Law and Race Commons^™

Rent Strikes And Tenant Power: Supporting Rent Strikes In Residential Landlord-Tenant Law, Samantha Gowing

Michigan Law Review

For more than a century, low-income tenants across cities in the United States have protested and organized together against unjust housing conditions. Yet landlords continue to evade accountability, leaving mold, pests, lead paint, unclean water, and innumerable other issues unaddressed. On top of habitability concerns, the past several decades of gentrification have displaced hundreds of thousands of Black and brown residents from their communities. To address these issues, legal reforms have focused on either housing-market regulation or individual rights devoid of effective enforcement mechanisms. These reforms fall short. Tenant power, not just tenant-focused housing reform, should be a concern of …

Remediating Racism For Rent: A Landlord’S Obligation Under The Fha, Mollie Krent

Michigan Law Review

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) is an expansive and powerful piece of legislation that furthers equal housing in the United States by ferreting out discrimination in the housing market. While the power of the Act is well recognized by courts, the full contours of the FHA are still to be refined. In particular, it remains unsettled whether and when a landlord can be liable for tenant-on-tenant harassment. This Note argues, first, that the FHA does recognize liability in such a circumstance and, second, that a landlord should be subject to liability for her negligence in such a circumstance. Part I …

The New Housing Segregation: The Jim Crow Effects Of Crime-Free Housing Ordinances, Deborah N. Archer

Michigan Law Review

America is profoundly segregated along racial lines. We attend separate schools, live in separate neighborhoods, attend different churches, and shop at different stores. This rigid racial segregation results in social, economic, and resource inequality, with White communities of opportunity on the one hand and many communities of color without access to quality schools, jobs, transportation, or health care on the other. Many people view this as an unfortunate fact of life, or as a relic of legal systems long since overturned and beyond the reach of current legal process. But this is not true. On the contrary, the law continues …

Urban Decolonization, Norrinda Brown Hayat

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

National fair housing legislation opened up higher opportunity neighborhoods to multitudes of middle-class African Americans. In actuality, the FHA offered much less to the millions of poor, Black residents in inner cities than it did to the Black middle class. Partly in response to the FHA’s inability to provide quality housing for low-income blacks, Congress has pursued various mobility strategies designed to facilitate the integration of low-income Blacks into high-opportunity neighborhoods as a resolution to the persistent dilemma of the ghetto. These efforts, too, have had limited success. Now, just over fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing …

Exploring The Determinants Of High-Cost Mortgages To Homeowners In Low- And Moderate-Income Neighborhoods, Michael S. Barr, Jane K. Dokko, Benjamin J. Keys

Book Chapters

In spite of the recent impetus to reform home mortgage markets, particularly as they affect low- and moderate-income (LMI) households, little systematic evidence is available about how potential abuses in mortgage lending manifest in the mortgages held by those households. While racial discrimination in mortgage markets has a long history in the United States, the role of mortgage brokers in lending has only recently increased and become controversial. In this chapter, we uncover two mechanisms through which differential mortgage pricing occurs among LMI homeowners: black borrowers and borrowers who use mortgage brokers pay more for mortgage loans than other borrowers, …

Citizen Police: Using The Qui Tam Provision Of The False Claims Act To Promote Racial And Economic Integration In Housing, Jan P. Mensz

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Economic and racial integration in housing remains elusive more than forty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act. Recalcitrant municipal governments and exclusionary zoning ordinances have played a large role in maintaining and exacerbating segregated housing patterns. After discussing some of the persistent causes of segregated housing patterns, this Note presents a novel approach to enforcing the Fair Housing Act and the "affirmatively furthering fair housing" requirement on recipients of federal housing grants. This Note presents a citizen suit that emerged from the Southern District of New York in Anti-Discrimination Center v. Westchester County, where a private …

Do Not (Re)Enter: The Rise Of Criminal Background Tenant Screening As A Violation Of The Fair Housing Act, Rebecca Oyama

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

Increased landlord discrimination against housing applicants with criminal histories has made locating housing in the private market more challenging than ever for individuals with criminal records. Specifically, the increased use of widely available background information in the application process by private housing providers and high error rates in criminal record databases pose particularly difficult obstacles to securing housing. Furthermore, criminal record screening policies disproportionately affect people of color due to high incarceration rates and housing discrimination. This Note examines whether the policies and practices of private housing providers that reject applicants because of their prior criminal records have an unlawful, …

The Current State Of Residential Segregation And Housing Discrimination: The United States' Obligations Under The International Convention On The Elimination Of All Forms Of Racial Discrimination, Michael B. De Leeuw, Megan K. Whyte, Dale Ho, Catherine Meza, Alexis Karteron

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

The United States government accepted a number of obligations related to housing when it ratified the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination ("CERD"). For example, the United States government must ensure that all people enjoy the rights to housing and to own property, without distinction as to race; cease discriminatory actions, including those that are discriminatory in effect regardless of intent; and take affirmative steps to remedy past discrimination and eradicate segregation. This Article discusses the United States government's compliance with those obligations, as well as the importance of meaningful compliance in maintaining the United …

Cultural Differences And Discrimination: Samoans Before A Public Housing Eviction Board, Richard O. Lempert, Karl Monsma

Book Chapters

In the 1971 case, Griggs v. Duke Power (401 U.S. 424), the United States Supreme Court held that if an employment test (or other mechanism for screening job applicants) had a disparate impact on a group protected by Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964, discrimination in violation of the Act would be presumed unless the employer could prove the "job-relatedness" of the test. (For details on the Griggs case, see England 1992 chap. 5.) The Griggs case represents a high-water mark in the Supreme Court's jurisprudence of discrimination, for it establishes proof rules that can catch both …

Eliminating The Labyrinth: A Proposal To Simplify Federal Mortgage Lending Discrimination Laws, Stephen M. Dane

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The object of this Article is to demonstrate that the statutory and regulatory framework established by the federal government in its efforts to fight mortgage-lending discrimination is an extremely complicated labyrinth of dead ends, false passages, and elusive goals. Instead of addressing the mortgage-lending discrimination problem directly and comprehensively, Congress has taken a piecemeal and incomplete approach that generally has failed to bring the mortgage-lending industry into equal access compliance.

After pointing out the problems and deficiencies in the current statutory and regulatory scheme, this Article suggests a bold, comprehensive solution to the problem that, if implemented effectively, should ensure …

Apartheid In America: A Historical And Legal Analysis Of Contemporary Racial Segregation In The United States, Michigan Law Review

Michigan Law Review

A Review of Apartheid in America: A Historical and Legal Analysis of Contemporary Racial Segregation in the United States by James A. Kushner

Constitutional Law - Equal Protection - Racial Discrimination And The Role Of The State, William C. Griffith S.Ed.

Michigan Law Review

Constitutional history from the 1857 Dred Scott decision to the 1954 Brown decision records "a movement from status to contract" for the American Negro. Although uncertainty clouds the definition of "state action," the civil rights of the Negro under the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment have been clearly established. The Negro citizen has arrived; the Negro minority group remains one of the gravest social problems of twentieth century America. De facto school segregation, limited economic opportunity, and inadequate housing are problems not solved by invocation of the fourteenth amendment or incantation of the Declaration of Independence. Solution, …

Greenberg: Race Relations And American Law, Spencer L. Kimball

Michigan Law Review

A Review of RACE RELATIONS AND AMERICAN LAW. By Jack Greenberg.