Whereas for over 80 years it has been the policy of the United States to promote the general welfare of the Nation by employing its funds and credit to assist States and localities to remedy unsafe housing conditions and the acute shortage of decent and safe dwellings for low income families under the United States Housing Act of 1937; Whereas the House of Representatives, which has over a period of many years endeavored to address housing and homeownership, and has had some success in doing so through related appropriations and authorizing legislation, has committed itself to meeting the affordable housing and community development needs of the country; Whereas the disparate impact standard under the Fair Housing Act is a longstanding protection that allows people to challenge policies that might seem neutral on their face but result in discriminatory outcomes; Whereas a government-sponsored corporation, the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC), established in 1933, implemented a system of redlining for years that rated neighborhoods based on a number of factors, including race; Whereas, in 1911, a St. Louis, Missouri, neighborhood enacted a racially restrictive covenant designed to prevent African Americans and Asian Americans from living in the area and in 1945 the Shelleys, an African-American family, moved into the neighborhood prompting Louis Kraemer to sue to enforce the covenant and prevent them from moving into their house, resulting in a Supreme Court decision that although restrictive covenants did not fall under constitutional protection, State enforcement of such covenants violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment; Whereas the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which became the National Association of Realtors, had harmful racial discrimination as part of its ethics code