Housing Law Commons^™

Affirmatively Furthering Health Equity, Mary Crossley

Articles

Pervasive health disparities in the United States undermine both public health and social cohesion. Because of the enormity of the health care sector, government action, standing alone, is limited in its power to remedy health disparities. This Article proposes a novel approach to distributing responsibility for promoting health equity broadly among public and private actors in the health care sector. Specifically, it recommends that the Department of Health and Human Services issue guidance articulating an obligation on the part of all recipients of federal health care funding to act affirmatively to advance health equity. The Fair Housing Act’s requirement that …

Intratextual And Intradoctrinal Dimensions Of The Constitutional Home, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

The home has been lifted to a special pantheon of rights and protections in American constitutional law. Until recently, a conception of special protections for the home in the Fifth Amendment Takings Clause was under-addressed by scholars. However, a contemporary and robust academic treatment of a home-centric takings doctrine merits a different approach to construction and interpretation: the intratextual and intradoctrinal implications of a coherent set of homebound protections across the Bill of Rights, including the Takings Clause.

Intratextualism and intradoctrinalism are interpretive methods of juxtaposing non-adjoining and adjoining clauses in the Constitution and Supreme Court doctrines to find patterns …

State Constitutional General Welfare Doctrine, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

It is black-letter law that the U.S. Supreme Court’s takings doctrine presupposes exercises of eminent domain are in pursuit of valid public uses that require just compensation. But, neither federal doctrine nor the text of the Takings Clause offers any additional constraints. The story of the Supreme Court’s takings jurisprudence is, in other words, incomplete and deserves reexamination. However, the usual protagonists, such as the Supreme Court or federal courts, are not central to this Article’s reexamination. Instead, this Article’s narrative is federalism, its characters are state courts, and its script is state constitutions.

In the post-Kelo v. New London …

Bundling Justice: Medicaid's Support For Housing, Mary Crossley

Articles

Achieving safe and stable housing presents a profound and ongoing challenge for many people living in poverty. The challenges include housing that is substandard or unaffordable and continuing risks of eviction. For a growing number, these challenges prove too much, and they become homeless. In addition, housing-related challenges that are part of daily life for many poor people can influence their physical and mental health. Increased attention to the health impacts of inadequate, insecure, and unaffordable housing has prompted some – including public health experts, physicians, and sociologists studying housing – to urge that housing issues, and homelessness in particular, …

Federalism, Convergence, And Divergence In Constitutional Property, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

Federal law exerts a gravitational force on state actors, resulting in widespread conformity to federal law and doctrine at the state level. This has been well recognized in the literature, but scholars have paid little attention to this phenomenon in the context of constitutional property. Traditionally, state takings jurisprudence—in both eminent domain and regulatory takings—has strongly gravitated towards the Supreme Court’s takings doctrine. This long history of federal-state convergence, however, was disrupted by the Court’s controversial public use decision in Kelo v. City of New London. In the wake of Kelo, states resisted the Court’s validation of the …

Landowners' Fcc Dilemma: Rereading The Supreme Court's Armstrong Opinion After The Third Circuit's Depolo Ruling, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

In Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Ctr., Inc., the Supreme Court took a turn in its refusal to provide avenues for relief to private actors against the state in federal court, finding that the Supremacy Clause does not provide for an implied right of action to sue to enjoin unconstitutional actions by state officers. Many critics of that decision, including the four dissenting Justices, question the wisdom of the ruling generally. However, from a property rights perspective, the decision sheds light on a dilemma unforeseen by many scholars and made most apparent by a recent Third Circuit decision, Jeffrey DePolo …

Inclusionary Takings Legislation, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

This Article proposes an alternative post-Kelo legislative reform effort called “inclusionary takings.” Like inclusionary zoning legislation, inclusionary takings legislation would trigger remedial affordable housing action to mitigate the phenomenon of exclusionary condemnations in dense urban areas and declining suburban localities. An inclusionary takings statute would also mandate that local municipalities and private developers provide affordable housing in new developments benefiting from eminent domain takings. Such a statute may ameliorate the phenomenon of exclusionary condemnations in dense urban areas that displaces low-income families from urban neighborhoods. An inclusionary taking, like inclusionary zoning, in other words, requires affordable housing contributions from developers …

Controversies In Tax Law: A Matter Of Perspective (Introduction), Anthony C. Infanti

Book Chapters

This volume presents a new approach to today’s tax controversies, reflecting that debates about taxation often turn on the differing worldviews of the debate participants. For instance, a central tension in the academic tax literature — which is filtering into everyday discussions of tax law — exists between “mainstream” and “critical” tax theorists. This tension results from a clash of perspectives: Is taxation primarily a matter of social science or social justice? Should tax policy debates be grounded in economics or in critical race, feminist, queer, and other outsider perspectives?

To capture and interrogate what often seems like a chasm …

Towards A New Eviction Jurisprudence, Gerald S. Dickinson

Articles

The One-Strike Rule, contemplated in a model lease provision, has been the primary mechanism employed by Congress to eliminate the “scourge of drugs” in public housing projects. The rule gives public housing authorities (PHA) discretion to evict tenants engaged in drug-related criminal activity and hold the tenant equally liable if a guest or family member engaged in the criminal activity, even if the tenant had no knowledge of the offense. The Supreme Court most notably upheld this policy in 2002 in United States Department of Housing and Urban Development v. Rucker.

Today the wisdom of that rule, which has served …