Housing Law Commons^™

Comment Of Professor Patricia A. Mccoy On Docket No. Cfpb-2021-0006, Patricia Mccoy

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

In this comment Professor McCoy responds to a proposed rule on protections for borrowers affected by the Covid-19 emergency under RESPA and Regulation X from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Statistically Speaking: Restrictive Changes To Fair Housing Act Disparate Impact Liability, Mitchell E. Feldman

Boston College Law Review

Disparate impact liability, a theory for pleading discrimination allegations, has been an important tool in the battle for housing equity. Disparate impact claims, however, have undergone drastic changes since their inception in 1971. Most recently, the Department of Housing and Urban Development issued a final rule amending the pleading requirements for litigants alleging disparate impact housing claims. The new rule threatens to undermine the development of disparate impact claims under the Fair Housing Act (FHA) of 1968, which gives plaintiffs access to relief, specifically in cases of lending discrimination. This Note analyzes the rule in light of a seminal 2015 ...

Fair Housing And The Causation Standard After Comcast, Robert G. Schwemm

Villanova Law Review

No abstract provided.

Changing The Rule That Changes Nothing: Protecting Evicted Tenants By Amending Cleveland Housing Court Rule 6.13, James J. Scherer

Cleveland State Law Review

Renting is on the rise, with all households seeing an increase in the prevalence of renting a home versus owning one from 2006 to 2016. As rental rates rise, so too do the rates of eviction. The detrimental effects of eviction are numerous and can be self-reinforcing, with a single eviction decreasing one’s chances of securing decent and affordable housing, escaping disadvantaged neighborhoods, and benefiting from affordable housing programs. All this was before the coronavirus pandemic that devastated jobs and savings accounts across the nation.

One of the biggest impacts that eviction has on renters is a public court ...

Remote Court: Principles For Virtual Proceedings During The Covid-19 Pandemic And Beyond, Alicia L. Bannon, Douglas Keith

Northwestern University Law Review

Across the country, courts at every level have relied on remote technology to adapt the justice system to a once-a-century global pandemic. This Essay describes and assesses this unprecedented journey into virtual justice, paying particular attention to eviction proceedings. While many judges have touted remote court as a revolutionary innovation, the reality is more complex. Remote court has brought substantial time savings and convenience to those who are able to access and use the required technology, but it has also posed hurdles to individuals on the other side of the digital divide, particularly self-represented litigants. The remote court experience has ...

The Canons Of Social And Economic Rights, Katharine G. Young

Boston College Law School Faculty Papers

Social and economic rights occupy an unsettled place in any global canon of constitutional democracy and human rights. This Article, appearing in a collection of Global Canons in an Age of Uncertainty (S. Choudhry, M. Hailbronner & M. Kumm, eds., OUP) recommends a contender for canonical status, at the same time as it problematizes the search. Insofar as the search for a canon reveals the boundaries of what may be considered exemplary claims of constitutional and democratic practice, the 2000 South African case of Republic of South Africa v. Grootboom is canonical for its treatment of social and economic rights. This ...

The Rental Crisis Will Not Be Televised: The Case For Protecting Tenants Under Consumer Protection Regimes, Eric Sirota

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Foreclosure Crisis of the 2000s has likely hurt renters more than homeowners. Incongruously, however, consumer enforcement agencies have been far more zealous in protecting mortgagors than tenants. This Article explores the under-protection of tenants as a class of consumers, particularly in a “commoditized” rental market, and examines how consumer enforcement agencies can more zealously incorporate tenant-protection into their mandates.

Much of the prior literature on the legal protections afforded tenants was published in the wake of the consumer rights revolution of the 1970s. This Article is the first to carefully reexamine, in the context of the modern rental market ...

Conflict Preemption: A Remedy For The Disparate Impact Of Crime-Free Nuisance Ordinances, Meredith Joseph

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Thousands of municipalities across the country have adopted crime-free nuisance ordinances—laws that sanction landlords for their tenants’ behaviors, coercing them to evict tenants for actions as innocuous as calling 9-1-1 in an emergency. These facially neutral ordinances give wide discretion to municipal officials, leading to discriminatory enforcement of evictions. As a result, these ordinances have a devastating impact on victims of domestic violence and are used as a tool to inhibit integration in majority-white municipalities. Many plaintiffs have brought lawsuits alleging violations of the U.S. Constitution and the Fair Housing Act. However, bringing lawsuits under various anti-discrimination protections ...

The Zoning Straitjacket: The Freezing Of American Neighborhoods Of Single-Family Houses, Robert Ellickson

Indiana Law Journal

Municipal zoning practices profoundly shape urban life in the United States. In regions such as Silicon Valley, regulatory barriers to residential construction have helped raise house prices to roughly ten times the national median. These astronomic prices have prompted some households to move to places, such as Texas, where housing is far cheaper. I have been engaged in an empirical study of zoning practices in Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater Austin. This Article presents one of my central findings, induced from those metropolitan areas and elsewhere: local zoning politics typically freezes land uses in an established neighborhood of ...

God Is My Roommate? Tax Exemptions For Parsonages Yesterday, Today, And (If Constitutional) Tomorrow, Samuel D. Brunson

Indiana Law Journal

In 2019, the Seventh Circuit decided an Establishment Clause question that had been percolating through the courts for two decades. It held that the parsonage allowance, which permits “ministers of the gospel” to receive an untaxed housing allowance, does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. It grounded its conclusion in part on the “historical significance” test the Supreme Court established in its Town of Greece v. Galloway decision.

In coming to that conclusion, the Seventh Circuit cited a 200-year unbroken history of property tax exemptions for religious property. According to the Seventh Circuit, that history demonstrated that both ...

Not My Problem? Landlord Liability For Tenant-On-Tenant Harassment, Aric Short

Faculty Scholarship

Tenant-on-tenant harassment because of a victim’s race, gender, or other protected status, is a severe and increasingly widespread problem often targeting vulnerable tenants. The creation of a hostile housing environment violates the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA), and victims may recover from their abusers, whether they are landlords or fellow tenants. But plaintiffs in two recent FHA lawsuits sought recovery from their landlords for something different: their landlords’ failure to intervene in and stop harassment committed by other tenants. These suits raise novel and important questions about the scope of the FHA, but the two courts disagreed about how ...

Reconciling Joint Tenancies With Writs Of Seizure And Sale, Alvin W. L. See

Research Collection School Of Law

This article examines the use of the writ of seizure and sale as a method of execution against a joint tenant’s interest in land and how it is to be reconciled with established principles of co-ownership law, in particular the fundamental distinction between a joint tenancy and a tenancy in common.

Stratégie Foncière Et Immobilière Au Maroc, Recomposition Territoriale Et Rapport À La Production Du Logement « Abordable » Quelles Perspectives Pour Agadir ?, Mohamed Ben Attou

Dirassat

Recent investment in housing programmes exerted great pressure on land capital so as to accommodate demographic urbanization. The public policies of the strategic planning of urbanization overlook issues of sustainability and land equity. Besides, speculations have tainted most practices associated with the land market and manipulated the mechanisms of demand and supply so that investors and stakeholders make wealth out of housing programs. Morocco managed to increase GDP per capita , however there are still many challenges to live up to namely those of draught and sustainability. The land market claims agricultural land uncontrollably to cater for a inexhaustible urbanization demand ...

Fair Housing’S Third Act: American Tragedy Or Triumph?, Heather R. Abraham

Journal Articles

Fifty-two years ago, Congress enacted a one-of-a-kind civil rights directive. It requires every federal agency—and state and local grantees by extension—to take affirmative steps to undo segregation. In 2020, this overlooked Fair Housing Act provision—the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” or “AFFH” mandate—has heightened relevance. Perhaps most visible is Donald Trump’s racially charged “protect the suburbs” campaign rhetoric. In an apparent appeal to suburban constituents, his administration repealed a race-conscious fair housing rule, replacing it with a no-questions-asked regulation that elevates “local control” above civil rights.

The maneuver is especially stark as protesters fill the streets ...

Leases As Forms, David A. Hoffman, Anton Strezhnev

Faculty Scholarship at Penn Law

We offer the first large scale descriptive study of residential leases, based on a dataset of ~170,000 residential leases filed in support of over ~200,000 Philadelphia eviction proceedings from 2005 through 2019. These leases are highly likely to contain unenforceable terms, and their pro-landlord tilt has increased sharply over time. Matching leases with individual tenant characteristics, we show that unlawful terms are surprisingly likely to be associated with more expensive leaseholds in richer, whiter parts of the city. This result is linked to landlords' growing adoption of shared forms, originally created by non-profit landlord associations, and more recently ...

Housing As A Right In The United States: Mitigating The Affordable Housing Crisis Using An International Human Rights Law Approach, Maria Massimo

Boston College Law Review

Throughout its history, the United States has perpetuated a double standard in regard to international human rights by urging other nations to protect and promote these rights, while simultaneously forgoing international human rights treaties in favor of its own Constitution and domestic human rights laws. Notably, the United States does not recognize one of the fundamental rights introduced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and contained in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: The right to adequate housing. Failure to recognize housing as a human or constitutional right has led to a worsening affordable ...

Co-Living Assessed In A Time Of Covid-19: Critical Intervention Or Millennial Fad?, Diane Klein

University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Lessons From Tenant Protection Provisions In Federal Financial Crisis Legislation, Katy Ramsey Mason

University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Dark Economics & Inspiring The Human Spirit To Transform It, Kemet Imhotep, Bruce Corrie

University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.

Pandemic Of Inequality: An Introduction To Inequality Of Race, Wealth, And Class, Equality Of Opportunity, Dr. Charles J. Reid, Jr.

University of St. Thomas Journal of Law and Public Policy

No abstract provided.