Law Commons^™

Do Americans Support More Housing?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

An analysis of opinion poll data on housing issues. The article finds that Americans generally believe that their community needs more housing of all types, but are more closely divided about whether such housing should be in their own neighborhoods. The article further finds that members of minority groups, lower-income Americans, and younger Americans are more pro-housing than older, affluent whites.

Flexibility And Conversions In New York City's Housing Stock: Building For An Era Of Rapid Change, Ingrid Gould Ellen, Noah Kazis

Law & Economics Working Papers

Post-COVID, New York City faces reduced demand for commercial space in its central business districts, even as residential demand is resurgent. Just as in past eras of New York’s history, conversion of commercial spaces into housing may help the city adapt to these new market conditions and provide an additional pathway for producing badly needed housing. If 10 percent of office and hotel spaces were converted to residential use, around 75,000 homes would be created, concentrated in Midtown Manhattan. However, there are considerable obstacles to such conversions, including a slew of regulatory barriers. Allowing greater flexibility in building uses—including by …

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 …

Domestic Emergency Pretexts, Amy L. Stein

Indiana Law Journal

Whereas emergencies used to be the exception to the rule, they now seem to be the norm. Wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and contagious diseases dominate our daily lives. Although these are not the traditional types of military emergencies of our past, these non-wartime emergencies can trigger some of the same emergency powers. And with their use comes some of the same concerns about abuses of such emergency powers. Much ink has been spilled analyzing the tradeoffs associated with necessary emergency powers and frequent abuses in the context of foreign threats—resulting in reduced privacy, civil liberties, and freedoms.

This Article is not …

Land Costs And New Housing, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Restrictive zoning limits housing supply, which (according to the law of supply and demand) increases housing costs. But some commentators argue that more permissive zoning would actually increase housing costs by increasing land costs. This article points out that if the latter claim was true, land costs would have risen in places that allowed lots of new housing and fallen in more restrictive regions such as San Francisco. In fact, land costs increased in both types of metro areas. More importantly, overall housing costs increased more rapidly in more restrictive metros.

Adaptive Rezoning For Social Equity, Affordability And Resilience, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

In this Article, I will show how the legacies of the institutional barriers to housing still persist to deprive many of the predicates for economic thriving and personal flourishing and how existing zoning philosophy cannot be justified by the need to protect health and safety. Righting the inequities of the past and of the present will require dismantling some of the institutions, apparently legitimate and well-meaning, but operating devilishly to create and perpetuate hardship and exclusion. This will require laying bare the institutions to reveal their ignoble essence. We need a radical overhaul of the historic zoning regime from one …

The Case Against The Case For Zoning, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Power points used in a presentation on a work in progress, responding to Christopher Serkin's "Case For Zoning" article at 96 Notre Dame L. Rev. 749.

The Euclid Proviso, Ezra Rosser

Washington Law Review

This Article argues that the Euclid Proviso, which allows regional concerns to trump local zoning when required by the general welfare, should play a larger role in zoning’s second century. Traditional zoning operates to severely limit the construction of additional housing. This locks in the advantages of homeowners but at tremendous cost, primarily in the form of unaffordable housing, to those who would like to join the community. State preemption of local zoning defies traditional categorization; it is at once both radically destabilizing and market responsive. But, given the ways in which zoning is a foundational part of the racial …

Shelter Mobility, And The Voucher Program, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

What is to be done about the poor and about poor neighborhoods? When it comes to housing policy, the current hope is that the Housing Choice Voucher Program (formerly the Section 8 Voucher Program) can provide an or ambitiously the answer to this perennial societal question. By piggybacking on the private rental market, the voucher program supposedly has numerous advantages over traditional, project-based, public housing. Not only is it less costly to house poor people in privately owned units compared to the cost of constructing and maintaining public housing, but the voucher program also offers the possibility of deconcentrating the …

Screened Out Of Housing: The Impact Of Misleading Tenant Screening Reports And The Potential For Criminal Expungement As A Model For Effectively Sealing Evictions, Katelyn Polk

Northwestern Journal of Law & Social Policy

Having an eviction record “blacklists” tenants from finding future housing. Even renters with mere eviction filings—not eviction orders—on their records face the harsh collateral consequences of eviction. This Note argues that eviction records should be sealed at filing and only released into the public record if a landlord prevails in court. Juvenile record expungement mechanisms in Illinois serve as a model for one way to protect people with eviction records. Recent updates to the Illinois juvenile expungement process provided for the automatic expungement of certain records and strengthened the confidentiality protections of juvenile records. Illinois protects juvenile records because it …

Socialists And Housing, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

My review of Capital City by Samuel Stein

Privatizing The Reservation?, Kristen A. Carpenter, Angela R. Riley

Publications

The problems of American Indian poverty and reservation living conditions have inspired various explanations. One response advanced by some economists and commentators, which may be gaining traction within the Trump Administration, calls for the “privatization” of Indian lands. Proponents of this view contend that reservation poverty is rooted in the federal Indian trust arrangement, which preserves the tribal land base by limiting the marketability of lands within reservations. In order to maximize wealth on reservations, policymakers are advocating for measures that would promote the individuation and alienability of tribal lands, while diminishing federal and tribal oversight.

Taking a different view, …

A Cross-Sectional Exploration Of Household Financial Reactions And Homebuyer Awareness Of Registered Sex Offenders In A Rural, Suburban, And Urban County., John Charles Navarro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As stigmatized persons, registered sex offenders betoken instability in communities. Depressed home sale values are associated with the presence of registered sex offenders even though the public is largely unaware of the presence of registered sex offenders. Using a spatial multilevel approach, the current study examines the role registered sex offenders influence sale values of homes sold in 2015 for three U.S. counties (rural, suburban, and urban) located in Illinois and Kentucky within the social disorganization framework. Homebuyers were surveyed to examine whether awareness of local registered sex offenders and the homebuyer’s community type operate as moderators between home selling …

Exploiting The Poor: Housing, Markets, And Vulnerability, Ezra Rosser

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

Matthew Desmond provocatively claims that landlords exploit poor tenants in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). This essay celebrates Desmond's work and explores the exploitation claim, focusing on how landlords deliberately exploit vulnerable tenants and on forms of market-based exploitation.

Does The Threat Of Gentrification Justify Restrictive Zoning?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Historically, progressives have opposed restrictive zoning, arguing that by restricting the housing supply to high-end housing, zoning reduces the supply of housing available to lower-income Americans. But recently, some progressives have suggested that new market-rate housing facilitates gentrification and displacement of lower-income renters. This article critically examines that theory.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration Keynote Speaker: Don Graves, Deputy Assistant To President Obama And Counselor To Vice President Biden: January 24, 2017, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

Does The Threat Of Gentrification Justify Restrictive Zoning?, Michael Lewyn

Michael E Lewyn

Growing Inequality And Racial Economic Gaps, Thomas W. Mitchell

Thomas W. Mitchell

Over the past several decades, economic inequality has grown dramatically in the United States while inter-generational economic mobility has declined, which has challenged the very notion of the "American Dream." In fact, the United States is more economically unequal than most other industrialized countries. Further, there are dramatic and growing racial economic gaps in this country. Despite the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and the various spinoffs it has catalyzed, there has not been any sustained, widespread social movement to address economic inequality in the United States over the course of the past several decades. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a …

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 …

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 …

Housing Resource Bundles: Distributive Justice And Federal Low-Income Housing Policy, John J. Infranca

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Growing Inequality And Racial Economic Gaps, Thomas W. Mitchell

Faculty Scholarship

Over the past several decades, economic inequality has grown dramatically in the United States while inter-generational economic mobility has declined, which has challenged the very notion of the "American Dream." In fact, the United States is more economically unequal than most other industrialized countries. Further, there are dramatic and growing racial economic gaps in this country. Despite the Occupy Wall Street Movement, and the various spinoffs it has catalyzed, there has not been any sustained, widespread social movement to address economic inequality in the United States over the course of the past several decades. Furthermore, it is unlikely that a …

Certainty Of Title: Perspectives After The Mortgage Foreclosure Crisis On The Essential Function Of Effective Recording Systems, Donald J. Kochan

Donald J. Kochan

Recording systems for property play a pivotal, market-facilitating role for the players engaged in any transaction, the judiciary that must resolve disputes between the players, and others members of the general public by informing each about the true nature of ownership of the real property things in the world. This symposium article explores the essential character of such systems in providing certainty of title, and takes a tour through the mortgage foreclosure crisis to see where adherence to and respect for these systems’ roles broke down. Leading up to the crisis, as securitization became vogue and the housing boom blurred …

Whither Workforce Housing?, Matthew J. Parlow

Matthew Parlow

The Role Of The Law In The Availability Of Public Transit And Affordable Housing In Atlanta’S West End, Elliott Lipinsky

ELLIOTT LIPINSKY

The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) is a branch of the U.S. Department of Transportation that administers federal funds and provides technical assistance for the support of locally operated public transit systems. MARTA / Atlanta metro area are part of FTA Region IV (the Southeast). FTA would be involved, for instance, in financing the federal grant monies discussed above. But actual regulation of operations (i.e., what MARTA does each day, or what MARTA will plan to do regionally) is more closely regulated by Georgia agencies.

Until recently, the Atlanta metropolitan area had no powerful central agency to coordinate regional transit. The …

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

Faculty Scholarship

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 …

A Conversation With President Obama: A Dialogue About Poverty, Race, And Class In Black America, Joseph Karl Grant

Journal Publications

The date is November 13, 2012.1 Just mere days ago, I received the invitation of a lifetime. Last night, I arrived in Washington, D.C. I am staying in the Hay-Adams Hotel on the third floor. I still cannot believe the extent of my life's journey. I have just been summoned to the White House by second term President-elect Barack Obama, who defeated Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee for President on November 6, 2012. The 2012 Presidential Election was a hard-fought battle between Barack Obama on the Democratic side, and Mitt Romney on Republican side. The election was a like the …

• The Credit Crisis And Subprime Litigation: How Fraud Without Motive ‘Makes Little Economic Sense’, Peter Hamner

Peter Hamner

The recent collapse of the financial markets spurred numerous lawsuits seeking a faulty party. Many plaintiffs argue that market participants committed securities fraud. They claim that deficient subprime loans caused the financial crisis. These risky loans were allegedly originated by banks to be sold off to third parties. The subprime loans were securitized and spread throughout the financial markets. The risk these loans presented was allegedly not disclosed to the buyers of the loans and securities on the loans. As these deficient loans and securities began to default the financial markets came to a halt. This article argues that securities …

Urban Development And Unequal Access To Housing Finance Services, Gregory D. Squires

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Giuliani Years: Corporation Counsel 1994–1997, Paul A. Crotty

NYLS Law Review

No abstract provided.