Fifty-three years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1968 – a follow up to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Also known as The Fair Housing Act of 1968, it remains the most important proposal enacted by Congress from the recommendations of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, also called the Kerner Commission, that continues to affect the daily lives of Americans.

To help curb the rampant discrimination in housing practices that predates both laws, the commission advised that Congress “enact a comprehensive and enforceable federal open housing law to cover the sale or rental of all housing, including single family homes.” The Act captures this provision by codifying “prohibitions against discrimination in the sale or rental of housing.”

The United States has made progress in the half century since the Fair Housing Act’s enactment, but we have a very long way to go. Homeownership rates for people of color are still well behind those of White Americans, despite substantial gains among Latinx households in 2020. The pandemic has given the affordable and fair housing crises more visibility, even as the previous administration gutted key policies that protect and advance housing opportunities.

It’s good news for all of us that the Biden administration is reaffirming the nation’s commitment to the law.

But to truly address the spirit of the Fair Housing Act, the U.S. must recalibrate its approach to homeownership. The proposed American Jobs Act, the Biden infrastructure plan, includes $213 billion that can help us do just this. Released on the eve of Fair Housing Month, the plan also calls on us to consider the history of our housing crisis.

Take for example, the influence of Harland Bartholomew, a planning engineer who shaped 500 zoning ordinances across the nation, who stated in 1916 that a goal of St. Louis’ restrictions was to prevent relocation into “finer residential districts” by people of color. The ordinance was adopted soon after.

Not surprisingly, the 1968 report from the Kerner Commission detailed the disparate housing conditions in which Americans lived, noting that Black people paid relatively more for worse housing—residences that were “three times as likely to be overcrowded and substandard.” Sadly, more than 50 years later, substandard housing remains far too common.

The Biden infrastructure package signals the federal government’s acknowledgement of America’s century-old history of discriminatory land use policy. It calls for a grant program to incentivize localities to eliminate barriers such as “minimum lot sizes, mandatory parking requirements and prohibitions on multifamily housing,” each of which undercuts fair and efficient housing production. This could prod development of lower-cost homeownership opportunities, such as duplexes, triplexes and condominiums, working to reverse the effects of decades of racist housing policies like those in St. Louis.

The Biden jobs plan asks Congress to increase funding for weatherization and other programs, improve housing efficiency and quality, and to pass the bipartisan Neighborhood Homes Investment Act, a bill to rehabilitate ownership opportunities that complements other tax credit-driven housing programs and would be the most consequential new housing tool since 1986.

Housing undergirds every aspect of family and community life, from schools and opportunity to health and wealth. The housing components of the infrastructure plan offer us a once-in-a-generation chance to better meet the original goals of the Fair Housing Act. It would be deeply unfair and a terrible loss to miss out on this opportunity.