Housing Law Commons^™

The Rise And Fall Of The Implied Warranty Of Habitability, David A. Super

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

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. …

Love You Madly: The Life And Times Of The Neighborhood Legal Services Program Of Washington, D.C., Brian Gilmore

University of the District of Columbia Law Review

This article is a brief historical examination of the origins of the Neighborhood Legal Services Program and an analysis of the work of the program as a federally-funded legal services program for forty years. Part I of this article examines the history of the program in the early years and the birth of the "neighborhood" concept in legal services. Part II analyzes the key precedent-setting housing cases the program litigated in the 1960's and 1970's. Part III addresses the criticisms of the program and reviews legal services in general. For instance, almost immediately from its inception, the idea of neighborhood-based …

Obligations Of Privilege, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Little attention is paid to the nature of the high incomes of the rich or to the legal or norm-based obligations the rich owe society. This popular and scholarly inattention reflects the general acceptance of the idea that the rich have earned their high incomes and owe society little. By looking at income equations revealing society's role in high incomes and the obligations of the rich, the Article urges a strengthening of the obligations of the rich and rejects the argument that the legal community ought not consider the moral demands associated with high incomes.

Land Use And Housing Policies To Reduce Concentrated Poverty And Racial Segregation, Myron Orfield

Fordham Urban Law Journal

This Article recommends that land use and housing policies be marshaled to reduce residential racial segregation and concentrated poverty. It argues secondly, that state legislatures must adopt a coordinated policy approach. This Article uses Oregon's comprehensive land use legislation as a paradigmatic example of policies that effectively promote affordable housing and decrease urban sprawl. Finally, the article discusses nine policies that the author believes are necessary to promote stable metropolitan living patterns.

The "No Property" Problem: Understanding Poverty By Understanding Wealth, Jane B. Baron

Michigan Law Review

Could it be that understanding homelessness and poverty is less a function of understanding the homeless and the poor than of understanding how the wealthy come to ignore and tolerate them? This is one of the more intriguing suggestions of anthropologist Kim Hopper's Reckoning with Homelessness, and it echoes claims made by lawyers who, like Hopper, have spent much of their careers advocating on behalf of the homeless. While Hopper's new book is first and foremost a work of anthropology, its structure strongly parallels recent work by legal scholars who have sought to assess the effects of litigation and lobbying …

Democratizing The American Dream: The Role Of A Regional Housing Legislature In The Production Of Affordable Housing, Thomas A. Brown

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Economic, ethnic and racial residential segregation are ubiquitous across United States metropolitan regions. As a result, the majority of affordable housing is located in central cities or inner-ring suburbs, generally in areas of highly concentrated poverty. Outer suburbs are often exempt from providing significant housing for the economically disadvantaged regional citizens. This should not be. If housing policy in metropolitan regions were established in a democratic fashion, the give-and-take of the political process would create strong incentives for regional cooperation in the creation of affordable housing. Drawing together scholarship in the fields of local government law, administrative law, and housing …

The Human Right To Housing: Making The Case In U.S. Advocacy, Maria Foscarinis, Brad Paul, Bruce Porter, Andrew Scherer

Articles & Chapters

American anti-poverty advocates are increasingly focusing on expressing homelessness as a violation of fundamental human rights. Conceptualizing homelessness as a human rights violation can help add legal content to advocacy goals, and help build support for the housing resources, policy changes, and improved legal protective measures needed to ensure access to housing.

This article explores the right to housing in domestic and international law, how to evaluate compliance with the right in the United States, and how to employ legal strategies in support of claims to the right. Theauthors review the status of international law in U. S. law and …

Slumlordism As A Tort, Joseph L. Sax, Fred J. Hiestand

Michigan Law Review

The war against poverty has been fought with rather more vigor than its initiators contemplated. Thus far, however, the major engagements have taken place in the streets of Watts and Chicago, which is not quite what they had in mind. Some, who think it odd that as we pass more laws we get more lawlessness, will perhaps content themselves by observing that the feeding hand is always bitten. Those less easily satisfied have begun to see the need for adopting some legal solutions as far reaching as the problems they are designed to abate; the following article is addressed to …