Kaine tells some of this personal history in an op-ed for CNN today, recounting the story of a black woman named Lorraine who was baldly denied an apartment then offered to a white tenant. Then he ties this history to another less well-known story about Donald Trump's past:

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Before Trump moved into the business of luxury high-rises and casinos, he helped run a rental empire built by his father in New York that catered to working- and middle-class tenants. In the early 1970s, the Justice Department accused the family of discriminating against black tenants across 39 properties the Trumps managed. The Trumps eventually signed a consent decree that required the company, among other things, to proactively list units in minority publications.

The discrimination at issue at the Trump properties is actually identical to the story Kaine tells of Lorraine in Richmond. From a deep dive on the Trump case earlier this year by Washington Post writers Michael Kranish and Robert O'Harrow Jr.:

When a black woman asked to rent an apartment in a Brooklyn complex managed by Donald Trump’s real estate company, she said she was told that nothing was available. A short time later, a white woman who made the same request was invited to choose between two available apartments. The two would-be renters on that July 1972 day were actually undercover “testers” for a ­government-sanctioned investigation to determine whether Trump Management Inc. discriminated against minorities seeking housing at properties across Brooklyn and Queens.

The case was among the government's biggest fair-housing discrimination lawsuits at the time, Kranish and O'Harrow write. And Trump, the company's 27-year-old president at the time, showed what we'd recognize today as his defiance in the face of evidence. He called the government's accusations "completely ridiculous." The family even counter-sued the government for $100 million — unsuccessfully — for accusing it of racial bias.

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The historic contrast between the Clinton ticket and Trump on this front — one fighting racial discrimination, the other accused of committing it — will probably remain a footnote to an election with new, more recent controversy arising every day. But as Kaine points out in his op-ed, the issue remains alive today, in persistent inequality in the housing market, in continued mortgage redlining and unaffordable rents that particularly burden the poor.

Housing issues, and the problems of poverty more generally, have figured little into this election and were all but absent from both parties' conventions, as the New York Times pointed out this week. "It was pretty shocking not to hear that word, housing, uttered on the main stage,” Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond told the New York Times of the conventions.

Kaine's op-ed is notable, too, for finally broaching the topic. In it, he vows that he and Clinton will expand federal aid to public housing agencies and for low-income housing tax credits and that they'll bolster resources for fair-housing enforcement. (He does not, however, specifically call out the controversial Obama administration rule trying to disarm segregation across the country.)