# Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988 The **Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988**, signed by President [[Ronald Reagan]] on **September 13, 1988**, rebuilt the [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]] around real enforcement and added two new protected groups: **people with disabilities** and **families with children**. Its chief Senate sponsor was [[Ted Kennedy]]. It took effect in March 1989. ## Why it matters For its first twenty years, the Fair Housing Act was a promise with almost nothing behind it. The government could look into a complaint and try to talk the landlord into settling, but it could not hold a hearing or go to court for the victim. Reagan himself said at the signing that the 1968 law had "lacked teeth" and that its conciliation provisions were "ineffective, when used." Nearly every tool the law uses today, from administrative hearings to federal penalties, dates from this Act. That is why today's fights over fair housing focus on HUD's rules, budgets and grants: the 1988 machinery is what is being slowed down. ## What it changed - **Administrative enforcement.** A person who files a complaint with HUD can have it decided quickly by a federal administrative law judge, or either side can choose a jury trial in federal court instead. - **Penalties.** Administrative judges could impose civil penalties of up to $10,000 for a first violation, $25,000 for a second and $50,000 for a third. The Justice Department could seek money for victims plus penalties of $50,000 for a first violation and $100,000 for later ones. - **Disability.** Discrimination against people with disabilities became illegal, including refusing reasonable changes to rules or reasonable physical modifications. New multifamily buildings had to meet basic accessibility design standards. - **Familial status.** Landlords could no longer refuse to rent to families with children under 18 or to pregnant women, with an exemption for qualifying housing for older people. - **Lending.** Coverage was extended to a wider range of real estate financing transactions. ## The fight over intent The Act left a lasting argument behind. In his signing remarks Reagan said Title VIII "speaks only to intentional discrimination" and that the new law did not endorse finding violations from discriminatory effects alone. But by 1988 every federal appeals court that had looked at the question allowed such claims, and the Act's own text added exemptions, covering appraisals, reasonable occupancy limits and refusals to rent to people convicted of making or distributing illegal drugs, that only matter if effects-based claims exist. In 2015 the Supreme Court relied on exactly that point to hold that the Fair Housing Act allows [[Disparate Impact]] claims, in [[Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project]]. Reagan's reading is now the official position of the federal government, which in 2026 proposed deleting HUD's own disparate-impact rule. ## Connections - [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]] - [[Disparate Impact]] - [[Americans with Disabilities Act]]: the broader disability-rights law that followed two years later. - [[Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project]]