The groups are launching the commission to mark the 40th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, Kemp said in a conference call. Other commission members include Okianer Christian Dark, an associate dean for academic affairs at Howard University College of Law; Gordon Quan, former mayor pro tem and housing committee chair for the city of Houston; I. King Jordon, president-emeritus at Gallaudet University; Pat Combs, former National Association of Realtors president; and Myron Orfield, law professor at the University of Minnesota and director of the Institute on Race and Poverty.

Approximately 150 people attended the hearing here Tuesday, with topics such as fair housing, racial housing segregation, federal enforcement of the Fair Housing Act and other issues, a commission spokeswoman says. The next regional hearing will be held on July 31 in Houston, a spokeswoman says. Hearings will also be held in Los Angeles on Sept. 9, in Boston on Sept. 22 and in Atlanta on Oct. 17, she says. The hearings will discuss topics such as fair housing, the foreclosure crisis, the effect of racial housing patterns on education, the impact of urban revitalization and housing in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina. The commission plans to release a report in December which will include some of the testimony provided at the hearings as well as recommendations.

Discrimination continues, and goes beyond telling a minority that an apartment has already been rented, the chairmen said during the call. "A lot of minority families were unfairly targeted by unscrupulous brokers and predatory lenders (and) put into sub-prime loans when they did not need to be," Cisneros said during the conference call. Communities still tend to be segregated, which has led to "40% of the schools in Chicago are 90% African-American," he says. The commission is also focusing on a need for better enforcement of the Fair Housing Act, Kemp says. There were more than four million fair housing code violations estimated in 2007. However, only 27,000 complaints were filed with HUD, and only 31 charges resulted from those complaints, Kemp says.