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Full-Text Articles in Law
Learning From Land Use Reforms: Housing Outcomes And Regulatory Change, Noah Kazis
Learning From Land Use Reforms: Housing Outcomes And Regulatory Change, Noah Kazis
Law & Economics Working Papers
This essay serves as the introduction for an edited, interdisciplinary symposium of articles studying recent land use reforms at the state and local level. These papers provide important descriptive analyses of a range of policy interventions, using quantitative and qualitative methods to provide new empirical insights into zoning reform strategies.
After situating and summarizing the collected articles, the Introduction draws out shared themes. For example, these essays demonstrate the efficacy of recent reforms, not only at facilitating housing production but at doing so in especially difficult contexts (like when producing affordable housing and redeveloping single-family neighborhoods). They point to the …
It Takes A Village: Designating "Tiny House" Villages As Transitional Housing Campgrounds, Ciara Turner
It Takes A Village: Designating "Tiny House" Villages As Transitional Housing Campgrounds, Ciara Turner
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
A relatively new proposal to reduce homelessness in the United States involves extraordinarily small dwellings. While the “tiny house” movement is intuitively appealing and has found sporadic success, strict housing codes, building codes, and zoning laws often destroy the movement before it can get off the ground. One possibility for getting around these zoning and building code challenges, without drastic overhauls to health and safety codes, is to create a new state-level zoning classification of “transitional campgrounds.” A new zoning classification would alleviate the issue because campgrounds are consistently subject to less strict building codes, which could permit tiny houses …
Racism Didn't Stop At Jim Crow, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Racism Didn't Stop At Jim Crow, Samuel R. Bagenstos
Reviews
Nearly 50 years ago, the Kerner Commission famously declared that “[o]ur nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” The picture has changed distressingly little since then. In the 1950 Census, the average African American in a metropolitan area lived in a neighborhood that was 35 percent white—the same figure as in the 2010 Census. In 2010, the average white American still lived in a neighborhood that was more than 75 percent white. America’s largest metropolitan areas—particularly, but not exclusively, in the North—continue to score high on many common measures of racial segregation. And racial segregation …
Citizen Police: Using The Qui Tam Provision Of The False Claims Act To Promote Racial And Economic Integration In Housing, Jan P. Mensz
Citizen Police: Using The Qui Tam Provision Of The False Claims Act To Promote Racial And Economic Integration In Housing, Jan P. Mensz
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
Economic and racial integration in housing remains elusive more than forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Recalcitrant municipal governments and exclusionary zoning ordinances have played a large role in maintaining and exacerbating segregated housing patterns. After discussing some of the persistent causes of segregated housing patterns, this Note presents a novel approach to enforcing the Fair Housing Act and the "affirmatively furthering fair housing" requirement on recipients of federal housing grants. This Note presents a citizen suit that emerged from the Southern District of New York in Anti-Discrimination Center v. Westchester County, where a private …
Consuming Government, Richard Schragger
Consuming Government, Richard Schragger
Michigan Law Review
In his ambitious new book, William Fischel, a Professor of Economics at Dartmouth College, gives us a new political animal: "The Homevoter." The homevoter is simply a homeowner who votes (p. ix). According to Fischel, she is the key to understanding the political economy of American local government. By implication, she is the key to understanding state and national government as well. Homeowners warrant special attention because "residents who own their own homes have a stake in the outcome of local politics that make them especially attentive to the public policies of local government" (p. ix). That is because local …
Exclusionary Zoning: A Wrong In Search Of A Remedy, Leonard S. Rubinowitz
Exclusionary Zoning: A Wrong In Search Of A Remedy, Leonard S. Rubinowitz
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
This article discusses affirmative approaches to providing effective relief in two types of exclusionary zoning cases: (1) remedies specific to a particular proposed development or a given site and (2) regional remedies, which provide a generalized framework for meeting what courts are increasingly identifying as a regional problem: the need for decent housing for all families. In the first instance (the "single-site" case) a court would remove obstacles in order to facilitate development of low- and moderate- income housing on a particular suburban site. In the second case (the regional approach) a court would specify the obligation of the municipalities …
The Interrelationship Between Excusionary Subdivision Control - A Second Look, Roger A. Cunningham
The Interrelationship Between Excusionary Subdivision Control - A Second Look, Roger A. Cunningham
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The thesis of this article is that the conclusion set out above is both oversimplified and inaccurate. Contrary to the author's contention in his Journal article, there are "viable distinctions between zoning and subdivision control," and consequently the major exclusionary techniques available to suburban communities through "zoning" are simply not available in connection with "subdivision control." Dramatic attempts at racial exclusion through subdivision control are likely to be infrequent. Although subdivision regulations, like zoning ordinances and building codes, require expenditures by land developers which increase the cost of housing and thus tend to exclude the poor, the effect of subdivision …
Overcoming Barriers To Scattered-Site Low-Cost Housing, Darrel J. Grinstead
Overcoming Barriers To Scattered-Site Low-Cost Housing, Darrel J. Grinstead
University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform
The effect of most zoning devices which have been used in suburban and non-ghetto city planning in the past few decades has been to erect substantial economic barriers around entire cities. These devices include minimum lot size requirements, density zoning, frontage requirements, single family restrictions, and minimum living space requirements. While such zoning practices may not be exclusionary in purpose, exclusion of minority groups has been the result. Moreover, since most minorities are heavily concentrated in low income groups, economic segregation will bring about a high degree of racial and ethnic segregation. Indeed, it has been suggested that these economic …
Conservation And Rehabilitation Of Housing: An Idea Approaches Adolescence, J. Michael Warren
Conservation And Rehabilitation Of Housing: An Idea Approaches Adolescence, J. Michael Warren
Michigan Law Review
From the time of construction, buildings are subject to the physical elements, the wear and tear of time, and the constant march of progress which transforms yesterday's luxuries into today's necessities. Left unchecked, these forces tend to produce the slums and blight that traditionally have been the curse of urban areas. Private, charitable, and civic organizations were the first to deal with the problem of improving conditions in slum areas. Later, state and local governments joined the effort, and although they were somewhat more successful than the pioneers in the field, without federal assistance the task proved to be beyond …