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In honor of Fair Housing Month, we’re going to tackle a subject that you may be losing sleep over but don’t talk about: fear of getting a fair housing complaint. No doubt, you’re well aware of the potentially devastating consequences faced by communities embroiled in fair housing litigation. With increasing regularity, there’s news of yet another community paying out thousands—sometimes millions—to resolve fair housing disputes.

For this month’s lesson, the Coach gathered some interesting fair housing cases from the past few months. In some, communities are called to defend their actions when dealing with prospects—over the phone and during on-site visits. Others involve disputes with residents in how they handled maintenance problems and enforcement of rules governing common areas. And there’s a recent case over what property managers did—or should have done—about an offensive joke that circulated among the residents via email.

This month’s lesson focuses on a tough problem: sexual harassment. You might be familiar with rules banning sexual harassment of employees in the workplace, but there are similar rules banning sexual harassment of prospects, applicants, and residents of multifamily housing communities.

In this Special Issue, Fair Housing Coach takes a look at HUD’s new discriminatory effects rules and what they may mean for your community.

Recent developments signal a renewed emphasis on traditional fair housing testing. Now more than ever, it’s important to do everything you can to ensure your community complies with fair housing law—that way, you’ll be likely to pass any fair housing test.

This month's issue focuses on what to do if your community is ever accused of a fair housing violation.

In this month's issue, we'll discuss whether and to what extent fair housing laws affect your ability to regulate smoking at your community.

This month's issue of Fair Housing Coach focuses on what fair housing experts see as a growing trend in potential liability under fair housing law—retaliation claims.

This month, the focus is on preventing resident grievances from escalating into costly litigation. Of course, you can't prevent anyone from filing a fair housing complaint—doing so may itself be a fair housing violation. But if you focus your fair housing efforts on prevention, you can avoid the costly drain on your resources—in the time, effort, and expense needed to defend your community from a full-blown HUD investigation or a private fair housing lawsuit.

This month, we are going to teach you about liability insurance that covers housing discrimination. This is important because even if you follow every lesson in Fair Housing Coach, someone someday may claim that you or your community discriminated against him in violation of fair housing laws. If that happens, you need to know whether your insurance covers the claim and, if it does, to what extent your community is covered.