Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Landlords, Latinos, Anti-Illegal Immigrant Ordinances, and Housing Discrimination

In the face of federal inability to effectively police our national borders and to remove unauthorized immigrants, many local governments have recently sought to take measures into their own hands by passing anti-illegal immigrant ( AII ) ordinances. These ordinances usually contain a combination of provisions restricting housing, employment, and public benefits for unauthorized immigrants, among other things.This Article focuses on AII provisions that are targeted at private rental housing, which typically take the form of sanctions against landlords who rent to unauthorized immigrants

Is Acquisition Everything? Protecting the Rights of Occupants Under the Fair Housing Act

This article addresses a recent trend among the federal courts to deny housing discrimination claims under the Fair Housing Act in cases where the plaintiff was an occupant of the housing at the time the discrimination occurred. Put another way, the courts have begun to read the FHA as protecting only the right to obtain housing, not the right to occupy that housing free of discrimination.The trend began with a 2004 Seventh Circuit opinion authored by Judge Richard Posner in the case of Halprin v. The Prairie Single Family Homes. Halprin dismissed most of the claims of a Jewish couple who alleged that the President of their Homeowner\u27s Association discriminated against them in a variety of ways. The sole reason for the dismissal was that the couple already owned their home and, according to Judge Posner, the FHA is concerned only with access to housing. Nearly a dozen federal courts have since followed suit.This article argues that Halprin was wrongly decided, and critiques the reasoning Judge Posner used to reach his conclusion. Next, the article proposes a better method of determining how the Act should apply: specifically, that language in the FHA which limits the application of particular provisions to the sale or rental of housing is intended to refer to the relationship between the parties, and not to a particular point in time. This interpretation has the advantage of reaching not only landlords who discriminate against tenants, but also defendants such as Homeowner\u27s Associations and municipalities, which are capable of discriminating against individuals who have purchased their homes. Halprin\u27s analysis will have potentially disastrous consequences for fair housing law, and it represents a departure from the manner in which remedial civil rights statutes have heretofore been interpreted. The Article concludes by situating Halprin within the broader debate between neoconservatives and Critical Race scholars about the proper aims of civil rights law in this post civil rights era

Vouchers and Affordable Housing: The Limits of Choice in the Political Economy of Place

America\u27s housing segregation problem, and the direct role of government and private actors in creating it, is well documented. What to do about it is less clear. And even when consensus develops about particular strategies, they can be difficult to implement because of significant headwinds that impede change. These headwinds-including market forces, government policies, and private prejudices-continue to stymie progress, and even well-intentioned reform efforts can fail at best and lead to negative consequences at worst. This piece seeks not to provide answers, but rather to describe one such set of reforms and headwinds and to propose some modest policy changes that might lead to incremental progress. I discuss attempts to help poor minority families move to neighborhoods with less concentrated economic and racial segregation in one particularly challenging place: the St. Louis metropolitan area

Discriminatory Housing Advertisements On-Line: Lessons from Craigslist

The Fair Housing Act makes it illegal to publish discriminatory housing advertisements. This has long been applied to newspapers, which have effectively screened all discriminatory housing ads from sight. However, in 1996 Congress created a loophole when it immunized website operators from liability for the content posted to their sites by third parties. Without publisher liability, websites have no incentive to screen out discriminatory housing ads. The result is that such ads are proliferating in cyberspace.While this situation is problematic from a fair housing standpoint, it presents a valuable opportunity. For the first time in a generation discriminatory housing advertisements are out in the open and available for analysis. This article contains a comprehensive review of discriminatory housing ads appearing on the popular website craigslist, which yields a number of interesting findings, including: (1) The vast majority of those who post discriminatory on-line advertisements for housing are placed by people seeking roommates. (2) The overwhelming majority of problematic ads discriminate on the basis of familial status. There are very few that discriminate based on race, ethnicity, or religion. (3) The few roommate ads that do mention race, ethnicity, or religion are more likely to discriminate in favor of minority groups. Thus, they appear more as expressions of individual diversity of backgrounds and beliefs than exclusionary tools of a majoritarian power structure.This information can and should inform changes to the legislative and enforcement regime for dealing with discriminatory housing advertisements. For example, we should recognize that the roommate relationship is different from traditional rental housing, and accord roommate-seekers protection from the law – protection which is currently given to small landlords (who arguably do not need it) but not co-lessees. Fair housing advocates also must address the unique problems presented by familial status as a protected category, both in terms of public awareness and acceptance of the law

Setting the Stage for Ferguson: Housing Discrimination and Segregation in St. Louis

The history of St. Louis is replete with discriminatory housing laws, policies, and practices: racially restrictive covenants, redlining, blockbusting and white flight, and exclusionary zoning. While these were common in virtually every part of the United States, they were particularly egregious, widespread, and pervasive in industrial Midwestern cities like Chicago, Detroit, and St. Louis – which saw a large influx of blacks migrating from the south at the close of the nineteenth century. In fact, three of the most foundational housing cases originated in St. Louis. When we look closely at these cases – not just the legal principles that they established but the physical, racial geography of the homes, neighborhoods, and cities that were contested – we can see how they reflected the racist forces that shaped the reality of modern metropolitan St. Louis. This can give us insight into what happened in Ferguson and why

Are Disparate Impact Claims Cognizable under the Fair Housing Act: Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. Inclusive Communities Project

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) makes it illegal to refuse to sell or rent or to otherwise make unlawful or deny housing to a person because of a protected characteristic, including race. The case asks the Court to determine whether the FHA covers disparate impact claims, where a plaintiff alleges discrimination based on the disparate impact that a defendant\u27s facially neutral practice has on members of a group who share a protected characteristic

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Landlords, Latinos, Anti-Illegal Immigrant Ordinances, and Housing Discrimination

In the face of federal inability to effectively police our national borders and to remove unauthorized immigrants, many local governments have recently sought to take measures into their own hands by passing anti-illegal immigrant ( AII ) ordinances. These ordinances usually contain a combination of provisions restricting housing, employment, and public benefits for unauthorized immigrants, among other things.This Article focuses on AII provisions that are targeted at private rental housing, which typically take the form of sanctions against landlords who rent to unauthorized immigrants

Disparate Impact and Integration: With TDCA v. Inclusive Communities the Supreme Court Retains an Uneasy Status Quo

This article begins with a brief history of disparate impact theory as it relates to fair housing cases. It then proceeds to an overview of two previous cases on this issue to reach the Supreme Court in recent years. Next, it analyzes the Inclusive Communities opinion, discussing both the Court\u27s affirmation of integration as a fair housing goal and its skepticism of whether plaintiffs can succeed using disparate impact theory in cases like the one at bar. The article concludes by locating the opinion\u27s focus on competing priorities within the historical tension between affordable housing/community development and integration and discussing the ramifications that this tension has for the use of disparate impact theory going forward

Beyond Disparate Impact: How the Fair Housing Movement Can Move On

Disparate impact theory is a vital tool for fair housing advocates. It allows them to challenge institutional behaviors that harm minority groups and municipal practices that perpetuate long-standing segregated patterns, without having to go through the difficult process of identifying a specific bad actor with explicitly discriminatory motives. Disparate impact theory has been a failure for fair housing advocates. It is overly complicated, infrequently used, and seldom leads to plaintiff success. Moreover, the availability of this theory has led to the underdevelopment of the law surrounding intentional discrimination, which has ultimately made all cases with circumstantial evidence more difficult to prove. According to respected commentators, all of the previous statements are true. Suffice it to say, this theory is one of the most theoretically significant, misunderstood, and controversial doctrines to arise in the area of antidiscrimination law. There is now a greater urgency to this debate, because disparate impact theory in the fair housing context is facing an existential threat: The Supreme Court is currently considering whether disparate impact theory is cognizable under the Fair Housing Act. Through this essay, I seek neither to praise disparate impact theory nor to bury it. Rather, I endeavor to make use of this particular legal moment to interrogate the doctrine and its application to fair housing cases. I begin with the assumption that disparate impact theory in housing is destined either for extinction or to continue on its current underperforming state. In light of these two, unsatisfactory outcomes, we must ask: What benefits does disparate impact add? If it is not achieving its hoped-for results, how can it be improved? If it is to be eliminated, how can advocates achieve these benefits through other means? Put another way: How can fair housing advocates move beyond disparate impact, at least as it currently exists