19C - CONSOLIDATED ANNUAL PERFORMANCE AND EVALUATION RPT

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accommodations in building, land use, and housing when necessary to afford disabled persons an equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling. 2. Actions to Overcome Identified Impediments During the 2011-2012 report period the City undertook the following actions (on its own or in cooperation with regional partners) to overcome the impediments to fair housing choices identified in the regional Al: ¦ Santa Ana contracted with FHCOC to provide comprehensive educational and enforcement programs to City residents. Actions taken during the 2011-2012 report period included: Fair Housing Community Education - During 2011-2012 the FHCOC participated in 51 education and/or outreach activities, reaching a culturally and ethnically diverse audience, in which we made participants aware of fair housing laws and our counseling services, including those to help them improve their readiness for a home purchase ¦ Fair Housing Enforcement - FHCOC staff responded to 71 housing discrimination complaints that resulted in the opening of a case file; seven of these cases involved the City of Santa Ana. Housing Dispute Evaluation & Resolution - On a regional basis, activities provided by FHCOC included assisting more than 5,060 unduplicated regional-households. Of these 839 unduplicated households were from Santa Ana. On a regional basis, FHCOC conducted 101 paired, on-site, systemic tests for discriminatory housing practices. These were split between 24 tests of for-sale real estate brokerage transactions and 77 rental housing transactions. ¦ FHCOC's website currently has an on-line housing discrimination complaint reporting tool that generates an e-mail to FHCOC. It is often used for complaints for other, non-discrimination, housing-related issues. In 2011-2012 FHCOC engaged the services of an information technology consultant to improve its computer-based capabilities. As part of this effort, the website will be upgraded to help further differentiate between the discrimination and non-discrimination complaints. Information regarding the process of investigating and resolving complaints will be added. ¦ On an occasional basis, advertising for Orange County rentals listed on Craigslist were monitored for discriminatory content. Any discriminatory advertisements were either flagged as prohibited, responded to in order to inform the poster of possible discriminatory content, brought to the attention of Craigslist via abuse@craigslist.org , or referred to FHCOC's investigators for possible enforcement action. Other on-line rental sites were sporadically monitored; however, the lack of a text search function made monitoring of other sites more time consuming and less feasible. Without exception the identified problematic postings indicated restrictions with regard to children under the age of 18 or improper preference for seniors or 'older adults' for housing opportunities that did not appear qualify as housing for older persons (age 55 and over). 08/23/2012 12 19C-20