Housing Law Commons^™

Note: City Of Oakland V. Wells Fargo Co.: Examining The Proximate Cause Standard Under The Fair Housing Act, Ava Lau-Silveira

Golden Gate University Law Review

The Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 partially deregulated the financial industry under the premise of helping “everyone attain the American dream of home ownership.” In 1999, the “Fannie Mae” made subprime mortgage loans readily accessible to those who normally would not qualify. People in Oakland, who “used to find it difficult to obtain mortgages,” were suddenly able to obtain mortgage loans, but with subprime terms, which started with low monthly payments, but would increase based on changes in the market interest rates. By 2008, subprime borrowers began defaulting on their loans at an unprecedented rate.

During the 2008 mortgage …

Ab 1482 – Tenant Protection Act And Its Impacts On Tenants, Landlords, And The Broader Housing Market, Ava Lau

GGU Law Review Blog

With housing shortages and rent steadily increasing, many long-time tenants are in favor of passing rent control laws. Advocates argue that rent control offers many benefits, including providing security for tenants against rising rents, providing affordable housing to tenants, and protecting vulnerable tenants from displacement. Its benefits include allowing tenants to achieve better financial stability, keeping families in their homes, and preventing working-class tenants, seniors, and vulnerable members of society from being priced out of their long-time residences and neighborhoods. Without rent control, lower-income tenants would have difficulty securing and keeping a home. At the same time, landlords benefit from …

Towards A Law Of Inclusive Planning: A Response To “Fair Housing For A Non-Sexist City”, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

Noah Kazis’s important article, Fair Housing for a Non-sexist City, shows how law shapes the contours of neighborhoods and embeds forms of inequality, and how fair housing law can provide a remedy. Kazis surfaces two dimensions of housing that generate inequality and that are sometimes invisible. Kazis highlights the role of planning and design rules – the seemingly identity-neutral zoning, code enforcement, and land-use decisions that act as a form of law. Kazis also reveals how gendered norms underlie those rules and policies. These aspects of Kazis’s project link to commentary on the often invisible, gendered norms that shape …

The Never-Ending Grasp Of The Prison Walls: Banning The Box On Housing Applications, Ashley De La Garza

The Scholar: St. Mary's Law Review on Race and Social Justice

Abstract forthcoming.

The Lihtc Program, Racially/Ethically Concentrated Areas Of Poverty, And High-Opportunity Neighborhoods, Brandon Weiss, Kirk Mcclure, Anne R. Willamson, Hye-Sung Han

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit ("LIHTC") program remains the nation's largest affordable housing production program. LIHTC units are under-represented in the neighborhood that both promote movement to high opportunity neighborhoods and affirmatively further fair housing. State and local officials should play an active role in guiding site selection decisions and ensuring that LIHTC developments are located in a manner that affirmatively furthers fair housing. Planners can use newly available data discussed herein to identify high-opportunity tracts.

Arlington Heights Won In The Supreme Court But The Fair Housing Act's Goal Of Promoting Racial Integration Saved The Low-Income Housing, Henry Rose

Faculty Publications & Other Works

In the early 1970’s, a developer sought a zoning change to a parcel of land in Arlington Heights, Illinois that would allow for the construction of government-subsidized low income housing. Arlington Heights denied the zoning change and the developer and several potential residents of the housing sued Arlington Heights arguing that this denial violated both equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA). In Vil. Of Arlington Heights v. Metro. Housing Dev., 429 U.S. 252 (1977), the case reached the United States Supreme Court on the equal protection issue and …

The Hidden Fences Shaping Resegregation, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article offers a window into the experiences that inform the neighborhood choices of middle-class and upper-middle-class Blacks. As I suggest below, there are many hidden fences, walling off white neighborhoods and restricting Blacks’ housing choices in de facto ways. These hidden fences exist in the form of the many challenges Blacks face when moving to white neighborhoods. The obstacles to easy, contented lives range from police harassment to anti-integrationist violence that push Blacks into less affluent neighborhoods. Ultimately, this Article demonstrates how race can circumscribe housing choice and social mobility, even in the absence of legal barriers restricting where …

Testing Fannie Mae's And Freddie Mac's Post-Crisis Self-Preservation Policies Under The Fair Housing Act, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

Beginning in the 1930s, the federal government adopted programs and policies toward safe and decent housing for all. The initiatives included the creation of the Federal Housing Administration that, among other things, spurred mortgage lending by guaranteeing mortgage loans to low- and moderate-income borrowers. The creation of the secondary mortgage market by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (“GSEs”) helped provide more liquidity for loan originators. However, somewhere along the way, these GSEs lost their way, as they pursued profitability without regard to risk and heedlessly bought mortgages without considering quality.

The overabundance of poor quality mortgages led to the housing …

Review Of The Fight For Fair Housing: Causes, Consequences And Future Implications Of The 1968 Federal Fair Housing Act, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

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 …

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 …

Affirmatively Furthering Neighborhood Choice: Vacant Property Strategies And Fair Housing, James J. Kelly Jr.

Journal Articles

When many of us think about fair housing enforcement, scenes involving undercover apartment applicants ferreting out racially biased landlords come to mind. Indeed, fair housing "testers" have been and continue to be an important element of civil rights accountability.' However, implementation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968 has had at least as much to do with increasing the supply of decent, affordable housing options to members of protected groups as with assuring those individuals that they will not be denied a particular housing unit because of the color of their skin or a disability.

This macro aspect of fair …

The Future Of Fair Housing And Fair Credit: From Crisis To Opportunity, Symposium: New Strategies In Fair Housing, John A. Powell, Jason Reece

john a. powell

The following paper provides an assessment of the current housing and credit crisis from a racial justice lens. The paper explores how race was interwoven into the current crisis and demonstrates the racialized impacts of the housing and credit crisis. We also explore some of the current challenges facing fair housing in our society, presenting concepts and models of reform to promote true integration with opportunity. We close with a new paradigm for addressing fair housing in the future and utilizing the opportunities presented by this crisis to produce a fair housing opportunity and a just society for all.

Disparate Impact And Integration: With Tdca V. Inclusive Communities The Supreme Court Retains An Uneasy Status Quo, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

This article begins with a brief history of disparate impact theory as it relates to fair housing cases. It then proceeds to an overview of two previous cases on this issue to reach the Supreme Court in recent years. Next, it analyzes the Inclusive Communities opinion, discussing both the Court's affirmation of integration as a fair housing goal and its skepticism of whether plaintiffs can succeed using disparate impact theory in cases like the one at bar. The article concludes by locating the opinion's focus on competing priorities within the historical tension between affordable housing/community development and integration and discussing …

Maximizing Inclusionary Zoning’S Contributions To Both Affordable Housing And Residential Integration, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

Inclusionary zoning is a popular policy that can uniquely serve both affordable housing and fair housing goals at the same time. Assuming the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development finalizes its proposed “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing” regulation, inclusionary zoning will become more broadly used. But more extensive use of inclusionary zoning poses both opportunities and risks for housing advocates because of the following three issues: (1) Unacknowledged tradeoffs between affordable housing and fair housing goals in inclusionary zoning design and implementation; (2) Conflicting concepts of residential integration; and (3) Legal challenges to inclusionary zoning. The challenge facing inclusionary zoning …

How Should The Law Treat Roommate Relationships? A Tale Of Two Cases, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

The law of roommates is an important but underdeveloped area of landlord-tenant law. Two recent cases, Fair Hous. Council v. Roommate.com, 666 F.3d 1216 (9th Cir. 2012) and Mercury Cas. Co. v. Chu, 229 CA4th 1432 (2014), offer contrasting approaches. This article explores the issues, reviews the cases and favors the Mercury court's approach.

The Promises And Pitfalls Of Micro-Housing, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

This is a primer on the new and growing phenomenon of micro-housing. It defines micro-housing, discusses policy arguments and outlines regulatory issues.

Does Fair Housing Law Apply To “Shared Living Situations”? Or, The Trouble With Roommates, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

In 2012, the Ninth Circuit held that to avoid a constitutional conflict with the right to freedom of association neither the federal Fair Housing Act nor California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act apply to persons seeking roommates or to other shared living situations. This article criticizes the opinion as poorly reasoned and overly broad and then offers a more targeted legislative solution to the problem.

Does Fair Housing Law Apply To “Shared Living Situations”? Or, The Trouble With Roommates, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

In 2012, the Ninth Circuit held that to avoid a constitutional conflict with the right to freedom of association neither the federal Fair Housing Act nor California’s Fair Employment and Housing Act apply to persons seeking roommates or to other shared living situations. This article criticizes the opinion as poorly reasoned and overly broad and then offers a more targeted legislative solution to the problem.

This is an abbreviated version of the article that appeared in the JOURNAL OF AFFORDABLE HOUSING AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT LAW (Spring 2014).

Overcoming Structural Barriers To Integrated Housing: A Back-To-The-Future Reflection On The Fair Housing Act's "Affirmatively Further" Mandate, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A key goal of the 1968 Fair Housing Act (“FHA”), which was passed as an immediate response to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, was to replace the ghettos with “truly integrated and balanced living patterns.” It hasn’t happened. Today, more than four decades after the FHA’s passage, “residential segregation remains a key feature of America’s urban landscape,” continuing to condemn new generations of minorities to a second–class set of opportunities and undercutting a variety of national goals for all citizens.

But recent developments dealing with an underutilized provision of the FHA – § 3608’s mandate that federal housing funds …

Moving Beyond Two-Person-Per-Bedroom: Revitalizing Application Of The Federal Fair Housing Act To Private Residential Occupancy Standards, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

Moving Beyond the Two-Person-Per-Bedroom Standard: Revitalizing Application of the Federal Fair Housing Act to Private Residential Occupancy Standards

Tim Iglesias

Abstract

New empirical evidence demonstrates that the common residential occupancy standard of two-persons-per-bedroom substantially limits the housing choices of many thousands of families, especially Latinos, Asians and extended families. The federal Fair Housing Act makes overly restrictive policies illegal, but the enforcement practices of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) have enabled the two-persons-per-bedroom standard to become de facto law. This article urges HUD to use its regulatory authority to remedy the situation and offers several solutions. …

Fair Housing At 30: Where We Are, Where We Are Going, Tim Iglesias, Susan Saylor

Tim Iglesias

California has long been a leader in anti-discrimination law including in housing. Thirty years after the founding of the California Real Property Journal, this article asks: How effective have the fair housing laws been in achieving their twin goals of ending housing discrimination and promoting community integration? Much progress has been made during this time, but stubborn patterns of bias and segregation persist. At the same time, our laws have expanded to encompass more people and more situations, making the goalpost more distant and elusive. This article (1) describes at how fair housing laws have changed since the first issue …

Reflections On Fair Housing Law, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

This presentation offered reflections on the state of fair housing law in light of numerous studies evaluating its effectiveness. It argues that while enforcement needs to be improved, fair housing advocates must also employ complementary strategies to reform social norms.

Discriminatory Housing Advertisements On-Line: Lessons From Craigslist, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

The Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to publish discriminatory housing advertisements. This has long been applied to newspapers, which have effectively screened all discriminatory housing ads from sight. However, in 1996 Congress created a loophole when it immunized website operators from liability for the content posted to their sites by third parties. Without publisher liability, websites have no incentive to screen out discriminatory housing ads. The result is that such ads are proliferating in cyberspace.While this situation is problematic from a fair housing standpoint, it presents a valuable opportunity. For the first time in a generation discriminatory housing advertisements …

Fhaa & The Internet: The Prospects For Self-Regulation, Tim Iglesias

Tim Iglesias

This presentation argues that the internet offers both great promise and possible peril for anti-discrimination in housing. The potential for self-regulation is mixed but ultimately weak. The presentation concludes with a call for federal regulatory reform.

The Need To Prioritize The Affirmative Furthering Of Fair Housing: A Case Statement, Symposium: New Strategies In Fair Housing, James Robert Breymaier

Cleveland State Law Review

The affirmative furthering of fair housing involves racially and economically pro-integrative policies and programs to produce structural changes that expand housing choices and improve individual opportunities.

The Future Of Fair Housing And Fair Credit: From Crisis To Opportunity, Symposium: New Strategies In Fair Housing, John A. Powell, Jason Reece

Cleveland State Law Review

The following paper provides an assessment of the current housing and credit crisis from a racial justice lens. The paper explores how race was interwoven into the current crisis and demonstrates the racialized impacts of the housing and credit crisis. We also explore some of the current challenges facing fair housing in our society, presenting concepts and models of reform to promote true integration with opportunity. We close with a new paradigm for addressing fair housing in the future and utilizing the opportunities presented by this crisis to produce a fair housing opportunity and a just society for all.

New Strategies For Old Problems: The Fair Housing Act At 40, Symposium: New Strategies In Fair Housing, Jeffrey D. Dillman

Cleveland State Law Review

This article discusses the advances in fair housing since 1968 while analyzing the evidence of persistent discrimination and segregation. It looks at past strategies of the enforcement of the FHA by fair housing groups and the education and outreach performed by the groups. Additionally, the author provides commentary on the future of fair housing.

Jones V. Mayer Revisited, Symposium: New Strategies In Fair Housing, Mira Tanna

Cleveland State Law Review

This article revisits Jones v. Mayer. Jones v. Mayer, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1968, was the first Supreme Court case to rule that the Civil Rights Act of 1866--which guarantees the same right of all citizens to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property as is enjoyed by white citizens--applies not only to actions of the state but also to private parties.

Substantial Equivalency And The Future Of Fair Housing In Ohio, Symposium: New Strategies In Fair Housing, G. Michael Payton, Matthew D. Miko

Cleveland State Law Review

This article reviews recent Ohio court decisions and discusses their potential impact on the continued certification of the state's fair housing law as “substantially equivalent.” It also addresses several responsive steps being taken by the Ohio Civil Rights Commission in order to re-establish the rights and responsibilities under the state's fair housing law.