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In honor of Fair Housing Month, the Coach is getting back to basics with an overview of fair housing law. There’s a lot going on in Washington, with many anticipating changes on the horizon for fair housing regulatory requirements adopted in the waning days of the previous administration.

For this month’s lesson, the Coach gathered recent court decisions on fair housing law. Keeping abreast of what’s happening in the courts can help you learn from the experiences of other communities to better prevent—or respond—to fair housing complaints. 

In this Special Issue, the Coach wraps up 2016 with a review of this year’s lessons. Keep it handy—it’s a quick refresher on top fair housing concerns we covered this year. It’s also a helpful index to the full lessons, all of which are available to review or download from FairHousingCoach.com. And you’ll find quiz questions—with a link to the answers—so you can see how much you’ve learned.

This month, the Coach offers a fair housing quiz designed to help you test your knowledge of fair housing law. The rules forbidding housing discrimination can get complicated, so it’s important that everyone working at your community understands fair housing—and knows how to apply it in everyday dealings with the public.

This month, the Coach zeroes in on the 10 things you can do right now to avoid fair housing trouble. Often, we’re focused on the big picture—and things that take time to put into practice. But for this lesson, we’re focusing on small, immediate steps that you could take right away to cut your risks of a fair housing complaint.

In this month’s lesson, the Coach offers highlights from recent court rulings on fair housing law. For each case, we’ll review what happened and how it landed in court. Then, we’ll explain the fair housing issues involved, and what the court decided and why—so you can understand how to avoid similar fair housing problems at your community. Finally, you can take the Coach’s Quiz to see how much you’ve learned.

With the spring leasing season in full swing, the Coach gets back to basics with a refresher on fair housing law. Think you already know all you need to know? You might be surprised, since the law banning housing discrimination isn’t as straightforward as it seems. Whether you’re new to the industry or a seasoned veteran, it’s important to understand how the law protects prospects, applicants, and residents so you can recognize—and avoid—the pitfalls that commonly lead to fair housing trouble.

In this lesson, the Coach spotlights recent news of settlements reached in fair housing cases. The amounts reportedly paid are sometimes staggering—which is news in and of itself—and show just how much it can cost to resolve fair housing complaints. But the real news is in the backstory, the events that led to a complaint against the community. It’s there that you can learn what, if anything, the community could have done to avoid the problem in the first place, or once the problem arose, to prevent it from escalating into a formal fair housing complaint.

In this month’s lesson, the Coach features 37 tips to help you prevent fair housing trouble at your community. Federal fair housing law bans housing discrimination based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability, and familial status. On top of that, many state and local laws also ban discrimination based on marital status, age, and sexual orientation, to name a few other commonly protected characteristics.

To kick off the New Year, Fair Housing Coach spotlights HUD’s new proposed rules on harassment and liability for discriminatory practices—and how they may affect your community’s efforts to comply with fair housing law.

In October 2015, HUD released a proposed rule to create new fair housing regulations that would apply nationally to both private and federally assisted communities. Though released in a single proposed rule, the new regulations would cover two major issues by: