The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a regulation Friday designed to make it easier to enforce a 45-year-old law to combat housing discrimination by lenders, insurers, landlords and municipalities.
The so-called disparate-impact rule allows plaintiffs to use a statistical analysis to demonstrate that lenders or cities promoted policies that had a disproportionately adverse impact on minorities. As a result, plaintiffs could claim that lenders or cities violated fair-housing laws without necessarily proving they did so with an intent to discriminate.
