TLDR

Civil rights laws are only as good as the President, Supreme Court, and Congress and all three suck right now.

But but but, the Supreme Court said that race-based housing contracts are against the constitution!

Former Con Law professor here and let me say that is a common misunderstanding of the landmark case Shelley v. Kraemer (1948).

As with most Supreme Court cases, the devil is in the details.

In general, rights in the US Constitution are limitations on GOVERNMENT ACTION and do not protect against PRIVATE CONDUCT. (The Thirteenth Amendment is an exception.)

In Shelley, the court held that race-based housing contracts are PERMISSIBLE as PRIVATE CONTRACTS. However, asking the COURT to enforce a racist contract cues GOVERNMENT ACTION and that government action is then in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection clause.

You can have your racist contract, just don't take it to court.

So how do we regulate private conduct? Both the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1968 amendment which included the Fair Housing Act are rooted in the power of Congress to regulate interstate commerce.

Basically, if a private behavior interferes with the ability to engage in interstate commerce, Congress can regulate it. (People crossing state lines are engaging in interstate commerce per Heart of Atlanta v. US (1964)).

You are probably tired of hearing me say it, but it gets worse before it gets worse.

As with most acts of Congress, deference was given to the president to carry it out through executive orders, under the assumption that while individual presidents might have different priorities, none would be openly antagonistic to the will of Congress. That assumption ended with President Trump who rolled back or attempted to roll back policies going all the way back to the Clinton administration. (See for example E.O. # 42,901 Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice.)

So certainly President Trump and his cabinet lackeys are not going to vigorously go after the fellow below.

Can private citizens seeking to stop this development prevail in the federal court system?

Perhaps in New England or the West Coast, but certainly not in Ozark Mountains of Arkansas where the story below takes place. Only a single appointee in the Eighth Circuit was appointed by a liberal president and the oldest members appointed by a comparatively moderate Bush Sr. are in their 80s and imminently replaceable by Trump. In the case of a circuit split we would have to rely on the US Supreme Court. Historically the court upheld the Fair Housing Act, but we began to see an erosion of that deference in the last decade. Kennedy was a swing vote in a 5-4 decision in 2015. Another decision in 2017 led by Breyer was 5-3 with the newly appointed Gorsuch not participating. With Breyer, Kennedy, and Ginsburg gone, a 7-2 court would be allow two defectors and still be antagonistic toward the Fair Housing Act. They were willing to roll back 50 years of precedent in Roe v. Wade. It's not a stretch to think that they would roll back 57 years of precedent dealing with Fair Housing.

Congress?

I can find no record of a bill seeking to repeal the Fair Housing Act...
YET...
Nothing is the best one can hope for from Congress.

But 69-percent of Americans voted for this so at least there's that.*

*People who chose not to vote did so with the full knowledge of what Trump did in his first term and were okay with the possibility he would do it again. I stand by my sophomoric approach that if you do not stand against a known evil, you implicitly support it.

77 million + 90 million = 69 percent of the electorate.