Law Commons^™

Reflections On The Persistence Of Racial Segregation In Housing, Alan C. Weinstein

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article is Weinstein's reflection on the Annual Sullivan Lecture entitled Crossing Two Color Lines: Interracial Marriage and Residential Segregation in Chicago by Dorothy E. Roberts (2016).

INTRODUCTION My reflection on Professor Roberts' Sullivan Lecture poses two questions. First, how far have we come as a nation from the hypersegregated housing patterns of the 1930s through 1960s that Professor Roberts described in her lecture? Regrettably, the answer appears to be not far at all. Further, we are today faced with a second form of hypersegregation, one based on income rather than race. Second, why have we made so little progress …

Abating Neighborhood Blight With Collaborative Policy Networks—Where Have We Been? Where Are We Going?, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Blight is a term with multiple meanings and a complex legal and policy history in the United States. Currently, blight and its community costs are frequently associated with vacant and often foreclosed homes, defective and abandoned buildings, litter, vacant lots, and graffiti. As a legal and policy term, blight has roots in the common law definitions of public nuisance. Researchers and scholars in other disciplines have cited blighted neighborhoods as both a cause and symptom of larger socioeconomic problems such as poverty, crime, poor public health, educational deficits, and other personal or systemic distress.

This Article traces the seeds of …

Perspectives On Abandoned Houses In A Time Of Dystopia, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article describes various perspectives on abandoned houses in urban neighborhoods and the reactions from those perspectives. It notes how conflicting reactions perpetuate the crisis of blight for individual residents and their communities. It argues that real solutions for management of abandonment must be based in local communities and tailored to local conditions. Priority must be placed on consistent maintenance in compliance with local housing and neighborhood health, safety and environmental codes. Housing preservation, rehabilitation, reutilization programs will not succeed without improved and sustained maintenance. Localities will need to take the lead in remodeling residential maintenance using new strategies, methods …

Responding To The Mortgage Crisis: Three Cleveland Examples, W. Dennis Keating, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Just as SVD [Slavic Village Development] fought back against predatory lending, mortgage fraud, and speculator flipping, the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County also sought to prevent these practices and stem the rising tide of foreclosures. This included legislation, litigation, and homeowner counseling. This article will focus on three examples of the response to the mortgage crisis in Cleveland: the Cleveland Housing Court, the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (land bank), and community development corporations (CDCs) and local intermediaries (namely, the Cleveland Housing Network (CHN) and Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI)). Each of these entities has developed initiatives aimed at the …

The People's Court, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The Cleveland Housing Court adjudicates only one house and one owner at a time, while the investors and speculators in blighted properties operate in secret at high volume from a distance. However, the court's focus on housing code compliance and its (when needed) willingness to hand down strong measures is powerful. Even now, the City of Cleveland is implementing new strategic code compliance measures in partnership with neighborhood-based community development corporations, to the point where there is less profit in owning worthless houses in Cleveland, and the court is redirecting the disposal of low-value foreclosed houses to local land banks …

Can Public Nuisance Law Protect Your Neighborhood From Big Banks?, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article considers how the law of public nuisance might be applied to protect neighborhoods from the destructive forces of the mortgage crisis. For more than thirty years I have been a close observer and a participant in community development at the neighborhood level in Cleveland, Ohio. I now supervise a law school clinical practice that provides legal counsel to an array of nonprofit community development corporations that, for more than thirty-five years, have been renewing housing and neighborhood sustainability in a city going through major social and economic change.

Essay: Current And Future Challenges To Local Government Posed By The Housing And Credit Crisis,, Alan Weinstein

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The ongoing problems in the housing and credit markets, caused by a toxic combination of wholesale deregulation of financial markets by the federal government and imprudent lending and investment practices by financial institutions, pose significant challenges to local and state government officials. Some of these challenges are obvious. How will cities cope with an unprecedented number of foreclosures at the same time that state and local tax revenues are decreasing? When will access to credit ease in a municipal bond market that has constricted as a result of both general credit concerns and questions about the companies insuring those bonds? …

The Subprime Mortgage Crisis And Local Government: Immediate And Future Challenges, Alan C. Weinstein

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

No abstract provided.

Book Review, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Reviewing L. Vale, Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods, Harvard University Press (2002)

The Dilemma Of Old, Urban Neighborhoods, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In his recounting of the suburban migration from America's cities, journalist and broadcaster Ray Suarez laments the loss of the "old neighborhood". He extols its virtues while explaining its decline. Suarez's nostalgic examples recall the virtues of the extended family kinship, neighborliness, and other features of the "urban village." These are often associated with those urban neighborhoods populated by recent immigratns. These urban villages were thought to have peaked in the decades between the American Civil War and the onset of the First World War, when many U.S. cities industrialized and grew very rapidly. However, a continuing movement of migrants …

The Parma Housing Racial Discrimination Remedy Revisited, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

In 1980, the city of Parma, Ohio, Cleveland's largest suburban city was found guilty of violating the Fair Housing Act. Federal District Court Judge Frank Battisti imposed an extensive remedy upon Parma. Upon approval by the Sixth Circuit of the imposed remedy, its implementation began in 1982. Controversy surrounded much of the remedy, and fourteen years later following Battisti's death, Federal District Court judge Kathleen O'Malley approved a new settlment aimed at ending the court's supervision of the modified remedy after another two years. Along with the Gautreaux, Mt. Laurel, and Yonkers cases, the Parma case represents a longstanding remedy …

The Challenge Of Providing Adequate Housing For The Elderly . . . Along With Everyone, Alan C. Weinstein

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Our patterns of land use and development have failed to accommodate the changed housing needs of an aging population. Primary among these needs is the desire of the elderly to be able to "age in place." To meet this need, America's suburban communities in particular will need to re-think their reliance on exclusive single-family zoning and begin planning and zoning for an increasingly large number of the elderly. Despite understandable concerns about maintaining housing values, this may well prove to be politically achievable simply because the very demographic changes that create the need will create a growing constituency in favor …

Litigating A Fair Housing Case In The 90'S, Kenneth J. Kowalski, Edward Kramer

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Recent statutory amendments to the Federal Fair Housing Act of 1968, 42 U.S.C. Sections 3601 et seq., will be the impetus for substantial litigation in this decade. The Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, which was enacted on September 13, 1988 and became effective on March 12, 1989, established new protected classes, created an administrative law judge system to enforce the law, and strengthened many of the original provisions of the Act. This article will review the Amendments, their impact on litigating a fair housing case, and recent case law in the area.

Emergence Of Community Development Corporations: Their Impact On Housing And Neighborhoods, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

CDCs, both locally and nationally, are seeking broader support from government, corporations and foundations. Without increased sustained support, it is not clear that CDCs can really provide the housing, employment, and services necessary for the revitalization of urban neighborhoods that are truly integrated by income, race and ethnicity. However, given the failure of the private market to provide below market housing, and the inability of most large public housing authorities to expand the supply of public housing, CDCs are the best and often the only hope for affordable housing in these neighborhoods.

Symposium On Rent Control, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Review of Richard Epstein's "Commentary on Rent Control and the Theory of Efficient Regulation," 53 Brooklyn Law Review 741, 742 (1988).

Book Review, The Failure Of The Private Housing Market, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Reviewing Rethinking Rental Housing, John Gilderboom and Richard Appelbaum, Temple University Press, 1988.

Suburban Cleveland's 20-Year Integration Struggle, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

A retrospective look at open housing efforts in one of the nation's most segregated regions.

An Overview Of Fair Housing, Kenneth J. Kowalski

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of federal fair housing laws and their impact on the real estate industry. This article limits its review to three principle federal statutes affecting equal-housing opportunities: Title VIII of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, 42 U.S.C. §3601 et seq. (hereinafter cited as the "Act" or "Title VIII") and the 1866 and 1870 Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. §§1981, 1982 (respectively "section 1981" and "section 1982"). A review of the substantive provisions of the statutes, methods of enforcement, and judicial interpretations are included. The article also discusses specific evidentiary issues, …

Book Review, Progressive Cities And The Tenants Movement, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Reviewing The Progressive City, Pierre Clavel, Planning and Participation, 1969-1984, Rutgers University Press, 1986.

Landlord Self-Regulation: New York City's Rent Stabilization System, 1969-1985, W Dennis Keating

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This article argues that New York City's self-regulation system failed. Its ultimate demise is attributable to several factors: the attempted insulation of decision making from public influence; the attempted exclusion of tenants from the decision-making structure; landlord domination of regulatory bodies and policies; widespread patterns of landlord violations of the rent destabilization code; the failure of regulatory bodies to adequately enforce available sanctions for code violations; and the emergence of countervailing tenant opposition, the subsequent politicization of critical issues and decisions and the eventual deligitimation of the system's structure.