Housing Law Commons^™

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.

Three Principles For Federal Housing Policy, David Reiss

Faculty Scholarship

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.

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.

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 …

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 …

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 …

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.

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 …

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 …

Misbehavior And Mistake In Bankruptcy Mortgage Claims: Some Caveats Regarding The Porter Study, Gregory S. Crespi

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This Article reviews the comprehensive empirical study of the bankruptcy mortgage foreclosure process conducted by Professor Katherine Porter and subsequently published in 2008 in the Texas Law Review. The results of her study, which analyzed 1,768 proof of claim submissions filed in a sample of 1,733 Chapter 7 bankruptcy proceedings, strongly suggest that there is a pervasive failure on the part of mortgage creditors to meet all of the formal documentation requirements for filing such bankruptcy claims. This documentation failure arguably impedes many mortgage debtors or bankruptcy trustees from reviewing these claims for their accuracy.

Porter's conclusion that the itemization …

Re-Appraising The Appraisers: Expanding Liability To Buyers And Borrowers In The Story Of The 2008 Financing Industry Crisis, Shelby D. Green

Elisabeth Haub School of Law Faculty Publications

On the surface, suing in negligence seems the most promising avenue for recovery against appraisers, because liability depends on an examination of defendant's conduct alone and does not require an examination or defendant's mental state to show intent or agreement. But historically insuperable hurdles have operated to prevent recovery under this seemingly simple cause of action. One hurdle is lack of privity. The appraiser's legal relationship is with the hiring party--the lender--to assess the risks of the loan transaction and not with the purchaser, who may rely on the appraisal in making the decision to purchase. Because of the lack …

The People's Court, Kermit J. Lind

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

The Cleveland Housing Court adjudicates only one house and one owner at a time, while the investors and speculators in blighted properties operate in secret at high volume from a distance. However, the court's focus on housing code compliance and its (when needed) willingness to hand down strong measures is powerful. Even now, the City of Cleveland is implementing new strategic code compliance measures in partnership with neighborhood-based community development corporations, to the point where there is less profit in owning worthless houses in Cleveland, and the court is redirecting the disposal of low-value foreclosed houses to local land banks …

Hip-Hop And Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, And Law, Lisa T. Alexander

Faculty Scholarship

U.S. housing law is finally receiving its due attention. Scholars and practitioners are focused primarily on the subprime mortgage and foreclosure crises. Yet the current recession has also resurrected the debate about the efficacy of place-based lawmaking. Place-based laws direct economic resources to low-income neighborhoods to help existing residents remain in place and to improve those areas. Law-and-economists and staunch integrationists attack place-based lawmaking on economic and social grounds. This Article examines the efficacy of place-based lawmaking through the underutilized prism of culture. Using a sociolegal approach, it develops a theory of cultural collective efficacy as a justification for place-based …