Commentary: How fair housing expands justice

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 - whose 50th anniversary we marked recently - seemed a monumental achievement at the time, a capstone to the historic measures of the 1960s that sought to transform race relations in America. Today, however, many civil rights activists view it largely as a failure because black/white housing segregation remains the norm in too much of urban America.

But something central has been widely overlooked. Fair-housing laws did bring about substantial change in a significant number of American cities. And a large body of careful research shows that