Housing Law Commons^™

Rescission Under The Truth In Lending Act: Borrowers Should Be Required To File Suit Within Three Years, Michael F. Green Jr.

Georgia Law Review

During the Financial Crisis of 2008 and the Great Recession that followed, homeowner defaults and foreclosures increased dramatically. These homeowners facing foreclosure had few options to obtain relief and little leverage to negotiate with their lenders. One of the few places they could turn was to the Truth in Lending Act (TILA), which provides that consumers can rescind certain home loans for up to three years after loan closing if the lender failed to make certain material disclosures to the consumer prior to closing. In the wake of the Financial Crisis, a circuit split emerged regarding this three-year temporal limitation. …

Can't We Be Your Neighbor? Trayvon Martin, George Zimmerman, And The Resistance To Blacks As Neighbors, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 paved the way for the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which was designed to address discrimination in one of our most intimate space — neighborhoods. Fifty-six years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, Americans remain fiercely resistant to the concept of neighborhood integration. This Article uses an unlikely event, the killing of Trayvon Martin, to discuss one manifestation of that resistance with disturbing implications.

Who Wins Residential Property Tax Appeals?, Randall K. Johnson

Faculty Works

This article explains who wins residential property tax appeals in Cook County, Illinois. It does so by collecting and combining public sector data, which has been recently released by the Cook County Assessor. The article then uses this data to compute three statistics. Lastly, it contextualizes each statistic in order to determine if some townships, or groups of townships, win more appeals than expected.

Are Disparate Impact Claims Cognizable Under The Fair Housing Act: Texas Department Of Housing And Community Affairs V. Inclusive Communities Project, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) makes it illegal to refuse to sell or rent or to "otherwise make unlawful or deny" housing to a person because of a protected characteristic, including race. The case asks the Court to determine whether the FHA covers disparate impact claims, where a plaintiff alleges discrimination based on the disparate impact that a defendant's facially neutral practice has on members of a group who share a protected characteristic.

Holding Deposit Agreements: Pre-Tenancy Obligations And Rights, Samuel Beswick

All Faculty Publications

There is confusion in the rental market over the legal significance of holding deposits, which are routinely paid by prospective tenants prior to signing a lease document. The purpose of this article is to clarify the legal position of holding deposit agreements (HDAs) entered into in the pre-tenancy period. In particular, to emphasise that, in the usual course:

• The agreement to, and payment of, a holding deposit creates a binding contract between the prospective tenant and the landlord. • A HDA is a conditional contract, which grants the applicant both the right and obligation to enter into the proposed …

Charter Eviction: Litigating Out Of House And Home, Margot Young

All Faculty Publications

The case of Tanudjaja v Attorney General (Canada) takes up the cause of housing rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in a novel and complex way. The government actions and inactions cited as constitutional breaches and the broad remedial requests reflect the “pixelated” picture of housing concerns necessary to understanding Canada’s housing security crisis. In dismissing the challenge at a preliminary stage, the Ontario Superior and Appeal Courts risk rendering the Charter irrelevant to the deep social justice concerns that cross our country. More specifically, formulaic judicial invocation of concerns about positive rights and justiciability leave the …

Poverty, Dignity, And Public Housing, Jaime Alison Lee

All Faculty Scholarship

Antipoverty efforts are persistently subverted by broad societal contempt for poor people. The belief that poor people are morally and behaviorally inferior, and that their personal failings are the cause of their own poverty, is a staple of American opinion polls and political rhetoric. This presumption is so widespread that it even permeates antipoverty programs, which treat poor people with disdain even as they offer aid and assistance.

Income discrimination creates not just social stigma, but legal inequalities. The Supreme Court recognized some forty years ago that welfare law promoted wealth-based Constitutional inequalities, and responded by invoking the doctrines of …

Private Regimes In The Public Sphere: Optimizing The Benefits Of Common Interest Communities, Gerald Korngold

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Community Lawyering: Introductory Thoughts On Theory And Practice, Michael R. Diamond

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

There are several fundamental questions that one might ask in seeking the meaning of the term "community lawyer." Albeit somewhat theoretical, the most basic questions involve delving into exactly what is meant by the term "community." For what, exactly, is the community-lawyer lawyering? Further, once a client has been identified, questions will arise about how the lawyer should relate to that client and about the role the lawyer ought to play in assisting the client to achieve its goals. There is a long and rich literature concerning the latter question but a fairly sparse body of legal writing on the …

The Price Of Equal Justice: How Establishing A Right To Counsel For People Who Face Losing Their Homes Helps Tackle Economic Inequality, Andrew Scherer

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

Producing Better Mileage: Advancing The Design And Usefulness Of Hybrid Vehicles For Social Business Ventures, John E. Tyler, Evan Absher, Kathleen Garman, Anthony J. Luppino

Faculty Works

Since 2008 approximately half of the states in the U.S. have enacted statutes permitting “hybrid” business forms that blend aspects of traditional for-profit ventures with characteristics normally associated with traditional non-profit entities. This article analyzes theoretical, academic, practical, legal, and regulatory questions regarding the extent to which the existing hybrids are suited to achieving social purposes objectives, including in comparison to modified traditional forms of business organization. Finding the current fleet of hybrids an innovative, useful start, but with need to evolve, this article proposes statutory language (set forth in a detailed appendix, and summarized in the article text), and …

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 …

Precipice Regulations And Perverse Incentives: Comparing Historic Preservation Designation And Endangered Species Listing, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The insight upon which this article is built is that the common structures of these two legal regimes create incentives toward destroying the resources they seek to protect. The shift from legal freedom to exploit resources to strict limitation on property modification and the lengthy and public process to designate or list specific resources for protection provide the motive and the opportunity to legally frustrate the application of the statutes. This article seeks to understand how these perverse incentives are created and how they can be lessened. The procedural and substantive provisions of both legal regimes have evolved to reduce …

Arrests As Regulation, Eisha Jain

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

For some arrested individuals, the most important consequences of their arrest arise outside the criminal justice system. Arrests alone—regardless of whether they result in conviction—can lead to a range of consequences, including deportation, eviction, license suspension, custody disruption, or adverse employment actions. But even as courts, scholars, and others have drawn needed attention to the civil consequences of criminal convictions, they have paid relatively little attention to the consequences of arrests in their own right. This article aims to fill that gap by providing an account of how arrests are systemically used outside the criminal justice system. Noncriminal justice actors …

Branding Identity, Kate Elengold

Kate Elengold

American Dreams, American Realities, Michael Lewyn

Michael E Lewyn

Review of Zoned In The USA, by Sonia Hirt.

Banks, Break-Ins, And Bad Actors In Mortgage Foreclosure, Christopher K. Odinet

Christopher K. Odinet

New York Residential Landlord-Tenant Law And Procedure—2014-2015 (7th Ed. 2015), Gerald Lebovits

Hon. Gerald Lebovits

No abstract provided.

The Use Of Tenant Screening Reports And Tenant Blacklisting—2015, Gerald Lebovits

Hon. Gerald Lebovits

No abstract provided.

Supreme Court, New York County, Robinson V. Finkel, Denise Shanley

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.