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Full-Text Articles in Law
Unjust Cities? Gentrification, Integration, And The Fair Housing Act, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Unjust Cities? Gentrification, Integration, And The Fair Housing Act, Olatunde C.A. Johnson
Faculty Scholarship
What does gentrification mean for fair housing? This article considers the possibility that gentrification should be celebrated as a form of integration alongside a darker narrative that sees gentrification as necessarily unstable and leading to inequality or displacement of lower-income, predominantly of color, residents. Given evidence of both possibilities, this article considers how the Fair Housing Act might be deployed to minimize gentrification’s harms while harnessing some of the benefits that might attend integration and movement of higher-income residents to cities. Ultimately, the article urges building on the fair housing approach but employing a broader set of tools to advance …
Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander
Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case For The Right To Housing, Lisa T. Alexander
Faculty Scholarship
Matthew Desmond's Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond's masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee's urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted's readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between "law on the books" and "law-in-action." Its most …
The Rise And Fall Of The Implied Warranty Of Habitability, David A. Super
The Rise And Fall Of The Implied Warranty Of Habitability, David A. Super
Faculty Scholarship
Growing concern about poverty in the late 1960s produced two sweeping legal revolutions. One gave welfare recipients rights against arbitrary eligibility rules and benefit terminations. The other gave low-income tenants recourse when landlords failed to repair their homes. The 1996 welfare law exposed the welfare rights revolution's frailty. Little-noticed by legal scholars, the tenants' rights revolution also has failed, and for broadly similar reasons. Withholding rent deliberately to challenge landlords' failure to repair is unduly risky for most tenants in ill-maintained dwellings: either moving to better housing is a better option or the risk of retaliation is too great. The …