Housing Law Commons^™

Proving The Point: Connections Between Legal And Mathematical Reasoning, Maria Termini

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Make New York Affordable Again, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

Suggests a package of zoning reforms to hold down New York City housing costs, and responds to counterarguments.

A Euclid Dissent, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

In Euclid v. Ambler Realty, the Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of zoning, including zoning that excluded apartment houses and retail businesses. Although the decision was not unanimous, the Euclid minority did not write a formal dissent. The purpose of this article is to show what such a dissent should have looked like.

Do You Believe In Ghost Apartments?, Michael Lewyn

Scholarly Works

According to the popular press, expensive cities are being overrun by "ghost apartments"- condominiums owned by wealthy foreigners, but used as investments rather than being rented out to local residents. This article points out that such apartments are in fact a very small percentage of housing supply, even in some cities that are supposedly overran with such condos. More importantly, the existence of new “ghost apartments” does not justify exclusionary zoning policies. If a city popular with foreign investors discourages construction of new housing, investors are likely to purchase older housing units, outbidding local residents for those units. In this …

The Hidden Fences Shaping Resegregation, Jeannine Bell

Articles by Maurer Faculty

This Article offers a window into the experiences that inform the neighborhood choices of middle-class and upper-middle-class Blacks. As I suggest below, there are many hidden fences, walling off white neighborhoods and restricting Blacks’ housing choices in de facto ways. These hidden fences exist in the form of the many challenges Blacks face when moving to white neighborhoods. The obstacles to easy, contented lives range from police harassment to anti-integrationist violence that push Blacks into less affluent neighborhoods. Ultimately, this Article demonstrates how race can circumscribe housing choice and social mobility, even in the absence of legal barriers restricting where …

The Least Restrictive Environment For Providing Education, Treatment, And Community Services For Persons With Disabilities: Rethinking The Concept, Donald H. Stone

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Arlington Heights Won In The Supreme Court But The Fair Housing Act’S Goal Of Promoting Racial Integration Saved The Low-Income Housing, Henry Rose

Touro Law Review

No abstract provided.

Progressive Property Theory And Housing Justice Campaigns, Brandon Weiss

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

No abstract provided.

State And Local Laws Banning Source-Of-Income Discrimination, Robert G. Schwemm

Law Faculty Scholarly Articles

Most states and many localities have civil rights laws that are substantially equivalent to the federal Fair Housing Act ("FHA"),' which means they at least ban discrimination based on the seven factors outlawed by the FHA (i.e., race, color, religion, national origin, sex, familial status, and disability). Many of these state and local laws also include other protected classes, such as age, marital status, sexual orientation, and source of income.

This Article reviews state and local efforts to outlaw source-of-income discrimination.4 (For its part, Congress currently has multiple bills before it that would add such a prohibition to the FHA.) …

Arlington Heights Won In The Supreme Court But The Fair Housing Act's Goal Of Promoting Racial Integration Saved The Low-Income Housing, Henry Rose

Faculty Publications & Other Works

In the early 1970’s, a developer sought a zoning change to a parcel of land in Arlington Heights, Illinois that would allow for the construction of government-subsidized low income housing. Arlington Heights denied the zoning change and the developer and several potential residents of the housing sued Arlington Heights arguing that this denial violated both equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution and the federal Fair Housing Act (FHA). In Vil. Of Arlington Heights v. Metro. Housing Dev., 429 U.S. 252 (1977), the case reached the United States Supreme Court on the equal protection issue and …

Invisible Among Us: The Epidemic Of Homeless Teen Parents, Michelle Basham

Mitchell Hamline Law Review

No abstract provided.

Administering Housing Law As Health Care: Attorneys As Healthcare Providers, Frank Griffin

South Carolina Law Review

No abstract provided.

Transitional Justice In Housing Injustice: The Case Of Housing Rights Violations Within Settler Democracies, Manal Totry-Jubran

Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law

The right to housing is recognized by international human rights treaties as an integral part of the right to an adequate standard of living. Many states have ratified these treaties and incorporated protection of some aspects of housing rights into their constitutions and domestic legislation. Other states have not enacted any legislation in recognition of housing rights, but they provide judicial remedies for violations of rights. Despite that, domestic and international reports indicate that housing rights are constantly being violated in countries across the world at different levels.

This Article focuses on housing rights violations within "settler democracies." Such countries …

A Better Approach To Urban Opportunity, Nestor M. Davidson

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative: 2019-2021 Work Plan, Dana M. Malkus

All Faculty Scholarship

Our City has a serious vacant property challenge. To effectively address vacancy, we must understand and respond to the factors that cause and perpetuate it. Much of the story of vacancy in our city, like other cities, includes a legacy of racism, disinvestment, and disengagement that has led to a breakdown in trust. We know that vacancy can result from incomplete foreclosure, bankruptcy, prolonged probate or lack of proper probate, investors with little incentive to care, judgment proof owners, bank ownership, lack of resources to repair or redevelop, lack of value, the foreclosure crisis, sprawl and weak markets.¹ In …

Building By Right: Social Equity Implications Of Transitioning To Form-Based Code, Daniela A. Tagtachian, Natalie N. Barefoot, Adrienne L. Harreveld

Articles

No abstract provided.

"Social Engineering": Notes On The Law And Political Economy Of Integration, Olatunde C.A. Johnson

Faculty Scholarship

On the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Fair Housing Act, progress towards the Act’s goals of non-discrimination and integration is uneven. On both fronts, the last fifty years have seen some progress, but by several accounts more progress has been made on the anti-discrimination front than in advancing integration. The last fifty years have also given us a wealth of knowledge about the types of policy and planning devices — such as mobility voucher programs and inclusionary zoning — that might help achieve the goal of integration and ample data about the harms of segregation versus integration’s benefits. …

Perpetual Affordability Covenants: Can These Land Use Tools Solve The Affordable Housing Crisis?, Elizabeth Elia

Penn State Law Review (2003 - Present)

Approximately 3.8 million privately-owned residential housing units in America today contain affordability covenants recorded in their chains of title. State and local agencies and the District of Columbia use these covenants to ensure that publicly-subsidized properties are actually used to provide affordable housing. With rents at all-time highs and stagnant wages, the affordable housing crisis has reached a fever pitch. House Democrats are proposing billions more in housing subsidy. To the extent those funds subsidize privately-owned housing development they, too, will be secured by affordability covenants. In response to this crisis, a new trend in high cost markets is to …

The New Housing Segregation: The Jim Crow Effects Of Crime-Free Housing Ordinances, Deborah N. Archer

Michigan Law Review

America is profoundly segregated along racial lines. We attend separate schools, live in separate neighborhoods, attend different churches, and shop at different stores. This rigid racial segregation results in social, economic, and resource inequality, with White communities of opportunity on the one hand and many communities of color without access to quality schools, jobs, transportation, or health care on the other. Many people view this as an unfortunate fact of life, or as a relic of legal systems long since overturned and beyond the reach of current legal process. But this is not true. On the contrary, the law continues …

Building Bridges: Examining Race And Privilege In Community Economic Development: Introductory Overview, Priya Baskaran, Renee Hatcher, Lynnise E. Pantin

Faculty Scholarship

The country has been in economic recovery since the Great Recession in 2007. Home prices have since stabilized after the mortgage and foreclosure crisis that followed the Recession. In late 2017, the federal government passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, leading to a surge in corporate earnings. As of the time of this writing, major stock indicators are at all-time highs, and interest rates are low. But corporate indicators and interest rates do not paint the entire picture. Most of the economic recovery is in affluent, predominately white parts of the country, while distressed areas inhabited by people of …

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 …

Environmental Determinism: Functional Egalitarian Spaces Promote Functional Egalitarian Practices, Katharine B. Silbaugh

Faculty Scholarship

Egalitarian, place-based thinking belongs at the table when considering approaches to improving early childhood. Places connect people’s lives. They also generate patterns that organize, and can re-organize, our social order and behavior. Places can spark and support the development of self-governance and cultivate a political voice grounded in the needs of the same community that place generates. Whether considered as community schools, community centers, or more ambitiously, community housing developments designed to include services that meet the needs of residents, the spatial dimensions of early childhood policy require explicit consideration.

A Homestead Act For The 21st Century, Mehrsa Baradaran

Scholarly Works

The goal of the 21st century Homestead Act is to counteract the longstanding legacy of racially discriminatory housing policies by revitalizing distressed communities through public investment. The basic structure of the program is a wholesale transfer of land to residents who meet certain criteria. Accompanied by a holistic plan at the city level to revitalize the community through public investments in infrastructure and jobs, this proposal would benefit people who live in select small and medium-sized cities that are experiencing high vacancies.

Housing, Healthism, And The Hud Smoke-Free Policy, Dave Fagundes, Jessica L. Roberts

NULR Online

No abstract provided.

Regulating Short-Term Accommodation Within Condominium, Douglas C. Harris

All Faculty Publications

Owning land within condominium, or strata property as it is known in British Columbia, includes holding an individual strata lot, a share of the common property, and the right to participate in governing the uses of the private and common property. Owners participate in governing through membership and voting rights in a strata corporation which has the responsibility to maintain the common property and the authority to establish bylaws that restrict the use of the common and private property. The corollary of membership and a voice in the affairs of the strata corporation is a duty to accept its governing …

Cartographies Of Power: Unequal Urban Development And The Racialization Of Space In São Paulo, Jessica Hyman

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This work aims first and foremost to add to the literature on urban politics and race in Brazil. Where other scholars have not so explicitly addressed the ever present ideology of whiteness in regards to spatial organization and displacement in Brazil, this piece aims to do so. I build off of the work of past scholars in reinforcing that the belief in the racial democracy of Brazil is in fact a myth. I do so by illustrating the processes of the racialization of space that occur in São Paulo’s favelas and their development. The right to the city —a Brazilian …

Elizabeth Warren’S New Housing Proposal Is Actually A Brilliant Plan To Close The Racial Wealth Gap, Mehrsa Baradaran, Darrick Hamilton

Popular Media

Last month, Sen. Elizabeth Warren released a $450 billion housing plan called the American Housing and Economic Mobility Act. The proposal is a comprehensive and bold step toward providing affordable housing for the most vulnerable Americans. The bill is the first since the Fair Housing Act with the explicit intent of redressing the iterative effects of our nation’s sordid history of housing discrimination. Critically, it has the potential to make a substantive dent in closing our enormous and persistent racial wealth gap.

The Criminalization Of Vehicle Residency And The Case For Judicial Intervention Via The Washington State Homestead Act, T. Ray Ivey

Seattle University Law Review

In 2014, a nationwide survey by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty found that the number of cities with ordinances that effectively criminalized vehicle habitation increased by 119% between 2011 and 2014. These ordinances take the form of metered street parking zones, permit-only parking zones, time restrictions, restrictions on vehicle operability, restrictions regarding licensing and registration, and even prohibitions directed specifically at vehicle habitation. Violations of these policies typically result in noncriminal citations imposing fees, requiring attendance at hearings, or inflicting other financial burdens, which nevertheless can have devastating impacts on someone with already limited resources. Additionally, the …

Professor David Reiss On The Future Of Home Ownership, David J. Reiss

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Urban Decolonization, Norrinda Brown Hayat

Michigan Journal of Race and Law

National fair housing legislation opened up higher opportunity neighborhoods to multitudes of middle-class African Americans. In actuality, the FHA offered much less to the millions of poor, Black residents in inner cities than it did to the Black middle class. Partly in response to the FHA’s inability to provide quality housing for low-income blacks, Congress has pursued various mobility strategies designed to facilitate the integration of low-income Blacks into high-opportunity neighborhoods as a resolution to the persistent dilemma of the ghetto. These efforts, too, have had limited success. Now, just over fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing …