Law Commons^™

The Limits Of Mobility And The Persistence Of Urban Inequality, Sheila Foster

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

David Schleicher's Article, Stuck! The Law and Economics of Residential Stagnation, draws much-needed attention to the consequences of declining interregional mobility of low-income workers. However, this Response argues that Schleicher's policy prescriptions evince a blind spot for the economic and racial stratification of disadvantaged populations within the successful metro regions these new migrants would enter. The concentration of highly skilled, educated, and affluent populations in the urban core, and the segregation and isolation of disadvantaged populations outside of it, impose additional costs on new migrants to access economic opportunities. Schleicher fails to sufficiently account for these costs, which offset …

The Rise And Fall Of The Implied Warranty Of Habitability, David A. Super

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Growing concern about poverty in the late 1960s produced two sweeping legal revolutions. One gave welfare recipients rights against arbitrary eligibility rules and benefit terminations. The other gave low-income tenants recourse when landlords failed to repair their homes. The 1996 welfare law exposed the welfare rights revolution's frailty. Little noticed by legal scholars, the tenants' rights revolution also has failed, and for broadly similar reasons.

Withholding rent deliberately to challenge landlords' failure to repair is unduly risky for most tenants in ill-maintained dwellings: either moving to better housing is a better option or the risk of retaliation is too great. …