Housing Law Commons^™

The Rental Crisis Will Not Be Televised: The Case For Protecting Tenants Under Consumer Protection Regimes, Eric Sirota

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

The Foreclosure Crisis of the 2000s has likely hurt renters more than homeowners. Incongruously, however, consumer enforcement agencies have been far more zealous in protecting mortgagors than tenants. This Article explores the under-protection of tenants as a class of consumers, particularly in a “commoditized” rental market, and examines how consumer enforcement agencies can more zealously incorporate tenant-protection into their mandates.

Much of the prior literature on the legal protections afforded tenants was published in the wake of the consumer rights revolution of the 1970s. This Article is the first to carefully reexamine, in the context of the modern rental market, …

Conflict Preemption: A Remedy For The Disparate Impact Of Crime-Free Nuisance Ordinances, Meredith Joseph

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Thousands of municipalities across the country have adopted crime-free nuisance ordinances—laws that sanction landlords for their tenants’ behaviors, coercing them to evict tenants for actions as innocuous as calling 9-1-1 in an emergency. These facially neutral ordinances give wide discretion to municipal officials, leading to discriminatory enforcement of evictions. As a result, these ordinances have a devastating impact on victims of domestic violence and are used as a tool to inhibit integration in majority-white municipalities. Many plaintiffs have brought lawsuits alleging violations of the U.S. Constitution and the Fair Housing Act. However, bringing lawsuits under various anti-discrimination protections presents many …

Reconciling Joint Tenancies With Writs Of Seizure And Sale, Alvin W. L. See

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This article examines the use of the writ of seizure and sale as a method of execution against a joint tenant’s interest in land and how it is to be reconciled with established principles of co-ownership law, in particular the fundamental distinction between a joint tenancy and a tenancy in common.

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 …

Kekuatan Hukum Perjanjian Pengikatan Jual Beli Atas Satuan Rumah Susun Terhadap Developer Yang Melakukan Wanprestasi (Studi Putusan-Putusan Pengadilan), Zipora .

Indonesian Notary

Penelitian ini membahas mengenai putusan-putusan pengadilan yang menentukan kekuatan hukum terhadap Perjanjian Pengikatan Jual Beli (PPJB) atas satuan rumah susun dalam hal developer melakukan wanprestasi berdasarkan studi putusan-putusan pengadilan. Mengingat adanya ketentuan dalam Undang-Undang Nomor 20 Tahun 2011 tentang Rumah Susun (UU Rumah Susun) yang memberikan rumusannya bersifat fakultatif sehingga developer dapat membuat PPJB di bawah tangan. Diikuti dengan lahirnya Peraturan Menteri Pekerjaan Umum dan Perumahan Rakyat (Permen PUPR) Nomor 11 Tahun 2019 tentang Sistem Perjanjian Pendahuluan Jual Beli Rumah yang di dalamnya mengatur bahwa PPJB dibuat dan ditandatangani di hadapan Notaris. Adapun permasalahan yang diangkat dalam penelitian ini meliputi …

Kepastian Hukum Bagi Konsumen Atas Perjanjian Pengikatan Jual Beli Rumah Susun, Arini Alvita

Indonesian Notary

Kebutuhan akan pemukiman di kota-kota besar Indonesia dewasa ini mengarah pada pembangunan rumah susun sebagai hunian vertikal. Berdasarkan Undang-Undang Nomor 20 Tahun 2011 tentang Rumah Susun (UURS) dan PERMEN PUPR Nomor 11/PRT/M/2019 tentang Sistem Perjanjian Pendahuluan Jual Beli Rumah (Permen Sitem PPJB), pemasaran rumah susun sudah dilakukan sebelum pembangunan rumah susun selesai dilaksanakan, namun tetap mengikuti persyaratan yang telah diatur dalam dua peraturan perudang-undangan tersebut. Pelaksanaan jual beli satuan unit rumah susun yang seperti itu dilakukan dengan cara membeli satuan unit rumah susun yang belum selesai tahap pembangunanya, kemudian dituangkan dalam perikatan pendahuluan dalam perjanjian pengikatan jual beli (PPJB), dan …

Stratégie Foncière Et Immobilière Au Maroc, Recomposition Territoriale Et Rapport À La Production Du Logement « Abordable » Quelles Perspectives Pour Agadir ?, Mohamed Ben Attou

Dirassat

Recent investment in housing programmes exerted great pressure on land capital so as to accommodate demographic urbanization. The public policies of the strategic planning of urbanization overlook issues of sustainability and land equity. Besides, speculations have tainted most practices associated with the land market and manipulated the mechanisms of demand and supply so that investors and stakeholders make wealth out of housing programs. Morocco managed to increase GDP per capita , however there are still many challenges to live up to namely those of draught and sustainability. The land market claims agricultural land uncontrollably to cater for a inexhaustible urbanization …

Fair Housing’S Third Act: American Tragedy Or Triumph?, Heather R. Abraham

Journal Articles

Fifty-two years ago, Congress enacted a one-of-a-kind civil rights directive. It requires every federal agency—and state and local grantees by extension—to take affirmative steps to undo segregation. In 2020, this overlooked Fair Housing Act provision—the “affirmatively furthering fair housing” or “AFFH” mandate—has heightened relevance. Perhaps most visible is Donald Trump’s racially charged “protect the suburbs” campaign rhetoric. In an apparent appeal to suburban constituents, his administration repealed a race-conscious fair housing rule, replacing it with a no-questions-asked regulation that elevates “local control” above civil rights.

The maneuver is especially stark as protesters fill the streets, marching in opposition to systemic …

Sexual Orientation And Gender Identity Discrimination Claims Under The Fair Housing Act After Bostock V. Clayton County, Rigel C. Oliveri

Faculty Publications

On June 15, 2020, the Supreme Court handed down a landmark decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia, ruling by a vote of 6-3 that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay, lesbian, and transgender employees from discrimination. The majority held that the statute's prohibition against discrimination in employment "because of ... sex" necessarily applies to discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender identity.

This decision will undoubtedly have ramifications reaching beyond the employment context because many other federal statutes contain language similar to that in Title VII. In particular, the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA), …

Cle Working Paper No. 3/2021--A Roof Over Our Stomachs: The Right To Housing In Canada And Its Implications For The Right To Food, Tasha Stansbury

Centre for Law and the Environment

In 2019, the Canadian government passed the National Housing Strategy Act, legislating for the first time a human right to housing in Canada. This was largely the result of pressure from housing advocates to align Canada’s legislation with the right to housing embedded in international human rights instruments. Despite similar efforts, food rights advocates have not had the same success in having the right to food recognized in Canadian law. This paper considers the question of whether, and how, food rights advocates can use the process of achieving a legislated right to housing as a model in pursuing the legislation …

Locked Up In The Eye Of The Storm: A Case For Heightened Legal Protections For Incarcerated People During Hurricanes, Maya Habash

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

No abstract provided.

Tenants Without Rights: Immigrants’ Experiences In The U.S. Low-Income Housing Market, Mekonnen Firew Ayano

Journal Articles

Immigrants who recently arrived in the United States generally are not able to exclusively possess rental properties in the formal market because they lack a steady source of income and credit history. Instead, they rent shared bedrooms, basements, attics, garages, and illegally converted units that violate housing codes and regulations. Their situations highlight the disconnect between tenant rights law and the deleterious conditions of informal residential tenancies. Tenant rights law confers a variety of rights and remedies to a residential tenant if the renter has exclusive possession of the premises. If the renter lacks exclusive possession, courts typically characterize the …

A Housing Crisis: The Story Of The Syringa Mobile Home Park And The Law Clinic's Quest For Water, Jessica M. Long

Articles

No abstract provided.

Alleviating The Harms Of Substandard Housing To Wisconsin Tenants: Correlating Rent With Assessed Property Value, Ellen Matheson

Marquette Law Review

Like other cities across the nation, Milwaukee utilizes a mix of regulatory,

statutory, and common law tools to address the problem of substandard rental

housing. This Comment examines the efficacy of those legal tools, in the

process demonstrating that existing remedies offer insufficient protections to

tenants in need of habitable housing. This Comment then proposes a novel

legal strategy that is designed to ameliorate the problem of low-quality,

overpriced rental housing: amending Wis. Stat. § 66.1015 to permit

implementation of a “rent-value correlation rate”—giving municipalities the

option to cap monthly contract rent as a percentage of the assessed property

value. …

Downtown Condos For The Rich: Not All Bad, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Some new condominiums in urban neighborhoods are too expensive for anyone but the very wealthy. Buyers of these high-cost units include not only wealthy city residents, but also nonresidents who wish to use housing as an investment rather than a residence. Some commentators use this apparent fact as an argument against new market-rate housing generally; they claim that new housing will be purchased by out-of-town investors rather than used by local residents and that those investors will leave housing units empty, rather than renting them out. A related argument is that, even if market-rate condos are purchased by local residents, …

Will Zoning Fix Itself?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Typically, zoning artificially limits housing supply, thus increasing housing costs. One possible defense of this system is that zoning can fix itself- that is, that when rents and housing costs become unusually high, politicians will deregulate and thus reduce housing costs. This article suggests that such a happy result is unlikely; instead, where housing costs spiral out of control, voters and politicians are likely to make regulation even more strict out of a fear of gentrification.

The Zoning Straitjacket: The Freezing Of American Neighborhoods Of Single-Family Houses, Robert Ellickson

Indiana Law Journal

Municipal zoning practices profoundly shape urban life in the United States. In regions such as Silicon Valley, regulatory barriers to residential construction have helped raise house prices to roughly ten times the national median. These astronomic prices have prompted some households to move to places, such as Texas, where housing is far cheaper. I have been engaged in an empirical study of zoning practices in Silicon Valley, Greater New Haven, and Greater Austin. This Article presents one of my central findings, induced from those metropolitan areas and elsewhere: local zoning politics typically freezes land uses in an established neighborhood of …

God Is My Roommate? Tax Exemptions For Parsonages Yesterday, Today, And (If Constitutional) Tomorrow, Samuel D. Brunson

Indiana Law Journal

In 2019, the Seventh Circuit decided an Establishment Clause question that had been percolating through the courts for two decades. It held that the parsonage allowance, which permits “ministers of the gospel” to receive an untaxed housing allowance, does not violate the Establishment Clause of the Constitution. It grounded its conclusion in part on the “historical significance” test the Supreme Court established in its Town of Greece v. Galloway decision.

In coming to that conclusion, the Seventh Circuit cited a 200-year unbroken history of property tax exemptions for religious property. According to the Seventh Circuit, that history demonstrated that both …

Bringing Judaism Downtown: A Smart Growth Policy For Orthodox Jews, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Until the late 20th century, the most rigorously traditional Jews, haredi Jews (often referred to as “ultra-Orthodox”) tended to congregate in New York City. But as New York became more expensive and haredi population grew due to high birth rates, some haredi Jews (known collectively as “haredim”) moved to small towns and outer suburbs in search of cheaper land, sometimes creating towns dominated by haredim such as Kiryas Joel, New York and Lakewood, New Jersey. As haredi populations have continued to grow, their households now seek undeveloped land outside these enclaves. But as haredim move deeper into the countryside, zoning …

The Limits Of Equity, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

"Equity" is a common buzzword in urban planning circles. However, nearly any land use decision can be justified as more equitable than the alternatives.

Fair Housing And The Causation Standard After Comcast, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

The Supreme Court last term held in the Comcast case that “but-for” causation must be shown by plaintiffs under the 1866 Civil Rights Act’s § 1981 and also announced that this standard is the default position presumed to govern all other federal civil rights statutes. This Article deals with how Comcast’s but-for presumption applies to fair housing cases.

The answer is complicated, because these cases are often brought under multiple laws. For example, a Black applicant who is rejected by an apartment complex ostensibly for having inadequate income, but who believes this decision was racially motivated because the complex …

Market-Anticipatory Approaches To Rural Property Vacancy, Ann M. Eisenberg

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The New Tipping Point: Disruptive Politics And Habituating Equality, Sarah E. Waldeck, Rachel D. Godsil

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Essay argues that the events of 2020 opened a window of political opportunity to implement policies aimed at dismantling structural injustice and systemic racism. Building on the work of philosopher Charles Mills and political scientist Clarissa Rile Hayward, we argue that the Black Lives Matter Movement constituted the “disruptive politics” necessary to shift dispositions of many in the United States toward racial equity by interrupting the white “epistemologies of ignorance.” Moreover, because policies that correct structural injustice are beneficial for people across race, even those whose hearts and minds remained closed may embrace legislative policies that function to dismantle …

Home Equity: Rethinking Race And Federal Housing Policy, Sarah E. Waldeck, Rachel D. Godsil

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Neighborhoods shape every element of our lives. Where we live determines economic opportunities; our exposure to police and pollution; and the availability of positive amenities for a healthy life. Home inequity—both financial and racial—is not accidental. Federal government programs have armed white people with agency to construct “white” spaces while stigmatizing “Black” spaces. The urgency of addressing structural injustice in housing has been laid bare by police-involved shootings and the disparate death rates linked to COVID-19.

Using political philosopher Tommy Shelbie’s theory of corrective justice, this Article explores the historical and present-day harms that need to be rectified and then …

The New Tipping Point: Disruptive Politics And Habituating Equality, Sarah E. Waldeck, Rachel D. Godsil

Faculty Publications & Other Works

This Essay argues that the events of 2020 opened a window of political opportunity to implement policies aimed at dismantling structural injustice and systemic racism. Building on the work of philosopher Charles Mills and political scientist Clarissa Rile Hayward, we argue that the Black Lives Matter Movement constituted the “disruptive politics” necessary to shift dispositions of many in the United States toward racial equity by interrupting the white “epistemologies of ignorance.” Moreover, because policies that correct structural injustice are beneficial for people across race, even those whose hearts and minds remained closed may embrace legislative policies that function to dismantle …

Home Equity: Rethinking Race And Federal Housing Policy, Rachel D. Godsil, Sarah E. Waldeck

Faculty Publications & Other Works

Neighborhoods shape every element of our lives. Where we live determines economic opportunities; our exposure to police and pollution; and the availability of positive amenities for a healthy life. Home inequity—both financial and racial—is not accidental. Federal government programs have armed white people with agency to construct “white” spaces while stigmatizing “Black” spaces. The urgency of addressing structural injustice in housing has been laid bare by police-involved shootings and the disparate death rates linked to COVID-19.

Using political philosopher Tommy Shelbie’s theory of corrective justice, this Article explores the historical and present-day harms that need to be rectified and then …

Table Of Contents, Seattle University Law Review

Seattle University Law Review

Table of Contents

Closing The Health Justice Gap: Access To Justice In Furtherance Of Health Equity, Yael Cannon

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

A massive civil “justice gap” plagues the United States. Every day, low-income Americans—and disproportionately people of color—go without the legal information and representation they need to enforce their rights. This can cost them their homes, jobs, food security, or children. But unmet civil legal needs in housing, employment, and public benefits, for example, are not simply injustices—they are well-documented drivers of poor health, or social determinants of health. Those marginalized by virtue of both race and socioeconomic status are particularly harmed by inaccessibility to justice and also by chronic health conditions and lower life expectancy. When a tenant walks into …

The Battle Of Brandy Creek: How One Black Community Fought Annexation, Tax Revaluation, And Displacement, Mark Dorosin

Journal Publications

The Brandy Creek community is a working class, Black neighborhood located just east of I-95, south of Weldon, North Carolina.' In 2005, this rural neighborhood and its surrounding land were legislatively annexed into the city of Roanoke Rapids as part of a planned economic development project. The decision to pursue legislative annexation allowed city officials to bypass the statutory notice and municipal service requirements of a city-initiated, involuntary annexation. Residents were never informed of Roanoke Rapids' intent to annex the community and had no opportunity to voice their opinions on the issue to town officials. In fact, the community first …

How Judicial Application Of Cda § 230 And Fha § 3604 Have Created Safe Havens For Online Housing Discrimination, Sophia A. Studer

Law Student Publications

This article analyzes how the anti-discrimination language of Fair Housing Act section 3604 is currently out of reach for people being discriminated against online through the exclusionary language of Communications Decency Act section 230(c). The exclusionary language in CDA section 230(c) prevents liability from attaching to interactive computer service providers so long as the interactive computer service provider is not a creator or developer of information. Through the decisions of Zeran, Craigslist, and Roommate, the federal appellate courts created broad shield of immunity for interactive computer service providers, leading to a safe haven for discrimination online. Together the courts and …