Law Commons^™

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 the …

Regarding Docket No. Fr-6111-P-02, Hud’S Implementation Of The Fair Housing Act’S Disparate Impact Standard, Sonia Gipson Rankin, Alfred Mathewson, Melanie Moses, G. Matthew Fricke, Kathy Powers, Gabriel R. Sanchez, Christopher Moore, Elizabeth Bradley, Mirta Galesic, Joshua Garland

Faculty Scholarship

The is a Comment on the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Proposed Rule: FR-6111-P-02 HUD’s Implementation of the Fair Housing Act’s Disparate Impact Standard . This comment examines how algorithms in housing applications may be inherently biased against certain groups of people.

Their arguments against the proposed legislation:

1. To ensure that an algorithm does not have disparate impact, it is not enough to show that individual input factors are not “substitutes or close proxies” for protected characteristics.

2. It is impossible to audit an algorithm for bias without an adequate level of transparency or access to the …

Hip-Hop And Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, And Law, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based …