Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat

In 1955, Rosa Parks broke the status quo and refused to give up her seat on the bus to make room for a white passenger.  Since then, many laws have been enacted to avoid discrimination of any person in the United States.

The Fair Housing Law

One such law is the Fair Housing Law of 1968 which aims to protect all people from discrimination based on their race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability, or familial status.  These are called “protected classes” and they are the ones covered at the Federal level.  In addition, States and localities may add their own protected classes.

For example, in Fairfax County, Virginia, the Human Rights Ordinance also protects persons over 55 years of age and persons of any marital status from discrimination.

At HomebySchool.com, we take Equal Housing Opportunity very seriously

At HomebySchool.com, we take Fair Housing (i.e. Equal Housing Opportunity) very seriously, and we carefully observe the Fair Housing Laws while adding value to our real estate services.   Our intention is to provide a value-add service to all persons interested in buying or selling a home in Fairfax County, Virginia.

A few of the ways in which we add value to the typical home-search experience are:

• We compile publicly-available information about Fairfax County schools
• We display homes for sale by school boundary

Let’s look at them one by one:

We compile information about Fairfax County schools – and their boundaries

All the information presented on this website is publicly available on the official Fairfax County Public Schools website (FCPS.edu), as well as on other official websites, including the local MLS.

What we have done is organize that public information from the point of view of a home seeker, so that it’s easier to consume it with their purposes in mind.

Why compiling Fairfax schools information isn’t discriminatory

Compiling Fairfax county schools information isn’t discriminatory because we don’t offer school (or neighborhood, or zip code, or city) advice.

Offering advice on the school, neighborhood, zip code, or city, would consitute “steering”. And steering is illegal.   Therefore, we don’t offer advice as to which school, or school boundary (or zip code or city) is best suited to a specific person.

What we do is simply organize the information (which is publicly available on other venues) and encourage every person to select their home based on their particular criteria.   Such criteria could be the number of bedrooms, or the price, or even the school that they’d like their home to be assigned to.

Another way in which we add value to the typical home search experience is to display homes for sale by school boundary.

We display Fairfax homes for sale by school boundary

A school boundary is simply a political division of land, much like a zip code or a postal city.

Our home search allows every person to search for homes like most Real Estate websites: through a display of homes for sale by zip code, or by postal city.  In addition, our home search also displays homes for sale based on such homes’ assigned school.

Why displaying a home by school isn’t discriminatory

All kinds of people can have a good reason to want to live within a school boundary.   Some people would want to live near a school with a great Football team, for example. Or, perhaps a school with a great theater program would be appealing to someone who loves the arts – and would want easy access to performances.

As you see, finding a home by school is for everyone who is interested in doing so, and it isn’t much different than finding a home by zip code, or by postal city.   This is Equal Housing Opportunity.

Next Step

Download The FREE No-Tears Guide to Moving to Fairfax, VA.  The Guide includes info on Fairfax County Schools,  a home affordability map by school boundary, and the link to finding a home by school on an interactive map.

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