Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation that promised to provide equal access to housing opportunity for all. Signed by then President Lyndon B. Johnson on April 11th, 1968, the federal housing bill prohibited discrimination concerning the sale, rental and financing of housing based on race, religion, or national origin, with protections against discrimination based on sex and disability or towards families with children, added in subsequent decades.

Despite the bill’s historic nature, in practice, persistent patterns of racial and economic residential segregation continue to hold back progress in every metropolitan region in the United States. Restrictive zoning and land use policies are consistently employed to make housing inaccessible to people of color and the rate of homeownership among the African American population has remained virtually unchanged since the bill’s passing. Additionally, the power of the bill is consistently hindered by improper enforcement from the state to federal level; earlier this year even, the Department of Housing and Urban Development decided to suspend the Affirmatively Further Fair Housing rule, an Obama-era rule intended to bolster the Fair Housing Act’s enforcement.

The bill has had a long and stormy trip. When signing the bill into law, Johnson said it was one of the proudest moments of his Presidency, remarking that the transformative piece of legislation "proclaims that fair housing for all—all human beings who live in this country—is now a part of the American way of life." Yet, on this 50th anniversary of his words, the proclamation "fair housing for all" has yet to be seen and the bills key tenets remain unfulfilled despite some successes. To reflect on the occasion, we’ve pulled together some of our past coverage on issues of housing, segregation, and racial and economic inequality in the built environment, to see both how far we have come, and how much further we have to go.

Moshe Safdie Reflects on the 50th Anniversary of Habitat 67, the Masterpiece He Completed at 25

Photographing the demolition and transformation of Chicago's public housing

How social equality is linked to health, as manifested in the built environment

Carrying a racist legacy, highways today play a central role in civil rights activism

Anti-growth zoning codes exacerbate economic disparity, racial segregation

Touring some of the world’s most attractive public housing projects

Separate and unequal: the neighborhood gap for Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians in metropolitan America

Soapbox: Race

Unzoning; a conversation with Seattle’s Mike Eliason about Passivhaus, not-for-profit housing and the marriage of high design with high function

In search of better affordable housing: the origin story of the Bronx’s Twin Parks development

St. Louis, segregation and how history shapes the urban landscape

The self-segregation of America’s wealthiest class

Housing mobility vs. America’s growing slum problem