A newly created City Council committee will spotlight housing issues in Birmingham. The Housing Policy Committee was established in a Tuesday vote, which District 5 Councilor Darrell O’Quinn called “a monumental occasion for fair housing.”

The Housing Policy Committee is the newest of the council’s 13 three-member committees, which meet separately from the full council and specialize on subjects such as education, utilities, economic development and transportation. While these committees don’t institute new laws by themselves, their recommendations, or lack thereof, can have significant influence on full-council votes.

The newly formed Housing Policy Committee replaces the council’s now-obsolete Census 2020/Redistricting Committee. It will be chaired by District 4 Councilor J.T. Moore and will include District 5 Councilor Darrell O’Quinn and District 8 Councilor Carol Clarke as members. In addition to local housing laws, Council President Wardine Alexander announced, the committee will evaluate current housing programs and advocate for fairer housing practices in the city.

An early priority for the committee will be to codify protections preventing housing discrimination based on income source.

“There are many folks in our community who have a nontraditional source of income, whether that be through a trust, a voucher, alimony, so on and so forth,” O’Quinn said. “What we find is that oftentimes, private property owners offering properties for rental will not recognize those sources of income or actively discriminate against people who have those sources of income.”

A local amendment recognizing source of income as a protected class — like race, sexual orientation or gender identity — “is actively under consideration,” he said.

“I regret to say that some present-day (landlords) actively say, ‘If you have a housing choice voucher, please don’t even bother to apply,”’ O’Quinn added. “That is on its face discriminatory, and Birmingham being the city that it is, poverty and race cannot be separated,” he added. “They’re intimately connected, and when you have (this) type of discrimination, it’s effectively racial discrimination, in my opinion. That’s a practice that needs to end.”

Council President Pro Tempore Crystal Smitherman added that many Black families have endured “generational curses” as a result of continuing discriminatory housing practices.

“Black people after the Civil War, going into Jim Crow, were forced into dense, close, low-quality housing because of discrimination, which we see today contributes to generations of crime, poverty, food insecurity, you name it,” she said.

The Housing Policy Committee will meet on the third Wednesday of each month at 3:30 p.m., Moore announced, meaning that it will first convene April 19. Other details of the meeting have not been set.