrated Gurian's triumph and hoped it would lead to similar suits across the country. For the first time in decades, HUD officials appeared willing deploy their most powerful weapon — billions in grant dollars — to make the promises of the 1968 Fair Housing Act a reality.

Those cries of victory proved premature. The battle for Westchester had just begun.

* * *

Spano's decision to sign the deal ignited a political firestorm. The three-term county executive pleaded with voters and county legislatures who balked at approving the settlement not to make the county a "symbol of racism."

Rob Astorino, his Republican opponent in that fall's election, sought to capitalize on anger around the settlement and the anti-tax sentiment sweeping the nation.

The manager of a local radio station, Astorino had served for six years as town board deputy supervisor of Mt. Pleasant, an 84-percent white town that had refused HUD block grants and their civil rights obligation. He'd lost to Spano four years earlier.

But 2009 was different.

While Spano attempted to defend his decision to sign the settlement, he found himself standing alone. Not one of the county's most prominent liberals spoke out publicly for the settlement or its goals.

As president, Bill Clinton championed residential integration. When he left the presidency and opened a New York office, he chose Harlem. But when he bought a home, he chose exclusive, nearly-90-percent-white Chappaqua. The hamlet is part of a municipality targeted by the settlement. Clinton's press office declined interview requests.

Before becoming New York's governor, Andrew Cuomo had founded a nonprofit that developed affordable housing. As Clinton's HUD secretary, Cuomo attempted to toughen the rules linking progress on housing integration to block grant money. Yet as Astorino assailed the settlement, Cuomo did not speak out.

His home lies in nearly 90 percent white New Castle, another community required to participate in the settlement. Cuomo's press office declined requests for interviews.

Three months after Spano inked the settlement, Astorino scored one of the most stunning upsets in Westchester County history.

Overnight, the game changed.

On Jan. 6, 2010, just three days after Astorino took his oath, a special assistant in HUD's Office of General Counsel sent an email to James E. Johnson, who had been picked by HUD to monitor the settlement. Elisabeth Voigt, a HUD lawyer, wanted Johnson to know about a statement by Astorino that "HUD finds concerning."

Astorino had assured a group of local officials that "he would not force anyone to build anything," Voigt wrote to Johnson. "These kinds of statements reflect a lack of commitment on the County's part, undermine the County's ability to meet its obligations by emboldening the cities to resist, and set the County up for failure in the long term."

What did HUD intend to do about this open declaration of defiance? "We don't believe it would be helpful for HUD to respond to this comment," Voigt told Johnson.

A white-collar defense lawyer and former Treasury Department official, Johnson was known for his skills as mediator. He had helped end a contentious dispute over racial profiling in his home state as chairman of the New Jersey Advisory Committee on Police Standards that reviewed police reforms.

His approach assumed a willing partner. He did not have one in Astorino.

At public meetings and in media interviews, Astorino accused HUD of trying to impose a "Utopian integration order." The settlement signed by Spano, he insisted, was a straightforward agreement to create 750 housing units. Nothing more.

In a recent interview at his office, Astorino energetically argued his case against HUD.

"The word integration is nowhere in the settlement," Astorino said, repeating a line he uses often. "This is no integration order from the courts."

He's partly right. The word "integration" is not in the 38-page consent decree. But the settlement requires the county to acknowledge that "the elimination of de facto residential segregation are official goals of the County's housing policies and programs." Westchester also agreed to market the housing specifically to African Americans and Latinos and report the race of every person who moves into the 750 units.

Further, the word integrated appears twice in the settlement. Segregation, three times. All told, the court order uses race, integrate, segregation, African American and Hispanic, or their derivatives, at least 27 times.

But Astorino argues the issue is about class, not race.

"I would love to live in Chappaqua next to the Clintons or Gov. Cuomo," he said. "But I don't have the economic means to do it."

Further, Astorino said communities should have the right to plan and zone the way they want.

"When people choose to buy a home or to live in a specific place, they go in there because the neighborhood is what a neighborhood is. They zoned for that," he said. "I don't think it's necessarily fair that a year later all of a sudden everything comes down and a building goes up next to you."

* * *

The deal with HUD required Westchester to draw up an implementation plan to meet the settlement's terms.

The proposal Astorino turned in in January 2010, nearly two months after the original deadline, did not mention integration. It did not include a plan for marketing the new units to Latinos and African Americans or a strategy for dealing with zoning. Instead, it repeated, word for word, the settlement's general instructions.

Johnson, the HUD-appointed monitor, rejected the plan, calling it "unnecessarily vague." He gave the county another month and tapped Brooklyn's Pratt Institute to review the county's work.

Pratt's experts called the new plan — now seven months in the making — "generic" and so deficient that they wondered if the county had intentionally written it that way.

The court order allowed Johnson to extend the implementation plan's deadline just once. After that, he was supposed to write it himself. But Johnson argued that persuading the county to draw up an acceptable plan would achieve more than forcing one upon it.

"Most litigation that ends in settlement results in resistance," Johnson said. "But whether or not it's dealing with some very tough issues with law enforcement or church arsons or racial profiling in New Jersey, actually engaging with those whose behavior you would like to change has yielded results."

He gave the county a third chance. The county turned in another plan that Johnson judged deficient.

By this time, civil rights activists watching the case were becoming alarmed. If the federal government didn't stand firm on the easy part of the settlement — writing a plan — what would happen when disputes arose over zoning or where to build the 750 units?

More than 80 civil rights and fair housing advocates, including Sara Pratt, who later became HUD's head of enforcement, sent Johnson a letter, imploring him to correct the deficiencies.

In July 2010, Johnson sent a letter to HUD officials. "I would like to at least consider whether, and under what circumstances, we engage the court," he wrote.

But Johnson said in an interview that HUD was not inclined to seek the court's intervention. So with HUD's approval, he spent the next year and a half extending the deadlines again and again as the county submitted one inadequate plan after another. By January 2012, the county had still failed to deliver a workable proposal. Yet neither Johnson nor the federal government asked Judge Cote to get involved.

Instead, Johnson moved ahead on a different front, approving dozens of housing units ordered under the settlement.

County officials put forward the Rye project that is cut off from the rest of the city by two interstate highways. In a letter to the county, Johnson called the project a "missed opportunity." Then he approved it.

Officials proposed a development on a strip of land in the community of Cortlandt, wedged along a highway and a railroad track. The site met the criteria for low concentrations of African Americans and Latinos only because, other than the residents of the nursing home, two homeless shelters and psychiatric hospital nearby, no one lived on that land.

Johnson, in a letter to the county, said the site wasn't "ideal for promoting residential integration." He approved it anyway.

Gurian contends HUD should have rejected the proposed sites, forcing the county to find better ones or pay fines when it failed to meet deadlines. Johnson countered that such an approach would have been risky.

"I can't predict what the county's behavior would be in that circumstance," he said. "I could have played a game of chicken, but I wasn't going to do that."

Instead, Johnson and HUD decided to go after what they called "low-hanging fruit," hoping to build good will with Astorino and the county's leadership. They feared the settlement could fall apart entirely if they pushed too hard.

"The key was not to make mistakes," said a former high-ranking HUD official who worked on Westchester strategy. "We were an agency that had not been thorough for decades, had been sitting on its hands and doing nothing for people who had been faced with systematic discrimination in this country. HUD loses this case, we're back to a loss of confidence and people would say we're worthless."

Faced with growing criticism over the housing sites, Johnson tightened the rules for further projects. In what he termed "guidance," he told the county that the rest of the housing needed to be in non-minority neighborhoods that were not isolated by railroads or highways.

But Westchester didn't change course. The county asked Johnson to approve a project in a non-residential part of Chappaqua crammed between railroad tracks and a highway.

Even some town residents complained.

"I'd like to know whether you would like your mother or sister to live here," Chappaqua architect Bill Spade asked the town board.

Instead of rejecting the site, Johnson met with developers to find ways to improve it. The plan remains on hold.

HUD also encountered resistance from Westchester on the portion of the settlement requiring the county to produce an analysis of impediments that addressed race and municipal resistance to affordable housing.

Due within 120 days, Westchester requested a series of extensions. When it finally submitted an analysis in April — days past the extended deadline — it ignored HUD's explicit instructions to address zoning and income discrimination.

"Quite frankly, the staff wrote it, came back to me, I reviewed it and there were things that I deleted that I would not agree with," Astorino said.

By May 2011, HUD had rejected the county's analysis four times. Still, it did not ask Judge Cote to intervene.

Fed up, Gurian returned to court, detailing what he saw as HUD and Johnson's failure to enforce the deal.

As he pressed the judge to step in, HUD took an unprecedented step: It froze $7 million in block grants to the county. As far as can be determined, it was the first time it had done so over a civil rights violation since the program's creation in 1974. The agency promised to release the money as soon as Westchester submitted an acceptable analysis.

Several former and current HUD officials interviewed for this article said that agency officials were divided over how hard they should press Westchester to comply. Some HUD officials wanted to be more aggressive, but decision makers ultimately decided withholding funds went far enough.

HUD's lawyers opposed Gurian's motion and asked Judge Cote not to get involved, arguing that though the "shortcomings are significant" by withholding the block money the agency had shown the county's actions "have not been and will not be ignored."

Ultimately, Cote ruled that the Anti-Discrimination Center had no standing to demand tougher enforcement because it had signed away that right when the case settled.

* * *

Last December, as Johnson prepared his first biennial report to the court on the settlement, he solicited HUD's view. The chief lawyer in the HUD regional office for New York responded with a list of 14 areas in which the county had failed to make "significant progress."

"Two years, into the Settlement, the County only appears to have taken the most minimal of steps towards compliance," she wrote.

By the end of 2011, HUD and Westchester were headed back to court. But, it was Westchester, not HUD, asking a judge to intervene. Astorino's lawyers questioned whether HUD had the authority to withhold its block grant. The county also challenged Johnson's demand that the county draw up a plan for dismantling exclusionary zoning, another requirement under the settlement, by February 2012. (Johnson had first instructed the county to complete this work by 2010.)

Astorino eventually lost on both issues, but wasn't deterred. In media interviews, he said, "HUD is trying to force me and Westchester County to dismantle local zoning, sue our municipalities and bankrupt our taxpayers. I will not allow that to happen."

HUD replied with a muted statement that mostly reminded the public the federal government had not brought the lawsuit to begin with. "A local group, not the federal government, first challenged Westchester's certifications to the federal government that it was affirmatively furthering fair housing," it said. "After a federal judge found against the County, the Obama Administration stepped in to see if a settlement was possible."

On the day the analysis of zoning was due, the county filed a report asserting that there was not a single instance in which local ordinances made it harder to build housing affordable to many African Americans and Latinos.

HUD called the document "wholly inadequate" and froze an additional $5 million in block grants slated for the county. Johnson ordered Westchester officials to try again.

After receiving a last-minute extension, Westchester handed in a copy of the document HUD had rejected in February but attached an analysis of New York zoning law by a local land-use professor that the county said confirmed its earlier findings.

As the dispute over zoning continued, Westchester refused to respond to requests from Johnson. The parties wound up in front of Judge Cote yet again.

In a detailed court filing in July, lawyers for the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York laid out the county's "pattern of delayed and incomplete responses" and failure to launch the public marketing campaign described in the settlement. They also noted that Astorino had vetoed legislation outlawing discrimination against lower-income tenants who pay their rent with the help of federal vouchers. The settlement required the county to adopt such a statute.

At the halfway mark of the seven-year court order, the government said the county's behavior "will make it all but impossible to achieve the results contemplated by the Settlement."

Still, the government's lawyers did not ask Judge Cote to hold the county in contempt or do anything specific. They simply asked the court to order Westchester to respond to Johnson's requests for information.

The county told the judge it would cooperate. But during his interview with ProPublica, Astorino continued to insist that the county's original analysis of zoning, which found no problems of any kind, was accurate and complete.

"HUD has made some false statements ... that we have failed to do any analysis of zoning," he said. "We've done one very exhaustive analysis that shows we have no exclusionary zoning."

The county still has not come up with a strategy to deal with zoning that makes it harder for African Americans and Latinos to live in the least diverse parts of the county.

Gurian said he is frustrated but not surprised. "We've known from the beginning that Westchester is in a resistance posture and the government is in an appeasement posture," he said. He's hardly the agency's only critic. "HUD is hopeless," said Roberta Achtenberg, who led fair housing enforcement at the agency under President Clinton and views its handling of Westchester as typical.

Michaux, the mother who lives in Port Chester but dreams of giving her children a better education by moving to Rye, has closely followed the progress of the lawsuit through local news reports. She doubts it will provide any deliverance for people like herself. "I feel like they are trying to skirt the issue — yeah, you built it," she says, referring to the 18 units isolated from Rye by two freeways, "but you are skirting the issue by building far away from where your real community is."

"They act like they care, but they don't."

Update (11/2): This post has been updated to clarify that a review by John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, of Westchester county's Analysis of Impediments was conducted after Craig Gurian filed suit against the county.

By Kim Barker, ProPublica, and Rick Young and Emma Schwartz, Frontline

Bank documents for a controversial conservative social welfare nonprofit released Friday by Montana officials contradict assertions by a former top official of the group.

The records show Allison LeFer signed many of the checks paid out by Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP, from April 2008 to October 2010.

LeFer also operates a printing business that did work for political candidates, but her husband, Christian LeFer, a key player in WTP between 2008 and 2010, has maintained that the couple kept her work and his strictly separate.

The bank records appear to contradict this, however, indicating Allison LeFer was involved with WTP. Separate records from candidates show they paid her printing company for work.

Outside groups like WTP are not allowed to coordinate with candidates, largely because contributions to candidates are subject to strict limits. Outside groups can take unlimited amounts of money.

Attempts to get a hold of Christian and Allison LeFer were unsuccessful Friday night.

Earlier this week, in response to questions about other documents that had surfaced on the group’s activities, Christian LeFer said, “Both my wife and I have scrupulously endeavored to avoid any possibility of illegal coordination.”

ProPublica and Frontline have written extensively about how boxes of documents found in a meth house in Colorado and sent to Montana authorities pointed toward possible coordination between candidates and outside spending groups, including WTP. The group was a focus of a Frontline film broadcast earlier this week.

The boxes contained files for 23 candidates for state office in Montana. They also held fliers and questionnaires from outside spending groups. One group, WTP, seemed to be pulling the strings, working with campaigns on strategy and surveys.

Although small, WTP has won national attention for its attempts to fight campaign-finance restrictions. Its lawsuit overturned Montana's ban on corporate spending in elections, extending the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision to all states.

The group also has been engaged in a long-running dispute with Montana campaign-finance regulators. It has sued Montana over its ruling two years ago that WTP was acting as a political committee and should have to report its donors. That lawsuit will be heard in March.

Documents available for WTP, now known as the American Tradition Partnership, provide a rare look into the inner workings of a so-called dark money group. These tax-exempt organizations can accept unlimited contributions and do not have to disclose their donors. ProPublica has written extensively about such groups, which are playing a growing role in federal and state elections.

In addition to the documents found in the meth house in Colorado, in early 2010, Montana regulators also were provided with others by a woman who briefly worked at WTP.  

Now Montana District Court Judge Jeffrey Sherlock has ordered the release of hundreds of pages of account transactions and copies of checks to consultants and vendors in Montana, Colorado and near Washington, D.C.

The records showed that checks written on WTP’s account and signed by Allison LeFer went to gun shows, for legal work and to LeFer’s printing company. She also signed a check for the group’s largest expenditure, a one-time transfer on Nov. 23, 2010, for $40,000 to “WTI.” This could refer to the Western Tradition Institute, the sister charity of WTP.

WTP had sought a protective injunction against the records’ release, sought by Frontline and ProPublica. Sherlock wrote in his ruling that there is a“substantial relation between disclosure of this financial information and Montana’s stated constitutional interest in its citizen’s right to know.”

Montana officials released some of the bank information late Friday and will release the remainder after redacting account information.

On its website, American Tradition Partnership, formerly WTP, describes itself as a grassroots lobbying organization fighting against radical environmentalists. It says it hasn’t engaged in politics or advocated for or against the election of candidates. Instead, it says it simplyeducates voters on how candidates stand on issues.

by Jennifer LaFleur

Taloria Stevenson Green has voted in every election since 1972, casting her ballot at a polling place across the street from her Washington, D.C. home.  But last year, she moved into a nursing home. She still voted though -- this time absentee, when local election officials came to the facility to help residents vote.

“We have a say-so in what goes on in our country,” Green, 61, told other nursing home residents at a luncheon held last month in Washington, D.C.  “I look at it as both a responsibility and a right to have my voice heard.”

But not all nursing home residents get to exercise that right.  Survey reports from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services in ProPublica’s Nursing Home Inspect database show that over the past few years, dozens of nursing homes have been cited for violating residents’ voting rights.

At a nursing home in Anchorage, state inspectors reported that the facility failed to ensure residents the opportunity to vote in a municipal election.  One resident was “visibly tearful” and said she had voted in every election, according to an inspection report.

Since that survey, the facility has taken steps to address the problems.

“As part of our plan of correction, we have established a voting protocol and better publicized how residents can access absentee and special needs voting,” said Kirsten Schultz, spokesperson for Providence Health & Services Alaska. “On the day of the election, our activity coordinator will work with election officials to ensure that any residents who need assistance to vote receive the support they need.” Since July, the facility has posted information about voting and staff talked with residents about voting.

In another case, surveyors reported that a nursing home in Los Angeles failed to help residents register to vote, which “resulted in the residents being denied their right, as citizens of the United States, to vote in an election.” ProPublica has contacted the facility, but has not heard back. We will update you when we do.

“There’s a sense that you go into a nursing home and have no more rights,” said Robyn Grant, public policy director for The National Consumer Voice for Quality Long-Term Care,  “Many residents take their right very seriously and are proud to have voted in every Presidential election.”

The rights of long-term care residents are laid out in the Nursing Home Reform Act of 1987, which protects the rights of long-term care residents as citizens of the United States.

“The facility can make an enormous difference in whether residents can exercise their constitutional right to vote,” said Nina Kohn, a law professor at Syracuse University who specializes in elder law.  “The facility may have to assist residents with voting.  Residents may need to be reminded about voting.”

It’s not up to a facility to decide who should be able to vote, Kohn said. “There is no capacity test in this country for voting.”

If nursing home residents or their families feel they have been denied those rights, they should contact their state nursing home ombudsman, Grant said.

You can explore the data yourself and find more voting problems in nursing homes using Nursing Home Inspect. Search for keywords like “vote,” “voting” or “election.”  Be sure to read the reports carefully to exclude reports where voting applied to other issues, such as a vote among resident about television usage.

by Kim Barker, ProPublica, and Rick Young and Emma Schwartz, Frontline

Nov. 5: This post has been updated.

This story was co-published with PBS Frontline.

The donors wrote notes on their checks like "Go get 'em!" or "Stop Obama." They scrawled in names of candidates for office in Montana and Colorado, or simply "oil & gas."

But unlike donors to political committees, the names of those who gave to Western Tradition Partnership, or WTP, were never supposed to be made public.

That changed Friday after a Montana district court judge released the social welfare nonprofit's bank records at the request of Frontline and ProPublica, saying citizens had a right to know.

It was the first time that a court has ordered a modern dark money group's donors to be made public, firing a warning shot to similar organizations engaged in politics.

The WTP bank records, which cover a period from March 2008 to December 2010, show that the group raised almost $1.1 million from other social welfare nonprofits, corporations, a political committee and individuals. It received $650,000 from the nonprofits, $70,000 from an Oklahoma businessman and his company and $50,000 from a Colorado homebuilder. Most WTP contributors, however, gave on a smaller scale: 495 of the group's 607 donations were for $100 or less.

The total amount raised by WTP, now known as American Tradition Partnership, was not large, compared to the tens of millions of dollars dark money groups like Crossroads GPS and Americans for Prosperity have collected in the 2012 election cycle.

But the details available on WTP, which has worked to elect conservatives in Montana and Colorado and has won national attention for a lawsuit that led the Supreme Court to apply its Citizens United ruling to states, are striking.

The bank records highlight WTP's ties to groups backing libertarian Ron Paul. The Conservative Action League, a Virginia social welfare nonprofit run at the time in part by John Tate, most recently Paul's campaign manager, transferred $40,000 to WTP in August 2008, bank records show. Tate was also a consultant for WTP. In addition, WTP gave $5,000 to a group called the SD Campaign for Liberty, affiliated with Paul and the national Campaign for Liberty.

The bank records also illustrate how cash passes between dark money groups, further obscuring its original source: $500,000 passed from Coloradans for Economic Growth to WTP to the National Right to Work Committee, over a few days in October 2008. Coloradans for Economic Growth and the National Right to Work Committee are social welfare nonprofits that don't have to disclose their donors. Tate and others paid by WTP were also once associated with National Right to Work.

WTP's biggest donation that wasn't simply a pass-through, for $110,000, was from the Spur Education Fund, an obscure nonprofit with no website, about which little information is available. Incorporated in June 2010, out of the same Denver law firm address as Coloradans for Economic Growth, the fund transferred money to WTP four times between July and September 2010.

Scott Shires, the man who incorporated WTP in Colorado in 2008, appeared to have signed off on one of those contributions, raising questions about whether WTP was also affiliated with Spur. A handwritten note on a transfer document for $40,000 from Spur, dated Sept. 2, 2010, said: "Deposit into Western Tradition Partnership acct ending 5610 as per Scott Shires phone request."

Shires, who says he has been the public face of about 600 committees over the past 20 years, has maintained he had very little involvement with WTP. On Sunday, he said he wrote some checks for the Spur Education Fund but didn't remember anything else.

"It's a game," he said. "There are people that don't want their names connected to certain committees, and I was the public name period. And that was case with WTP."

Social welfare nonprofits, unlike super PACs, are allowed to keep their donors secret. Although they can spend money on politics, their primary purpose is supposed to be social welfare, or helping the community at large. ProPublica has written extensively about how some of these groups exploit gaps between election authorities and the Internal Revenue Service, the regulatory agency for social welfare nonprofits, to spend millions of anonymous dollars on political campaigns.

As some nonprofits have pushed the limits, regulators are starting to push back at the state level. Besides Montana, California's Supreme Court ordered an Arizona social welfare nonprofit to reveal the donors for $11 million spent to oppose a California tax initiative and to support a ballot measure restricting union dues collection by Sunday. After saying it would appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, Americans for Responsible Leadership backed down and announced its donors Monday morning. Who were they? A social welfare nonprofit and a trade association, neither of which has to release its donors. California regulators accused the group of "campaign money laundering."

In an article last month, ProPublica and Frontline described how WTP may have misled the IRS in its initial application for recognition. The bank records we obtained raise new questions, showing no money came in from the man WTP claimed as its primary donor when it asked the IRS to expedite the approval of its application. The bank records also indicate the group raised enough money to require it to file tax returns for 2009 and 2010, yet the IRS has no record of tax returns for WTP after 2008.

The records also raise more questions about potential coordination between candidates and WTP. Candidates, who have strict contribution limits, are not allowed to coordinate with outside spending groups like WTP, which can raise unlimited amounts of money.

The bank records show that Allison LeFer, the wife of former WTP official Christian LeFer, signed almost all WTP's checks.

Allison LeFer runs a printing company that did work for Montana candidates in 2008 and 2010, many of whom WTP also supported. The printing company, Direct Mail and Communications, shared a post office box with WTP, bank records show. In August 2008, WTP also transferred money to a business checking account for "DMC Consulting," possibly another name for LeFer's company.

The bank deposits for WTP include a $557.50 check in June 2010 to Direct Mail from Friends of Dan Kennedy, the campaign committee for Kennedy, who won election to the Montana state legislature in 2010. Kennedy, who reported paying this amount to Direct Mail in campaign filings to the state, didn't return phone calls or an email Sunday.

So far, Christian and Allison LeFer have not responded to questions about the bank documents from ProPublica and Frontline. Neither has Donny Ferguson, who now runs American Tradition Partnership.

A Frontline documentary broadcast last month showed how WTP helped to shape the campaigns of candidates in state races in Montana.

After that documentary and a story showing how documents found in a meth house in Colorado pointed to possible illegal coordination between WTP and campaigns, Christian LeFer said the documents had been stolen from his wife's car and mingled in a way to suggest coordination.

LeFer insisted that he and his wife had "scrupulously endeavored" to avoid any possibility of coordination.

Montana authorities subpoenaed the bank records as part of an ongoing investigation. After the state said WTP should have registered as a political committee and reported its donors in October 2010, the group sued. That lawsuit is due to be heard in March.

Once the records were released Friday and account information was redacted, they were sent to Frontline. The bank records will be available to the public on Monday.

It's not clear whether the bank records in the two WTP accounts reflect all of the money flowing in and out of the group. For instance, a list of prospective donors leaked by a whistleblower who worked for WTP in early 2010 says that a man in Colorado helped "steer us $50k last cycle" from another social welfare nonprofit. Yet there is no record in the bank documents of that donation.

In its one tax return filed with the IRS, WTP claimed it raised almost $666,000 in 2008. Its bank account records show it raised $687,000, most of which was passed on to the National Right to Work Committee.

It's not yet clear how most WTP donors will react to losing their anonymity.

Donald Hood of Longmont, Colo., gave $6,000 in 2009. On Sunday, he said he gave the money not for a specific candidate, but for a specific issue on the ballot he didn't remember. He was upset his donation had been revealed.

"That's nobody's business," Hood said. "Most of my donations are to groups where my donations are anonymous….The fact that you have my name and know I gave money to an organization one time is not really too pleasant, to my mind."

The biggest individual donor to WTP was Norman Asbjornson, a Montana native who gave $50,000 to WTP in August 2008. AAON Inc., Asbjornson's heating, ventilation and air conditioning manufacturing company in Tulsa, Okla., gave $20,000 to ATP in October 2010. (The donation from Asbjornson was made public in a story by the Center for Public Integrity last week.)

Asbjornson couldn't be reached for comment Sunday. He has said he believes taxes inhibit growth and has given more than $160,000 in federal races since 2008, including more than $65,000 to the Republican National Committee, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

The second biggest individual donor was Larry Mizel, who gave $50,000 in October 2010. Mizel founded M.D.C. Holdings, a homebuilding and home financing company in Denver. He's a major contributor to Republican causes, giving $100,000 to the super PAC American Crossroads in August. Mizel, who couldn't be reached for comment Sunday, is also on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, a social welfare nonprofit that is supporting Mitt Romney for president.

New Leadership Colorado, a political committee, gave WTP $45,000 in October 2008. The IRS website on political committees has no records for any activity of the group in 2008 and sparse records for 2010. New Leadership is registered out of the same law firm address as Spur Education Fund and Coloradans for Economic Growth.

Another donor was K12 Management, which gave $20,000 in October 2010. K12 Management, which bills itself as the "largest provider of online education for grades K-12," was co-founded in 2000 by former Education Secretary William Bennett and has been at the center of controversy over the rapid rise of for-profit virtual schools.

In some ways, WTP's bank records show it ran like many small local businesses. The group overdrew its accounts on several occasions. It bought merchandise at Big Bear Sports Center and purchased meals at restaurants like Montana's Rib & Chop and Wahoo's Fish Taco.

Most of the group's checks even misspelled its name, bearing the moniker "Western Traditon Partnership."

by Kim Barker

Montana is known for its big skies, jagged mountains and open roads. Not so much for people.

Yet as much as $40 million is being spent to tell the state's 675,000 registered voters who to pick as senator: incumbent Democrat Jon Tester or Republican Rep. Denny Rehberg. That's almost $60 for every potential voter.

Much of the TV ad spending is being done by outside groups that do not have to identify their donors, unseen hands that may tip a race that could determine which party controls the Senate.

More than 20 dark-money groups have chimed in so far, from big shots like Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS to obscurities like Citizens for Strength and Security Fund. More TV ads — an estimated 89,000 between June 1 and Oct. 21 — have run in the Tester vs. Rehberg face-off than in any other Senate race in the country, the Wesleyan Media Project says.

"I made a joke recently to some people that I was going to sit down and watch a discussion of the Senate race, interrupted by some football," said Bowen Greenwood, the head of Montana's Republican Party. "Nobody really understands how to adapt to this new landscape yet. We're all doing this by the seat of our pants."

Greenwood's lament gets at what life has become in the new post-Citizens United, Wild West of campaign finance. The ad saturation has been highest in close Senate races, not only in Montana, but in Wisconsin, Indiana and Virginia, according to Wesleyan's study of estimates by Kantar Media's Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks broadcast and national cable spots. And still, despite the millions spent, Tester and Rehberg are locked in a tight race, with a recent poll showing Rehberg slightly ahead.

David Parker, an associate professor at Montana State University who is writing a book on the Tester-Rehberg Senate race, estimates that as much as $15 million more will be spent to win the seat than was spent in 2006.

Outside groups could account for half the spending on TV commercials, most of which are attack ads.

"They're just harsh and negative and mean," Parker said.

Much of the spending has been on so-called "issue" ads that ran outside the reporting window for the Federal Election Commission, but Parker has driven around the state twice to collect information from TV stations on spending.

The influx of outsiders may be turning off some voters. Liberal groups with Montana-sounding names — think "rural" and "hunters" — have been accused of being fronts for national environmental interests. A cable system pulled one negative Crossroads ad for falsehoods — rare this election season. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce drew ridicule for an ad opposing "John" Tester.

Smaller groups show not only how dark the money can be, but how odd.

A nonprofit called America Is Not Stupid, incorporated last year in Florida, is among those running ads in Montana. The IRS has no record of the group's tax-exempt status. Its purported president, Miguel Angel Gutierrez, was not findable, and the lawyer who founded it, Gene Peek, didn't return phone calls. Its ad features a baby in need of a diaper change.

"I don't know what smells worse: my diaper or Jon Tester," the voiceover says.

Greenwood said a constituent had called to ask if America Is Not Stupid was affiliated with the Republican Party. The GOP state director said he'd never heard of the group.

"Politicians care a great deal about their message," he said. "And nobody is happy that somebody else is dictating what we're talking about rather than our candidates."

by Suevon Lee

This post is being kept up-to-date. It was first published on July 23.

Voter IDs laws have become a political flashpoint in what's gearing up to be another close election year. Supporters say the laws — which 30 states have now enacted in some form — are needed to combat voter fraud, while critics see them as a tactic to disenfranchise voters.

We've taken a step back to look at the facts behind the laws and break down the issues at the heart of the debate.

So what are these laws?

They are measures intended to ensure that a registered voter is who he says he is and not an impersonator trying to cast a ballot in someone else's name. The laws, most of which have been passed in the last several years, require that registered voters show ID before they're allowed to vote. Exactly what they need to show varies. Some states require a government-issued photo, while in others a current utility bill or bank statement is sufficient.

As a registered voter, I thought I always had to supply some form of ID during an election.

Not quite. Per federal law, first-time voters who registered by mail must present a photo ID or copy of a current bill or bank statement. Some states generally advise voters bring some form of photo ID. But prior to the 2006 election, no state ever required a voter to produce a government-issued photo ID as a condition to voting. Indiana in 2006 became the first state to enact a strict photo ID law, a law that was upheld two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Why are these voter ID laws so strongly opposed?

Voting law opponents contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic. Obtaining photo ID can be costly and burdensome, with even free state ID requiring documents like a birth certificate that can cost up to $25 in some places. According to a study from NYU's Brennan Center, 11 percent of voting-age citizens lack necessary photo ID while many people in rural areas have trouble accessing ID offices. During closing arguments in a recent case over Texas's voter ID law, a lawyer for the state brushed aside these obstacles as the "reality to life of choosing to live in that part of Texas."

Attorney General Eric Holder and others have compared the laws to a poll tax, in which Southern states during the Jim Crow era imposed voting fees, which discouraged blacks, and even some poor whites -- until the passage of grandfather clauses -- from voting.

Given the sometimes costly steps required to obtain needed documents today, legal scholars argue that photo ID laws create a new "financial barrier to the ballot box."

Just how well-founded are fears of voter fraud?

There have been only a small number of fraud cases resulting in a conviction. A New York Times analysis from 2007 identified 120 cases filed by the Justice Department over five years. These cases, many of which stemmed from mistakenly filled registration forms or misunderstanding over voter eligibility, resulted in 86 convictions.

There are "very few documented cases," said UC-Irvine professor and election law specialist Rick Hasen. "When you do see election fraud, it invariably involves election officials taking steps to change election results or it involves absentee ballots which voter ID laws can't prevent," he said.

An analysis by News21, a national investigative reporting project, identified 10 voter impersonation cases out of 2,068 alleged election fraud cases since 2000 – or one out of every 15 million prospective voters.

One of the most vocal supporters of strict voter ID laws, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that his office has prosecuted about 50 cases of voter fraud in recent years. "I know for a fact that voter fraud is real, that it must be stopped, and that voter id is one way to prevent cheating at the ballot box and ensure integrity in the electoral system," he told the paper. Abbott's office did not immediately respond to ProPublica's request for comment.

How many voters might be turned away or dissuaded by the laws, and could they really affect the election?

It's not clear.

According to the Brennan Center, about 11 percent of U.S. citizens, or roughly 21 million citizens, don't have government-issued photo ID. This figure doesn't represent all voters likely to vote, just those eligible to vote.

In late September, an analysis by Reuters and research firm Ipsos of data culled from 20,000 voter interviews found that those lacking proper ID were less likely to vote anyway, “regardless of state law changes.”

Among those who said they were “certain to vote,” only 1 percent said they did not have proper ID while another 1 percent said they were uncertain whether they had the proper ID.

The analysis also found that those who lack valid photo ID tended to be young people, those without college educations, Hispanics and the poor.

State figures also can be hard to nail down. In Pennsylvania, nearly 760,000 registered voters, or 9.2 percent of the state's 8.2 million voter base, don't own state-issued ID cards, according to an analysis of state records by the Philadelphia Inquirer. State officials, on the other hand, place this number at between 80,000 and 90,000.

In Indiana and Georgia, states with the earliest versions of photo ID laws, about 1,300 provisional votes were discarded in the 2008 general election, later analysis has revealed.

As for the potential effect on the election, one analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog estimates they could decrease voter turnout anywhere between 0.8 and 2.4 percent. It doesn't sound like a very wide margin, but it all depends on the electoral landscape.

"We don't know exactly how much these news laws will affect turnout or skew turnout in favor of Republicans," said Hasen, author of the recently released The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. "But there's no question that in a very close election, they could be enough to make a difference in the outcome."

When did voter ID laws get passed — and which states have the strictest ones?

The first such law was passed as early as 2003, but momentum has picked up in recent years. In 2011 alone, legislators in 34 states introduced bills requiring voters show photo ID — 14 of those states already had existing voter ID laws but lawmakers sought to toughen statutes, mainly to require proof of photo identification.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has a helpful breakdown of states' voter ID laws and how they vary.

Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania have the toughest versions. These states won't allow voters to cast a regular ballot without first showing valid photo ID. Other states with photo ID laws offer some more flexibility by providing voters with several alternatives.

What happens if a voter can't show valid photo ID in these states?

These voters are entitled to a provisional ballot. To ensure their votes count, however, they must produce the mandatory ID within a certain time frame and affirm in person or writing they are the same individual who filled out a temporary ballot on Election Day. The time limits vary: They range anywhere from up to three days after the election (Georgia) to noon the Monday after the election (Indiana).

Ohio is now embroiled in a last-minute legal scuffle over provisional ballot procedures. Since 2006, if Ohio voters don't show some kind of ID at the polls, they fill out a provisional ballot and have 10 days to bring ID, in person, to the board of elections. The law states that an election official fills out the provisional ballot affirmation indicating what kind of ID, if any, a voter shows. On Friday, Nov. 2, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted issued a directive to election boards saying voters themselves — and not election officials — must record the ID information.

Voting rights advocates have asked a federal district judge for a clarification on the procedure. The judge says he'll issue one before the 10-day period after the election elapses. Husted's office did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Are there any exceptions to the photo ID requirement?

Yes. Indigency or religious objections to being photographed. But these exceptions don't automatically grant a voter the ability to cast a regular ballot: In Pennsylvania and Indiana, voters will be given a provisional ballot and must sign an affidavit for their exemption within the given time frame. For a more specific breakdown of all exceptions, see this state-by-state summary.

Why is the Justice Department getting involved in some cases?

Because of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states with a history of discrimination receive preclearance before making changes to voting laws. Texas and South Carolina passed strict photo ID laws in 2011 but were refused preclearance by the DOJ, which argued that these laws could suppress turnout among minority voters. Texas went to court seeking judicial preclearance from a federal district court; in August, a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the law. South Carolina has presented arguments before the same court.

South Carolina also requested judicial preclearance. On Oct. 10, a separate three-judge panel cleared the law, stating that it satisfies Section 5 due largely to its "reasonable impediment provision," which permits voters with registration cards to cast a provisional ballot if they provide a reason for being unable to procure photo ID. However, the law cannot take effect until 2013, wrote Judge Brett Kavanaugh, since there's uncertainty as to whether it can be "properly implemented in time for the 2012 elections."

What about challenges to the laws?

On Aug. 15, a Pennsylvania judge shot down an attempt to attempt to block the state’s voter ID law. The plaintiffs appealed. On Sept. 18, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, by a 4-2 vote, vacated the judge’s order and returned the case for further review. The justices asked the trial judge to assess whether voters could obtain state-issued photo ID without difficulty in the short time remaining before the November general election. If the judge could not be convinced voters wouldn’t be disenfranchised, the justices wrote, the law should be temporarily blocked.

In an Oct. 2 ruling, Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson did just that. He wrote that he was “not still convinced” that voters yet to obtain photo ID wouldn’t be disenfranchised as a result of the new law. He blocked it from taking effect, but only for the upcoming November 6 election. Additionally, the judge’s ruling still permits Pennsylvania election officials to request photo ID from registered voters this election, just not prevent anyone from casting a regular ballot if they’re unable to produce one.

As we’ve reported, other judges have also ruled in favor of other states’ voter ID laws. Here’s a rundown of the rulings.

The DOJ is also investigating many of the states’ laws, including Pennsylvania's photo ID law. As first reported by Talking Points Memo, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division sent the state's chief election official a letter Monday afternoon requesting 16 separate items, including the state's complete voter registration list, any documents supporting the governor's prior assurance that "99 percent" of the state's eligible voters already have acceptable photo ID, any papers to prove the state is prepared to provide registered voters with ID cards free of charge upon oath or affirmation, and any studies that inform state officials of the "demographic characteristics" of residents who lack valid voter ID.

The DOJ letter states it needs these documents within 30 days to evaluate the state's compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.

Tennessee saw a fight over whether library cards with photos were an acceptable form ID under the state's new law. Just last week, the Tennessee Supreme Court affirmed that voters can cast regular ballots using the free library cards.

Have any states attempted to enact strict voter ID laws but so far been unsuccessful?

Yes. In Wisconsin, two judges have blocked enforcement of the state's photo ID law. The state attorney general has asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to intervene and reinstate the law before the November election. Meantime, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire and North Carolina have vetoed strict photo ID bills passed by their Republican-led legislatures last year.

In New Hampshire, however, the state legislature overrode the governor's veto. In September, the Justice Department cleared the law, required since parts of the state are covered under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. Voters in New Hampshire who cannot produce a valid photo ID in the upcoming November election will still be permitted to vote after signing a challenged voter affidavit. But that's not all: these voters will be sent verification letters from the Secretary of State to confirm they voted. If they don't respond in writing within 90 days, the state attorney general will pursue an investigation into voter fraud.

Are there other voter ID laws in effect that ask for but don't necessarily require photo ID?

Yes. In these so-called "non-strict photo ID states" — Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Idaho, South Dakota and Hawaii — individuals are requested to show photo ID but can still vote if they don't have one. Instead, they may be asked to sign affidavits affirming their identity or provide a signature that will be compared with those in registration records.

Why has there been such a recent surge in voter ID legislation around the country?

This report by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice cites primarily big Republican gains in the 2010 midterms which turned voter ID laws into a "major legislative priority." Aside from Rhode Island, all voter ID legislation has been introduced by Republican-majority legislatures.

News21 also has this report on the close affiliation between the bills’ sponsors and the conservative nonprofit group, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

Republican figures have championed such laws. For instance, Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, recently praised the state's legislative accomplishments at a Republican State Committee meeting last month. "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," he said.

A spokesman for Turzai, Steve Miskin, told ProPublica that Turzai was "mischaracterized" by the press. "For the first time in many years, you're going to have a relatively level playing field in the presidential elections" as the result of these new laws," Miskin said. "With all things equal, a Republican presidential nominee in Pennsylvania has a chance."

Correction August 20, 2012: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated “voting law advocates contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic.” It’s voting law opponents who make that contention.

Correction July 24, 2012: An earlier version of this story said Texas went to federal court to challenge the DOJ’s denial of preclearance. In fact, Texas filed a lawsuit seeking preclearance from the federal district court two months before the DOJ announced its decision. Also, some states require a government-issued photo that does not have to come from the federal government as first detailed.

Clarification Sept. 25, 2012: This post has been clarified to reflect details about who was discouraged from voting under a poll tax.

Correction Oct. 4, 2012: An earlier version of this story stated that New Hampshire was unsuccessful in enacting a voter ID law. In fact, its legislature overrode the governor’s veto and the law is now in place in the state.

by Suevon Lee

When voters finally get to the polls tomorrow, they may run into more than a big crowd. Voters in many states will be facing a slew of confusing measures and often overly long ballots.

Here are some of the most striking examples we’ve spotted:

Florida has the one of the longest ballots on record in state history

Early voters in Florida have already reported long lines. One potential reason for the delays: Voters have to wade through 11, wordy, constitutional amendments.

Backed by Republican state lawmakers, the proposed amendments among other things seek to prohibit requiring individuals or businesses to purchase or provide health care as specified under the Affordable Care Act, prohibit public funding for abortion except in certain circumstances, and allow public funding for religious organizations.

Unlike citizen-led ballot initiatives, which require court approval and are bound to a mere 75 words, legislative amendments face no such restrictions – in either word length or quantity.

The lengthiest amendment this year – one proposing property tax breaks for the owners of second homes and vacation homes plus businesses that own commercial property – is 640 words. The second-longest amendment, which proposes giving legislators the authority to confirm Florida Supreme Court justices, trails closely behind at a slim 585 words.

In Miami-Dade County, a sample ballot for the general election runs 12 pages. The Miami Herald has reported that each ballot is taking up to 70 seconds to print when elections officials give it to voters.    

Confused Florida voters have bombarded citizens’ groups like the League of Women Voters with a record number of calls for help with cutting through the jargon.

“We’re extremely concerned it will create lines,” said the League’s state executive director, Jessica Lowe-Minor. “Decreased early voting and increased interest in the election combined with a long ballot is going to create a delayed process.”

Some observers also complain that the amendments are not clearly written.

“The descriptions of [the amendments] are quite convoluted,” said Tony Carvajal, chief of staff at the non-partisan Collins Center for Public Policy in Miami, which has published a simple voters’ guide to the amendments.  The titles don’t exactly tell you what it is. “I still look at that ballot and say it’s a bit confusing for me.”  

Tens of thousands of absentee ballots in Florida omitted a crucial heading

To make matters worse, many Floridians voting absentee who have already waded through the long ballot had to contend with an unfortunate kink: a printing error left out the heading for this year’s highly targeted judicial retention races on the Florida Supreme Court. (See a sample ballot, courtesy of the Palm Beach Post.)

The error is estimated to have affected about 35,000 absentee ballots in Palm Beach County, seat of the infamous “butterfly ballot” controversy from the 2000 presidential race.

About 27,000 of these flawed absentee ballots have already been turned in.

The problem goes beyond the obvious confusion for hapless voters: without the simple one-line heading, ballot tabulation machines are unable to scan and process these ballots. It’s prompted Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher to commission“teams of workers,” according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, to “hand copy votes onto good ballots.”

Voting “No” on California’s Proposition 40 actually means voting “yes” for change

Proposition 40 is a referendum placed on the ballot by California Republicans dissatisfied with the way state Senate districts were drawn up by an independent redistricting commission in 2011. (See ProPublica’s investigation into how Democrats maneuvered California’s congressional redistricting.)  

But voting “yes” on the measure actually leaves the new districts as they are. Voting “no” overturns them. Of course, voters in California and elsewhere are far more accustomed to ballot initiatives in which voting “yes” supports something new, while voting “no” rejects it – the mirror opposite of the referendum.

“There’s a real danger here that voters attempting to preserve the status quo will unintentionally trigger an entirely new line-drawing process,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California.

To complicate matters, Proposition 40’s supporters have since abandoned the campaign to get voters to reject the new districts. They’ve since shifted focus to getting Republican victories in the new seats.

The measure nevertheless remains on the ballot, where it is listed last among 11 measures. A confused – and by this point, fatigued – voter lacking particularly strong feelings toward the referendum may “tend to vote no, just out of caution,” says Schnur.

If enough people voted ‘no,’ what might be the result? Potentially even more confusion. The California Supreme Court has already upheld the new district lines, but it could still end up ordering what the proposition calls for: court-appointed special officials to redraw the district lines. That would begin the arduous and tumultuous redistricting process all over again.

California offers two competing tax measures that could potentially cancel each other out

Two seemingly similar tax initiatives on California’s ballot aim to achieve the same thing: provide more funding of public schools and early childhood education.

Backed by Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, Proposition 30 would temporarily raise the state sales tax by 0.25 percent and income tax for individuals making more than $250,000. Eighty-nine percent of that would be funneled to K-12 schools and 11 percent to community colleges.

Meanwhile, Proposition 38, bankrolled by powerful civil rights attorney Molly Munger, would generate revenue for education funding, but by raising income tax for individuals making as low as $7,500 in taxable earnings.

 Supporters behind the two measures have thrown their weight behind discrediting the other initiative.

That means that voters facing near-identical choices on the ballot could either vote to reject both initiatives to simply avoid a close choice or be so divided in their votes they’ll set up a potential court fight over the winning initiative.

“We have this odd spectacle of two ballot measures designed to raise taxes for public schools attacking each other,” said USC’s Schnur.

If both tax measures happen to receive more than a 50 percent vote, the initiative with the higher number of votes will take effect – but only in areas in which the measures overlap.

“Ultimately, if both pass, it would be up to the courts to decide how the money is allocated,” said Schnur.

Alabama wants to remove a racist passage from its Constitution, but reaffirms another

This year, Alabama will be voting on a proposed constitutional amendment to remove racist language. The measure’s sponsor, Republican state Sen. Arthur Orr, explained to the Montgomery Advertiser, “it’s important symbolically to send a message to our sister states and to the world that Alabama is a different place than it was 50 years ago.”

Yet Amendment 4 actually reaffirms other segregationist-era language in the state Constitution.

The proposed amendment would remove the 1901 Jim Crow-era passage, “separate schools shall be provided for white and colored children.” Yet it restates another education-related section meant to defy the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down as unconstitutional segregation in the nation’s schools.

That 1956 Alabama amendment declares, “Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed as creating or recognizing any right to education or training at public expense, nor as limiting the authority and duty of the legislature, in furthering or providing for education, to require or impose conditions or procedures deemed necessary to the preservation of peace and order.”

Intended to thwart the integration of Alabama’s schools, the 1956 measure was held unconstitutional by an Alabama state judge in 1991.

One potential reason the old language was included: In 2004, Alabama voters actually narrowly defeated an amendment that would have lifted both the 1901 and 1956 passages from the state Constitution.

The state’s black politicians, Democrats and the largest teachers’ association are urging voters to block this year’s amendment.

by Amanda Zamora , Jeremy B. Merrill and Al Shaw

The high rollers hitting Las Vegas have been betting on politics this fall, with more political ads airing in Sin City than any other media market in the country.

The same trend holds true for Free the Files, where Las Vegas accounts for 2,418 political ad files — the most of any market in our database of political ad purchases at TV stations from around the country. Volunteers have helped “free” more than 790 of those files, logging up to $45 million in ad contracts in Las Vegas so far.

But we want a better picture of who’s behind the Vegas ad blitz, so we’re declaring an Election Day Challenge here at ProPublica. The mission? To liberate Las Vegas.

With your help, we want to deconstruct spending in the most-saturated political ad market in the country and to analyze the impact of outside spending in the presidential campaign and other races, including the hotly-contested race between Republican Dean Heller and Democrat Shelley Berkley for John Ensign’s old Senate seat.

You’ll notice an Election Day Challenge bannered around our site. To participate, log into Free the Files by clicking “free a file in Las Vegas.” You will be asked to confirm that the file is an ad contract (not an invoice or other document), and then answer four easy questions about each contract — political ad information that would otherwise be locked inside PDF files on the FCC's web site.

Many thanks go to the hundreds of volunteers who’ve reviewed political files already over the last six weeks. With your help, we’ve logged $550 million in ad contracts overall. The top 10 contributors on our all-time Free the Files leaderboard as of 12 a.m. Eastern, Nov. 7, as well as the top Election Day Challenge contributor (whoever reviews the most files between now and 12 a.m. EST, Nov. 7), will earn official Free the Files t-shirts.

As the pundits and pollsters descend, here are two things you can do for democracy this election day: go vote, and help us uncover outside spending by freeing a file!

by Lois Beckett

Tuesday, Nov. 6, 1:42 p.m. This post has been updated.

Proud voters are already posting photos of their ballots on Instagram—sometimes with the names of their chosen candidates filled in. But before you snap a shot of your vote, you might want to check your state laws. As the Citizen Media Law Project points out as part of their guide to documenting the 2012 election, showing your marked ballot to other people is actually illegal in many states.  

Laws against displaying your ballot are motivated by concerns about vote buying, since voters being bribed might need to be prove they voted a certain way.  

While laws vary from state to state, the penalties for showing your ballot can be stiff.

“It’s illegal to display your voted ballot and violators could be convicted of a misdemeanor,” Colorado secretary of state spokesman Richard Coolidge told ProPublica. The penalty, according to Colorado law: a fine of not more than $1000, imprisonment in county jail for not more than one year — or both.

InMichigan and Hawaii, voters who show their ballots to other people can, in certain circumstances, have their votes thrown out.

It’s not clear how these rules apply to sharing a picture of your ballot on the Internet, or whether states would actually prosecute voters for an Instagram shot. Officials from Hawaii have yet to respond to a request for comment.

In Michigan, voters will have their ballots confiscated if they are found taking a photo or video of a ballot in a polling place, said Fred Woodhams, a spokesman for the Michigan department of state. Once an exposed ballot is confiscated, voters do not get a new one.

That doesn’t mean the state is monitoring the web for violations. “Certainly, we’re not going to Instagram to find people’s ballots,” he said.

 “Virtually all of these laws are older laws that predate the current technology,” said Jeffrey Hermes, a First Amendment expert who wrote the Citizen Media Law Project’s guide to ballot disclosure rules.

But, he warned in his guide, “It is easy to imagine situations in which the thoughtless posting of a marked ballot on Facebook could result in negative consequences.”

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Irvine, said that taking a picture of your marked ballot is “bad news.”

“Hard as it is to believe, before the secret ballot there was a lot more vote buying and we don't want more of that now,” he wrote in an email.

A North Carolina elections official told WRAL last week that a “criminal vote-buying scheme” in another state had involved cell phone pictures of completed ballots.

Some states simply prohibit using phones or cameras within a polling place.

Allowing voters to publicly display their ballots might also undermine the culture of the secret ballot, Hermes said. Another factor is the fear that voters might be intimated or swayed by seeing other people’s ballots.  

“These are legitimate concerns,” Hermes said, “but they only extend so far.”  

If voters “want to express what they feel and their experience and the polls, the First Amendment should protect that,” he said.  

Josh Stearns of Free Press, a media and technology advocacy group, told ProPublica he did not see much difference between wearing a t-shirt supporting a candidate, and sharing a photograph of your ballot.

“For a lot of people, voting is a really important life event,” he said.

“We can take our kids into the voting booth, but in many places we can’t take a picture of our ballot.”

Stearns said that allowing individuals to photograph their ballots might also be an important way of providing them with a record of their own vote.

Students interviewed this week by the DePaul University student paper had a range of views on posting ballot photos on Instagram, from approval to disappointment that voting had become “just another thing you can tweet.”

At least one state has recently changed its stance on the issue, Hermes said. Maine repealed its ban on voters showing their own ballots in 2011.

by Cora Currier and Blair Hickman

We outlined seven anticipated problems at the polls – from confusion over voter ID laws to disruptions caused by Hurricane Sandy. Now, we're collecting your stories on the issues. Tell us if you encountered trouble voting by tweeting @ProPublica with #InvestigateThis.