Law Commons^™

No Place Like Home: Tenant Harassment And The Frailty Of Housing Court, Adam M. Shrier

Capstones

Residents across New York City—particularly those living in rent-stabilized or rent-controlled apartments—are subject to concerted, persistent harassment at the hands of landlords determined to replace them with higher-rent paying tenants or tenants who will remain compliant in response to the landlords’ negligence or illegal actions. Although tenant harassment is illegal in New York City, the laws and penalties of New York City Housing Court have proven to be an ineffective system for tenants and insufficient deterrent against landlords who stand to make significant financial gains from deregulating apartments and who often get slapped with little to no fines for their …

Rental Home Sweet Home: The Disparate Impact Solution For Renters Evicted From Residential Foreclosures, David Lurie

Northwestern University Law Review

At the end of the last decade, a drastic spike in residential foreclosures brought unprecedented attention to the damage that mass foreclosure often brings to primarily low-income, minority–majority communities. Much of this attention—in both the media and in the legal arena—has been devoted to homeowners disadvantaged by predatory loans and other unsavory practices. However, a recent body of scholarship has shown that the brunt of mass foreclosure often falls on renters, who often have little or no procedural protection from speedy and unexpected eviction from their homes, regardless of lease status or tenure. This Note argues that the Supreme Court’s …

Zoning’S Centennial: A Complete Account Of The Evolution Of Zoning Into A Robust System Of Land Use Law—1916-2016 (Part Iii), John R. Nolon

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In land use, there are two things that Americans dislike: one is sprawl, the other is density. This catch-22 can be resolved by mitigating those aspects of urban living associated with density: congestion, bulky buildings, sameness, design incongruities, unsafe streets, inefficiency, and the sense that neighborhoods are not livable and pleasant. These characteristics of density cut against sustainability. They define places that people want to leave as soon as they can. To reduce vehicle miles travelled and carbon emissions, as well as to prevent sprawl, we must create places of enduring value, located next to transit in walkable and sustainable …

Now Is The Time!: Challenging Resegregation And Displacement In The Age Of Hypergentrification, Bethany Y. Li

Fordham Law Review

Gentrification is reaching a tipping point of resegregating urban space in global cities like New York and San Francisco, often spurred by seemingly neutral government policies. The displacement resulting from gentrification forces low-income people from their homes into areas of concentrated poverty. Low-income communities consequently lose space, place, social capital, and cultural wealth that residents and small businesses have spent decades building up. This Article argues that communities at this tipping point must integrate litigation strategies directly aimed at stemming the adverse impacts of gentrification. Community organizing is integral to antidisplacement efforts, but litigation—and its injunctive powers—should play a larger …

Just, Smart: Civil Rights Protections And Market-Sensitive Vacant Property Strategies, James J. Kelly Jr.

James J. Kelly Jr.

This essay, prepared for and published by the Center for Community Progress, a national, non-profit intermediary dedicated to developing effective, sustainable solutions to turn vacant, abandoned and problem properties into vibrant places, examines the legal and normative implications of local governments' use of neighborhood real estate market data to strategically focus vacant property remediation tools. I and other writers, such as Frank Alexander, Alan Mallach and Joseph Schilling, have argued for the importance of understanding the economic feasibility of market-based rehabilitation of derelict, vacant houses in making decisions as to how and when to use a variety of code enforcement, …

Financiación Por Promotores De Vivendas Asequibles Para La Clase Trabajadora Mediante Impuestos Y Recuperación De Plusvalías: Una Comparación De Los Enfoques Estadounidense Y Español, Julian Conrad Juergensmeyer

Julian C. Juergensmeyer

Este artículo explora las diferencias, similitudes, ventajas y desventajas comparativas entre los deberes de financiación de los promotores urbanos de viviendas asequibles y para la clase trabajadora en los Estados Unidos y España. Se hace hincapié en las impact fees como fuente de ingresos en los Estados Unidos y los requisitos de recuperación de plusvalías en España y en Cataluña en particular. El autor concluye que las impact fees norteamericanas proporcionan una base más amplia para los deberes de los promotores de financiación, pero que los programas españoles de recuperación de plusvalías ofrecen una mayor flexibilidad a las autoridades encargadas …

A New American Dream For Detroit, Andrea Boyack

Faculty Publications

The problem of neighborhood deterioration is keenly visible in Detroit today, but Detroit’s housing struggles are not unique. Like most of America, the Detroit metropolitan area is racially fragmented, and minority neighborhoods are the most likely to be impoverished and failing. Detroit’s problems of housing abandonment and neighborhood decay are both caused and exacerbated by decades of housing segregation and inequality. The “American Dream” has always been one of equal opportunity, but there can be no equality of opportunity when there is such stark inequality among home environments. Detroit’s neighborhood decline is a symptom of the city’s population loss and …

Note: Anti-Discrimination Legislation In Housing

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

The Politics Of Race, Class, And Gentrification In The Atl, Keith Jennings

Trotter Review

Methodologically, the essay uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine gentrification from a race, class, and gender perspective. Within the essay a number of the dynamics directly associated with Atlanta’s political economy and the impact those dynamics are having on issues such as affordable housing, poverty, and Black employment and underemployment are analyzed. While not a central focus of the essay, the changes taking place outside of Atlanta in several counties, as a result of the push and pull effect in the metropolitan region, are briefly discussed.

From Disinvestment To Displacement: Gentrification And Jamaica Plain’S Hyde-Jackson Squares, Jen Douglas

Trotter Review

In this essay, I offer a place-based history of socioeconomic and demographic change in Hyde Square and nearby Jackson Square (henceforth “Hyde-Jackson Squares”). I document the area’s ongoing gentrification and describe the distribution of gentrification pressures. I situate this contemporary process against the socio-spatial patterns carved out by the area’s historical rise as an industrial suburb, its struggle amid decades of disinvestment, and the community efforts that ultimately stabilized the neighborhood. In these sequential transformations is the story of how Latinos and Blacks entered, departed, and have strived to remain in the neighborhood.

“Separatist City”: The Mandela, Massachusetts (Roxbury) Movement And The Politics Of Incorporation, Self-Determination, And Community Control, 1986–1988, Zebulon V. Miletsky, Tomás González

Trotter Review

November 4, 2016, marks 30 years since the historic referendum in which close to 50,000 citizens of Boston living in or near the predominantly Black area of “Greater Roxbury” voted on whether the area should leave Boston and incorporate as a separate municipality to be named in honor of former South African president Nelson and Winnie Mandela, or remain a part of Boston. The new community, what planners called “Greater Roxbury,” would have included wards in much or all of the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, the Fenway, the South End, and what was then known as Columbia …

Community Land Trusts: A Powerful Vehicle For Development Without Displacement, May Louie

Trotter Review

In the Great Recession of 2007–2009, Boston’s communities of color were hit hard. A 2009 map of foreclosures looked like a map of the communities of color—Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The one island of stability was a section of Roxbury called the Dudley Triangle—home to the community land trust of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI).

Originally established to respond to the community’s vision of “development without displacement,” the land trust model was adopted to help residents gain control of land and to use that control to prevent families from being priced out as they organized to improve their neighborhood. …

Introduction: The Gentrification Game, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

In real estate talk, there are only three things that matter, and they are location, location, location. The same is true in dispossession, which translates into the freeing up of location so that it can be possessed by others. Another term that has cropped up fairly recently, much in use in the crossover between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is gentrification, which has a benign face as well as one that is not so kindly, like the paired tragic and comic masks of classic drama.

In this issue of the Trotter Review, we explore gentrification and its alternate, dispossession, …

Communities Of Opportunity: Pursuing A Housing Policy Agenda To Achieve Equity And Opportunity In The Face Of Post-Recession Challenges, Kalima Rose, Teddy Kỳ-Nam Miller

Trotter Review

Where we live directly impacts our ability to achieve our full potential. Access to good schools, quality jobs, reliable transportation, and healthy food is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity. Unfortunately, communities of color, and urban black communities in particular, are disproportionately residing in neighborhoods locked out of opportunity, or disproportionately burdened by housing costs —spending over half of their income on housing. In 2015, PolicyLink undertook a research project to understand the changing post-recession housing landscape, to characterize the forces that were undermining housing security for communities of color, and to characterize the policy opportunities that could address the …

Uncovering The Buried Truth In Richmond: Former Confederate Capital Tries To Memorialize Its Shameful History Of Slavery, Howard Manly

Trotter Review

Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones had the noblest of intentions.

With Virginia’s capital having a poverty rate of nearly 25 percent, no one blamed Jones, a child of the sixties and preacher by calling, for trying to develop prime riverfront property to generate revenue to create more jobs, better schools, and housing.

But when Jones unveiled a proposal in 2013 that included building a new baseball stadium near one of the city’s historic slave burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom, it was, by all accounts, troubling to historic preservationists and Black community activists. “Shameful” was one of the words most often …

Book Review: Desire And Disaster In New Orleans: Tourism, Race And Historical Memory By Lynnell L. Thomas, Casey Schreiber

Trotter Review

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory, by Lynnell L. Thomas, challenges the racial messages embedded within dominant tourism narratives in New Orleans. From tour guides, to websites, to travel brochures, Thomas extracts and analyzes a variety of messages to document how competing representations of race—desire and disaster—are two frames through which New Orleans tourism narratives represent black culture. Thomas leads readers to question the extent to which alternative tourism narratives can be constructed to more justly address constructions of blackness.

Gentrification As Anti-Local Economic Development: The Case Of Boston, Massachusetts, James Jennings

Trotter Review

Activists and political leaders across the city of Boston are concerned that gentrification in the form of rapidly rising rents in low-income and the poorest areas are contributing to displacement of families and children. Rising home sale prices and an increasing number of development projects are feeding into this concern. There is also a growing wariness about the impact that this scenario can have on small and neighborhood-based businesses and microenterprises whose markets are represented by the kinds of households facing potential displacement. This potential side-effect suggests that gentrification could actually emerge as anti-local economic development in Boston. It can …

Newsroom: Horwitz Addresses Rally For Homeless 09/15/2016, Amanda Milkovits, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The New Progressive Property And The Low-Income Housing Conflict, Zachary A. Bray

Zachary Bray

The foundation of property law has been much debated in recent years, as several scholars have sought to provide a theoretical alternative to what they call the dominant, “law-and-economics” approach to property. In place of the law-and-economics approach, these scholars advance a new theoretical approach, which I call “the new progressive property.” At its core, this new approach favors rules thought to promote the collective well-being of the larger community while ensuring that relatively disadvantaged members of society have access to certain basic resources. This Article explores the boundaries and practical implications of the new progressive property. To do so, …

Hip-Hop And Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, And Law, Lisa T. Alexander

Lisa T. Alexander

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based …

Anti-Social Behaviour, Expulsion From Condominium, And The Reconstruction Of Ownership, Douglas C. Harris

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Statutory condominium regimes facilitate massive increases in the density of owners. The courts are responding to this spatial reorganization of ownership by reconstructing what it means to be the owner of an interest in land. This article analyzes the ten cases over eight years (from 2008 to 2015) in which Canadian courts grant eviction and sale orders against owners within condominium for anti-social behaviour. The expulsion orders are new. Until these cases, ownership within condominium in Canadian common law jurisdictions was thought to be as robust as ownership outside condominium such that owners could not be expelled from condominium for …

Confronting Race And Collateral Consequences In Public Housing, Ann Cammett

Seattle University Law Review

Access to affordable housing is one of the most critical issues currently facing low-income families. In many urban areas, rising costs, dwindling economic opportunity, and gentrification have foreclosed access to previously available rental stock and contributed to a crisis in housing. For African Americans lingering economic disparities arising from generations of forced racial segregation and the disproportional impact of mass incarceration have magnified these problems. In this Article I explore legal barriers to publicly subsidized housing, a “collateral consequence” of criminal convictions that increasingly serves as a powerful form of housing discrimination. Evictions, denial of admission, and permanent exclusion of …

Cash Is King: How Market-Based Strategies Have Corrupted Classrooms And Criminal Courts In Post-Katrina New Orleans, Olympia Duhart, Hugh Mundy

Seattle University Law Review

On many accounts, it is a tale of two cities. The headlines and marketing machines tout to the world that “The Big Easy is Back.” But beyond the celebrations and parades, the story for poor Katrina survivors is very different. While many residents and businesses are enjoying a resurgence a decade after Katrina stormed through, others in post-Katrina New Orleans have a different experience. More than ten years after Hurricane Katrina, the city still struggles with systemic failures. These problem areas include housing, health care, mental health treatment, employment, education, and the criminal justice system. All of these challenges are …

Nationstar Mortg. V. Rodriguez, 132 Nev. Adv. Op. 55 (July 28, 2016), Patrick Caddick

Nevada Supreme Court Summaries

The subsequent discovery of fraud does not provide good cause for overcoming a default of the 30-day window in which to file a petition for judicial review of foreclosure mediation.

Recent Decisions: Discrimination In Housing

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Aid To Education; The Ribicoff Memorandum; Church And State; Law And Morals; Fair Housing Laws; Labor Law; Contingent Fees

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

There’S No Place Like (Your) Home: Evaluating Existing Models And Proposing Solutions For Room-Sharing Regulation, Lara Major

San Diego Law Review

As urban housing grows increasingly unaffordable, city-dwelling millennials are forced to consider novel ways to pay the rent. The intersection of costs outpacing a reasonable share of income, demand for short-term housing, and ubiquitous personal technology has spawned an entire “room-sharing” industry, dominated by start-up Airbnb. Facilitated by Airbnb’s smartphone application, millennials open up their condominiums, houses, and apartments to complete strangers for short-term use. But, with the growth of the room-sharing economy come concerns for its participants, such as apportioning liability and, the focus of this Comment, determining how room-sharing fits within existing regulatory schemes.

The Fight For Justice In Housing Court: From The Bronx To A Right To Counsel For All New York City Tenants, Susanna Blankley

Wilf Impact Center for Public Interest Law

No abstract provided.

Expanding Access To Justice: Alternatives To Full Representation In New York State, Randal Jeffrey

Wilf Impact Center for Public Interest Law

No abstract provided.

Why A Right: The Right To Counsel And The Ecology Of Housing Justice, Andrew Scherer

Wilf Impact Center for Public Interest Law

No abstract provided.