Housing Law Commons^™

The New Progressive Property And The Low-Income Housing Conflict, Zachary A. Bray

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The foundation of property law has been much debated in recent years, as several scholars have sought to provide a theoretical alternative to what they call the dominant, “law-and-economics” approach to property. In place of the law-and-economics approach, these scholars advance a new theoretical approach, which I call “the new progressive property.” At its core, this new approach favors rules thought to promote the collective well-being of the larger community while ensuring that relatively disadvantaged members of society have access to certain basic resources. This Article explores the boundaries and practical implications of the new progressive property. To do so, …

Overcoming Structural Barriers To Integrated Housing: A Back-To-The-Future Reflection On The Fair Housing Act's "Affirmatively Further" Mandate, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

A key goal of the 1968 Fair Housing Act (“FHA”), which was passed as an immediate response to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, was to replace the ghettos with “truly integrated and balanced living patterns.” It hasn’t happened. Today, more than four decades after the FHA’s passage, “residential segregation remains a key feature of America’s urban landscape,” continuing to condemn new generations of minorities to a second–class set of opportunities and undercutting a variety of national goals for all citizens.

But recent developments dealing with an underutilized provision of the FHA – § 3608’s mandate that federal housing funds …

Imagining A Right To Housing, Lying In The Interstices, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

This article explores whether the philosophical and constitutional predicates for the recognition of a right to housing exist in some form in our nation’s jurisprudence and political order. Part II traces the evolution of the concept of “rights” from that embraced by the country’s founders to the present, how such a right to housing would fit within the dialogue of property rights, the notion of ownership, and the interest in liberty. Part III discusses the historical role of the court in protecting housing. Part IV discusses the notion of protecting rights to housing under existing equal protection and due process …

Responding To The Mortgage Crisis: Three Cleveland Examples, W. Dennis Keating, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

Just as SVD [Slavic Village Development] fought back against predatory lending, mortgage fraud, and speculator flipping, the City of Cleveland and Cuyahoga County also sought to prevent these practices and stem the rising tide of foreclosures. This included legislation, litigation, and homeowner counseling. This article will focus on three examples of the response to the mortgage crisis in Cleveland: the Cleveland Housing Court, the Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corporation (land bank), and community development corporations (CDCs) and local intermediaries (namely, the Cleveland Housing Network (CHN) and Neighborhood Progress, Inc. (NPI)). Each of these entities has developed initiatives aimed at the …

Does America Need Public Housing?, Peter W. Salsich

All Faculty Scholarship

Does Twenty-First Century America Need Publicly-Owned Housing? This question was being asked in 2011, as an era of sharply-curtailed discretionary government spending dawned in the aftermath of the debt limitation crisis. From its inception in 1937 to the present, public housing remains the housing program with the deepest subsidy, designed for households who cannot compete effectively in the private housing market and, since the 1950s, the program that reaches the lowest income quadrant of society. Questions posed in 2011 center around the future of the 1.1 million public housing units in existence (down from 1.4 million two decades ago), all …

Crisis Management: Principles That Should Guide The Disposition Of Federally Owned, Foreclosed Properties, Raymond Brescia, Elizabeth A. Kelly, John Travis Marshall

Faculty Publications By Year

Residential home values in the United States have fallen considerably from their highs in the mid-2000s. This has had profound effects on consumer wealth and spending, creating a significant drag on the U.S. economy. What is worse, this loss in values corresponded with a steep rise in unemployment, which started in late 2007, and has yet to fall considerably. The loss in home values has wreaked havoc on household finances, and bank ledgers, as the outstanding principles of the mortgages those banks hold and service all too often exceed the current value of the homes against which they are secured. …

Out Of House, And Home: Refocusing On Homelessness, Vulnerable Populations, And Human Rights, Adele M. Morrison

Law Faculty Research Publications

No abstract provided.

Billions Of Tax Dollars Spent Inflating The Housing Bubble: How And Why The Mortgage Interest Deduction Failed, Rebecca N. Morrow

Fordham Journal of Corporate & Financial Law

The mortgage interest deduction is an incredibly popular, politically well-supported and hugely expensive tax incentive. Yet economic studies consistently show that the mortgage interest deduction fails to advance its fundamental purpose. It does not increase the rate of homeownership. On the contrary, to the extent that it is effective in influencing human behavior, it does so by inflating home prices and encouraging borrowing against equity. These effects – inflated home prices and excessive borrowing – contributed to the economic crisis of 2008. In the years leading up to the crisis, Americans spent billions of tax dollars further inflating a dangerously …

Maryland Foreclosure Mediation - Working Or Waning? A Critical Look At The State's Foreclosure Mediation Program, Chelsea Jones

University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class

No abstract provided.

How The Pursuit Of The American Dream Turned Into Chicago's Housing Nightmare, Laughlin Cutler

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Cause And Effect: Criminalizing The American Dream, Jessica Sanchez

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Mixed-Income Housing: A Collaborative Strategy To Spark Urban Economic Development, Daina Staisiunas

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

"Step By Step The Longest March Can Be Won": The Struggle To Define Housing As A Human Right, John Bartlett

Public Interest Law Reporter

No abstract provided.

Message In Mortgage: What Dodd-Frank's 'Qualified Mortgage' Tells Us About Ourselves, David Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Insurance And Cultural Perspectives On Katrina, Jeffrey E. Thomas

Faculty Works

No abstract provided.

Response/Reply Brief Of Appellants/Cross-Appellees, Jacob Scoggins V. Lee's Crossing Homeowners, 718 F.3d 262, Docket No. 11-02202 (Seventh Circuit Court Of Appeals 2013), J. Damian Ortiz, John Marshall Law School Fair Housing Legal Clinic

Court Documents and Proposed Legislation

No abstract provided.

Community Economic Development And The Paradox Of Power, Michael R. Diamond

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

This article starts from the premise that poverty is a growing problem in the United States. Intergenerational poverty, the entrenchment of a class of very poor people, is a major sub set of that problem and is tied very closely to the issue of race. The author claims that missing in the fight by the poor and their allies against stratified poverty is the creation and utilization of power. This paper examines the disparate ways in which commentators have defined power. It suggests that those seeking to obtain power must understand the concept’s varying meanings and direct their activities to …

Foundations Of Federal Housing Policy, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

Federal housing policy is heavily funded and made up of a morass of programs. This book chapter provides a taxonomy of goals for housing policy. The chapter first asks what the aim of housing policy is. In other words, what can a well-designed and executed housing policy achieve? The answer to this question is not at all clear-cut. Some argue that the aim of housing policy is to allow all Americans to live in safe, well-maintained and affordable housing. Others argue for a more modest aim – achieving an income transfer to low- and moderate-income families that mandates that the …

Three Principles For Federal Housing Policy, David Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

To Kill A Mockingbird Mediator?: Assessing The Need For Third-Party Neutrals In Federal Bankruptcy Courts' Home Foreclosure Avoidance Programs, Lancelot L. Esteibar

Cardozo Journal of Conflict Resolution

This Note proceeds in four parts. First, Part I provides background information on the mortgage crisis, the loss mitigation processes, and current federal, state, and bankruptcy court programs aimed towards preventing foreclosure. Second, Part II describes the role of a mediator and the process of mediation. Third, Part III examines barriers to effective negotiation and why mediators can assist in overcoming those obstacles in the bankruptcy courts' loss mitigation programs. Finally, Part IV offers an alternative to the direct negotiation model prescribed by the S.D.N.Y., E.D.N.Y., and D.R.I. loss mitigation programs.

Homeownership — Dream Or Disaster?, Peter W. Salsich

All Faculty Scholarship

This article discusses the impact of the foreclosure crisis on the housing prospects of American families. Foreclosure is governed by state law, which establishes a procedure to enable lenders to recover property from defaulting borrowers through a public sale process. States authorize two different methods, judicial foreclosure, in which the foreclosure process requires a judicial hearing, and power of sale foreclosure, in which a trustee can offer mortgaged property to the highest bidder at a public sale after giving twenty days public notice. Judicial foreclosure is administered by state courts in twenty-three states. The power of sale foreclosure process is …

Historic Preservation And Its Cultured Despisers: Reflections On The Contemporary Role Of Preservation Law In Urban Development, J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The past years have seen widely noticed critiques of historic preservation by “one of our leading urban economists,” Edward Glaeser, and by star architect Rem Koolhaas. Glaeser, an academic economist specializing in urban development, admits that preservation has value. But he argues in his invigorating book, Triumph of the City, and in a contemporaneous article, Preservation Follies, that historic preservation restricts too much development, raises prices, and undermines the vitality of the cities. Koolhaas is a Pritzker Prize-winning architect and oracular theorist of the relation between architecture and culture. In his New York exhibit, Cronocaos, he argued …

Cutting Municipal Services During Fiscal Crisis: Lessons From The Denial Of Services To Condominium And Homeowner Association Owners, Gerald Korngold

Articles & Chapters

No abstract provided.

The Emergence Of International Property Law, John G. Sprankling

McGeorge School of Law Scholarly Articles

This Article explores a new field: international property law. International law increasingly creates, regulates, or otherwise affects the property rights of individuals, business entities, and other non-state actors. Globalization, democratic reforms, technology, and human rights principles have all contributed to this development.

The Article begins by examining the unsuccessful effort to create a broad, internationally-enforceable human right to property during the second half of the twentieth century. Despite this failure, international property law doctrines have evolved in specialized contexts over recent decades. The Article demonstrates that these doctrines stem from four sources: (a) regulation of the global commons; (b) …

De-Concentrating Poverty: De-Constructing A Theory And The Failure Of Hope, Michael R. Diamond

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

Since the late 1980s, led by William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged, scholars have been writing about the social problems caused by the concentration in residential communities of high levels of poverty. Even before Wilson’s book, government policy, which previously had resulted in racially and economically segregated communities, had begun to shift towards de-concentration. The consent decree in Hills v Gautreaux, and the HOPE VI and Moving to Opportunity Programs all pointed towards de-concentration of poverty. Commentators have suggested both benign and not-so-benign reasons for the policy shift.

There were a variety of quite hopeful goals promoted by …