Housing Law Commons^™

Going The Extra Mile: Expanding The Promoting Affordable Housing Near Transit Act, Emily Casey

Law Student Publications

The Promoting Affordable Housing Near Transit Act (“Act”), introduced in Congress in June 2021 and signed into law six months later, proposes a goal of balancing the disproportionately-high costs of housing and transportation felt by lower-income families by combining these resources in one project: transit-oriented housing developments. Middle-income and wealthy suburbanites have ready access to cities by car, but lower-income urbanites lack access to the suburbs without a private vehicle. While the goal of the Act recognizes this disparate outcome, the Act’s failure to include expansion of mass transit into the suburbs will continue to restrict low-income minorities to urban …

Affirmatively Resisting, Ezra Rosser

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This Article argues that administrative processes, in particular rulemaking’s notice-and-comment requirement, enable local institutions to fight back against federal deregulatory efforts. Federalism all the way down means that state and local officials can dissent from within when challenging federal action. Drawing upon the ways in which localities, states, public housing authorities, and fair housing nonprofits resisted the Trump Administration’s efforts to roll back federal fair housing enforcement, this Article shows how uncooperative federalism works in practice.

Despite the fact that the 1968 Fair Housing Act requires that the federal government affirmatively further fair housing (AFFH), the requirement was largely ignored …

Corporate Consolidation Of Rental Housing & The Case For National Rent Stabilization, Brandon Weiss

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Rental housing in the United States is increasingly owned by corporate landlords that operate under a different set of incentives, behind a level of anonymity previously unavailable, and pursuant to practices that often exacerbate an already precarious housing landscape for tenants. Marketsensitive and nuanced rent stabilization laws have reemerged at the state and local level as a viable policy option to help regulate escalating rents and prevent tenant displacement. These laws, when well drafted, can address outdated critiques of strict rent caps and can complement alternative approaches, like those of the politically popular Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY) movement, which …

Unequal Homes, Unequal Health: Applying The Loss Of Chance Doctrine To Landlord-Tenant Cases, Delaram Takyar

Publications

Low-income families and families of color in the U.S. are disproportionately likely to live in homes that are negligently maintained by landlords, with significant implications for their physical health. Despite suffering harm, tenants often cannot seek legal relief without ruling out all possible alternate causes of their injuries. For example, if a tenant develops asthma after being exposed to black mold in her home and can show that her landlord had knowingly refused to remediate the mold, the tenant would still be barred from relief if she were genetically predisposed to developing asthma or could have also been exposed to …

Singling Out Single-Family Zoning, John Infranca

Suffolk University Law School Faculty Works

Single-family zoning is increasingly under attack in both the popular press and scholarly journals. Critics highlight how zoning districts that allow only detached, single-family homes exacerbate racial and economic segregation and perpetuate wealth disparities. Although a few local and state legislatures have eased regulations to permit denser development in existing single-family neighborhoods, such neighborhoods remain the dominant component of American zoning. The power of local governments to impose zoning derives from the police power—traditionally understood as the power to legislate in furtherance of health, safety, and the public welfare. These traditional concerns seem to provide little justification for prohibiting duplexes …

Liability Rule Practices Amidst The Property Rule Of Indonesian Capital Market, Adiwarman Adiwarman

Indonesia Law Review

Shareholder protection is the most important legal issue in capital market law. Conflict of interest is one of the corporate actions in the capital market. The property rule requires independent shareholders’ approval for conflicts of interest transactions. The property rule paradigm empowers independent shareholders in the company’s decision-making process. In practice, listed companies violate the property rule and are subject to sanctions, but the rights of shareholders will be reduced due to fines imposed by the capital market authorities. A normative method is used to answer the problem of how does Indonesia enforce the conflict of interest rule in order …

Who’S The Fairest Of Them All: Circuit Split Over Landlord Liability For Tenant-On-Tenant Discrimination Under The Fair Housing Act, Kelli Conway

Brooklyn Law Review

This note explores a circuit split between the Second and Seventh Circuits regarding whether landlords and property owners can be held liable for postacquisition, tenant-on-tenant discrimination. This issue is one of first impression in recent years, resulting in divergent holdings. To address conflicting judicial approaches to an increasingly prevalent civil claim, this note argues for the necessity of a Congressional amendment to the Fair Housing Act (FHA), the law which generally governs housing discrimination. Specifically, the proposed amendment would recognize postacquisition discrimination as an actionable claim and append a test to the FHA for postacquisition liability as employed by the …

Landlord Liability For Tenant-On-Tenant Harassment Under The Fair Housing Act, Mary Karapogosian

Cardozo Law Review

No abstract provided.

Justice For All: Demanding Accessibility For Underrepresented Communities In The Law: A Roger Williams University Law Review, Roger Williams University School Of Law

School of Law Conferences, Lectures & Events

No abstract provided.

The Failed Federalism Of Affordable Housing: Why States Don't Use Housing Vouchers, Noah M. Kazis

Michigan Law Review

This Article uncovers a critical disjuncture in our system of providing affordable rental housing. At the federal level, the oldest, fiercest debate in low-income housing policy is between project-based and tenant-based subsidies: should the government help build new affordable housing projects or help renters afford homes on the private market? But at the state and local levels, it is as if this debate never took place.

The federal government (following most experts) employs both strategies, embracing tenant-based assistance as more cost-effective and offering tenants greater choice and mobility. But this Article shows that state and local housing voucher programs are …

Cle Working Paper No. 3/2022--What Is The Test For Interlocutory Injunctions Affecting Homeless Encampments? A Critique Of Vancouver Fraser Port Authority V Brett And Associated Case Law, Stepan Wood

Centre for Law and the Environment

Vancouver Fraser Port Authority v Brett (VFPA v Brett), decided in 2020, marked a new low in judicial responses to the intersecting crises of housing, homelessness, poverty, toxic drugs, mental health, racism and colonialism. By dropping to the ground the already low bar for granting interlocutory injunctions to evict homeless encampments from publicly owned land i n BC, this decision invites a critical assessment of BC courts’ approach to homeless encampment injunctions. In this paper I present the first comprehensive survey of 21st century BC homeless encampment interlocutory injunction applications, which shows that they have an extremely high …

Checking Out Indefinitely: Supporting Survivors Of Sex Trafficking Alongside Training And Education For Lodging Employees, Alyssa M. Grzesiak

William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice

There are roughly five million victims of sex trafficking in the United States. Over the course of a decade, over 3,500 instances of human trafficking involved a hotel or motel. Traffickers are relying on unaware lodging establishment employees, as well as complicit employees and managers, to successfully carry out their crimes. Despite the vital role the lodging industry plays in human trafficking, only seven states have implemented mandatory training for hotel and motel employees. This Note posits that the implementation of mandatory training and education programs for employees of lodging establishments could increase awareness and responsiveness to human trafficking, thus …

“Pigs In The Parlor”: The Legacy Of Racial Zoning And The Challenge Of Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing In The South, Jade A. Craig

MC Law Review

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 includes a provision that requires that the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administer the policies within the Act to “affirmatively further” fair housing. Scholars have largely derived their analysis from studying large urban areas and struggles to integrate the suburbs. The literature, however, has not focused on the impact of zoning and discriminatory land use policies within and around low-income rural and small communities or specifically in the southeastern United States. Scholars have also insufficiently considered the implications of these policies on the duty to “affirmatively further” fair housing.

Racial zoning was …

White Picket Fences & Suburban Gatekeeping: How Long Island’S Land Use Laws Cement Its Status As One Of The Most Segregated Places In America, Jessica Mingrino

St. John's Law Review

(Excerpt)

The average wealth of Black families is one-seventh that of white families in the United States today. Homeownership—the primary avenue through which Americans accumulate personal and generational wealth—is the leading driver of the wealth disparity between white and Black American families, known as the “racial wealth gap.” The systematic and intentional exclusion of Black people from developing communities during the twentieth century largely excluded people of color from the housing boom and denied them the opportunity afforded to white people to multiply their assets. Contrary to widespread belief, however, legislation-backed oppression of Black Americans did not end in the …

Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, And Homelessness Post-Bostock, Alaina Richert

University of Michigan Journal of Law Reform

Housing discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity is a critical problem facing LGBTQ+ people in the United States. In addition, LGBTQ+ people, particularly transgender people, disproportionately suffer from homelessness and face discrimination by homeless shelters on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. This homelessness and discrimination both disproportionately affect transgender people of color. This Note makes two contributions that would enable courts to grant meaningful relief in these contexts. First, it argues that “sex” in the Fair Housing Act includes sexual orientation and gender identity after the holding in Bostock v. Clayton County. Second, …

Can Affordable Homes Be Healthy? Legal Strategy, Socio-Legal Studies And Activism In Indonesia, Santy Kouwagam

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

This article uses two Constitutional Court decisions in Indonesia to exemplify the importance of analysing legal strategies. These decisions declared a rule barring developers from building and selling tiny houses to be unconstitutional and invalid. The article shows that ‘justice’ in legal procedures still needs further definition, and that judges’ elaboration of decisions and their legal reasoning still needs improvement. The article will first discuss the cases, using Legal Strategy analysis. It will then highlight problems with the commoditisation of houses. Finally, it will argue that the problem of unhealthy and unaffordable housing in Indonesia can be resolved, by bringing …

Eviction Court Displacement Rates, Nicole Summers

Northwestern University Law Review

This Essay introduces the concept of eviction court displacement rates, defined as the percentage of eviction filings that result in tenant displacement. The Essay argues that a jurisdiction’s eviction court displacement rate provides crucial insight into the role of its legal system in driving substantive eviction outcomes. The Essay then compiles existing data on court displacement rates and compares those rates across jurisdictions. This comparison reveals massive variation in court displacement rates nationwide. In some jurisdictions, a tenant’s likelihood of displacement upon receiving an eviction filing is approximately one in twenty. In other jurisdictions, it is higher than one in …

Property Law And Inequality: Lessons From Racially Restrictive Covenants, Carol M. Rose

Northwestern University Law Review

A long-standing justification for the institution of property is that it encourages effort and planning, enabling not only individual wealth creation but, indirectly, wealth creation for an entire society. Equal opportunity is a precondition for this happy outcome, but some have argued that past inequalities of opportunity have distorted wealth distribution in contemporary America. This article explores the possible role of property law in such a distortion, using the historical example of racially restrictive covenants in the first half of the twentieth century. I will argue that the increasing professionalization and standardization of real estate practices in that era included …

American Courts' Image Of A Tenant, Nadav Shoked

Northwestern University Law Review

What is the core of current American residential landlord–tenant law, and how was that core formed? This Essay argues that in the past few decades courts have settled on a two-pronged landlord–tenant law regime. The law provides tenants with assurances respecting the quality of the units they rent. It does not, conversely, provide them with any assurances respecting the price of the rental units—and, therefore, respecting their ability to remain in those units.

The first component of the regime was established through the well-known judicial creation and endorsement of the warranty of habitability. The second component’s entrenchment is often attributed …

Compulsory Terms In Property, Timothy M. Mulvaney

Northwestern University Law Review

The state’s imposition of compulsory terms in property relations—such as habitability warranties binding landlords and tenants and minimum wages binding employers and employees—has long been conceived by analysts generally situated on the political right as an affront to individual freedom and inevitably harmful to the terms’ intended beneficiaries. This critique, though, seems to have special purchase in public discourse today not only within its traditional circle of supporters on the right but, at least in some instances, for a sizable number on the left as well. The bipartisan acceptance of this critique is serving as a substantial roadblock to a …