Law Commons^™

Side By Side: Revitalizing Urban Cores And Ensuring Residential Diversity, Andrea Boyack

Faculty Publications

Fifty years ago, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. expressed a hope that someday people of all races would “live side by side in decent, safe, and sanitary housing.” Residential patterns in America today, however, remain highly segregated by race and income. The Fair Housing Act outlawed overt housing discrimination and unjustified discriminatory impacts, but zoning laws and housing finance structures have continued to impede housing integration, leaving communities nearly as racially homogenous as they were in the mid 20th century. These separate neighborhoods are far from equal. The majority of people who reside in financially distressed city-center neighborhoods are …

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 …

Segregative-Effect Claims Under The Fair Housing Act, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Two types of discriminatory-effect claims have been recognized under the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA): (1) disparate impact; and (2) segregative effect. Neither requires a showing of illegal intent, and both, according to a 2013 regulation promulgated by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), are subject to the same three-step burden-shifting proof scheme, which assigns the plaintiff the initial burden of proving that the defendant’s challenged practice causes a discriminatory effect. Both the disparate-impact and segregative-effect theories date back to appellate decisions from the 1970s, although the Supreme Court’s endorsement of the former in 2015 in Texas …

The New Politics Of New Property And The Takings Clause, Christopher Serkin

Vanderbilt Law School Faculty Publications

This Essay offers a broad gloss on the traditional politics of property protection and then catalogues a number of ways in which those politics have been changing. In many cases, the account is of fragmentation and fracture as once stable commitments have become much more contingent and fact dependent.' Admittedly, this characterization paints with an extremely broad brush. That is both its contribution and its weakness. This short Essay deliberately simplifies the characterization of preferences across the political spectrum. Much more nuanced definitions would better track the complexity of the underlying issues. Judges and scholars discussed below might also object …

Defining And Closing The Hydraulic Fracturing Governance Gap, Joshua Ulan Galperin, Grace Heusner, Allison Sloto

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

As recent examples in Texas and Colorado have shown, if local governments ban fracking, they risk pushback from state governments. This pushback, in turn, can result in preemption making an outright local ban on fracking self-defeating because it could ultimately result in less local control over the impacts of hydraulic fracturing. Given this potentially self-defeating nature of local fracking bans, local governments should address the impacts of fracking through more traditional local governance mechanisms that do not pose as great a risk to local authority.

On this premise, this Article seeks to make the case for the importance of, and …

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.

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

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Fracking is happening and local governments are subjected to many of its associated risks. They either need to act, or know—clearly and convincingly—why they should not. The federal government has stopped far short of comprehensive regulation of fracking; the states’ regulations range from fair to poor, sometimes preempting local regulation but most often sharing regulatory authority over land use impacts.

Defining And Closing The Hydraulic Fracturing Governance Gap, Joshua Galperin, Grace Heusner, Allison Sloto

Articles

As recent examples in Texas and Colorado have shown, if local governments ban fracking, they risk pushback from state governments. This pushback, in turn, can result in preemption making an outright local ban on fracking self-defeating because it could ultimately result in less local control over the impacts of hydraulic fracturing. Given this potentially self-defeating nature of local fracking bans, local governments should address the impacts of fracking through more traditional local governance mechanisms that do not pose as great a risk to local authority.

On this premise, this Article seeks to make the case for the importance of, and …