Evicted: The Socio-Legal Case for the Right to Housing

Matthew Desmond\u27s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City is a triumphant work that provides the missing socio-legal data needed to prove why America should recognize housing as a human right. Desmond\u27s masterful study of the effect of evictions on Milwaukee\u27s urban poor in the wake of the 2008 U.S. housing crisis humanizes the evicted, and their landlords, through rich and detailed ethnographies. His intimate portrayals teach Evicted\u27s readers about the agonizingly difficult choices that low-income, unsubsidized tenants must make in the private rental market. Evicted also reveals the contradictions between law on the books and law-in-action. Its most significant contribution to American housing and poverty scholarship is the socio-legal data it provides to demonstrate the high economic and social costs America pays for its failure to consider housing a basic human right. Indeed, Desmond ultimately calls for an American right to housing and presents law and policy solutions in Evicted to advance such a right. This Essay argues that Desmond\u27s mostly federal legal prescriptions are insufficient to help all Americans realize the full promise of the human right to housing . American cities should also enact local ordinances that legitimate new housing arrangements in order to fully realize the human right to housing. Part I argues that Evicted\u27s stories show that the law operates differently in poor housing markets than in traditional markets, and that poor residents are differently situated in low-income housing markets based upon their age, sex, gender, race, and ethnicity. In this context, traditional housing laws are often a cause of, rather than a solution to, housing inequality and insecurity. Evicted also reveals that poor tenants and their landlords make informal bargains that often undermine the goals of numerous housing-related laws and sacrifice poor residents\u27 dignity. Part II builds on Desmond\u27s legal and policy prescriptions by providing examples of how cities can codify the right to housing at the local level through resolutions and ordinances that legitimate more equitable housing arrangements. Part II further asserts that the right to housing is a legal tool that can help localities manage and effectively internalize the mounting economic and social costs of increasing inequality in American housing markets. If, in the face of retracting federal government support for housing the poor and working-class, localities enact laws that reflect the human right to housing, they may be able to encourage the private sector and civil society to work with them to create housing markets that reduce evictions and better respond to people\u27s housing needs

Hip-Hop and Housing: Revisiting Culture, Urban Space, Power, and Law

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 lawmaking. Cultural collective efficacy describes positive social networks that inner-city residents develop through participation in musical, artistic, and other neighborhood-based cultural endeavors. This Article analyzes two examples of cultural collective efficacy: the early development of hip-hop in the Bronx and community murals developed by Mexican immigrants in Chicago\u27s Pilsen neighborhood. These examples show that cultural collective efficacy can help inner-city residents mitigate the negative effects of living in a poor and segregated community and obtain more concrete benefits from urban revitalization in their communities. Cultural collective efficacy also provides a framework to examine important microdynamics in the inner-city that scholars and policymakers have ignored. Lastly, this Article devises new combinations of place-based laws that might protect cultural collective efficacy, such as: (i) historic districts with affordable housing protections secured through transferable development rights, (2) foreclosure prevention strategies, (3) techniques to mitigate eminent domain abuse, and (4) reinterpretations of the Fair Housing Act\u27s affirmatively furthering fair housing mandate. These examples of place-based lawmaking may more effectively promote equitable development and advance distributive justice in U.S. housing law and policy

Tiny Homes: A Big Solution to American Housing Insecurity

“There’s no place like home,” said Dorothy. Yet, millions of people in the United States may face eviction, foreclosure, or homelessness in 2021 and beyond. America is on the brink of an unprecedented housing crisis in the wake of Covid-19. The federal government, and various states and localities, have taken actions to avert a housing crisis in the aftermath of Covid 19. While these actions have undeniably helped mitigate widespread foreclosure and eviction crises, they do not fully address the more fundamental American housing challenge—an inadequate supply of affordable housing at all income levels, a longstanding problem that Covid-19 has only intensified. This Article argues that tiny homes—homes that are less than 400 square feet—are an understudied and potentially big solution to the problem of housing insecurity, particularly during times of crisis, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. Now, increasing numbers of localities and nonprofits work in public and private partnerships to develop tiny homes villages as emergency housing or affordable housing in addition to housing for homeless people. The villages often consist of more than one tiny home and some villages can accommodate 350 tiny homes per site as well as families. Tiny homes villages, if designed properly, are an affordable and efficient way to add to the housing supply, providing residents with a community in which to advance their human flourishing as well as obtain shelter. Tiny homes will not work for every homeless person or in every community. Tiny homes villages should not replace all other forms of shelter for homeless people or all other forms of affordable housing. Localities, however, should develop the necessary building codes, zoning designations, land use categories, and approval processes to make living tiny legal and to permit tiny homes villages to mitigate housing insecurity

Reflections on Success and Failure in New Governance and the Role of the Lawyer

While the recent global economic downturn and the change in power in U.S. government force us to reexamine the efficacy of new governance approaches to public problem-solving and regulatory reform, the contributions of Symposium participants affirm that new governance will likely continue to be with us in the not-so-distant future. Thus, there is a continuing need to clarify the lawyer\u27s role in new governance. This Afterword begins that task by (1) reassessing the core normative goals of much new governance jurisprudence and practice, analyzing and critiquing the limited role for lawyers envisioned in this field; (2) positing how lawyers should proceed in a new governance world while still advancing distributive justice; and (3) analyzing the implications of these changes for legal education. The Afterword concludes by outlining further scholarly work that must be done to help lawyers navigate in a new governance regime

Stakeholder Participation in New Governance: Lessons from Chicago

The efficacy of the public-private partnership as a tool for social reform is the subject of continued scholarly and public debate. New governance theory, an increasingly popular form of jurisprudence, constructs an optimistic vision of stakeholder collaboration in public-private partnerships that justifies the use of the public-private partnership in regulatory reform. New governance scholars contend that recent governance trends such as devolution, deregulation, decentralization, and privatization create opportunities for previously marginalized stakeholders to more fully participate in public problem-solving. New governance scholars expect that both public and private stakeholders, with differing interests, skills and objectives, will effectively collaborate to solve public problems in the absence of traditional formal legal protections. New governance\u27s implicit promise is that traditionally marginalized stakeholders, such as poor public housing residents, will be empowered as a result of their participation in social reform. This Article examines stakeholder participation in Chicago\u27s landmark ten-year HOPE VI public housing reform experiment as a test of these claims. Chicago\u27s reform process is a national example as other cities replicate Chicago\u27s model. Specifically, this Article examines the effect of social fissures along race, class and gender lines on the participation of public housing residents in Chicago\u27s urban reform plan. This micro-study of Chicago\u27s process reveals that empowered stakeholder participation is difficult to achieve under conditions of social conflict in the absence of traditional rights-based protections. This Article proposes a balance between hard-law and soft-law measures to provide a public law framework for future national HOPE VI reform. These recommendations may guide future new governance reform efforts that include traditionally marginalized stakeholders in public-private collaborations

Community in Property: Lessons from Tiny Homes Villages

The evolving role of community in property law remains undertheorized. While legal scholars have analyzed the commons, common interest communities, and aspects of the sharing economy, the recent rise of intentional co-housing communities re-mains relatively understudied. This Article analyzes tiny homes villages for unhoused people in the United States, as examples of co-housing communities that create a new housing tenure—stewardship—and demonstrate the growing importance of community, co-management, sustainability, and flexibility in con-temporary property law. These villages’ property relationships challenge the predominance of individualized, exclusionary, long-term, fee simple ownership in contemporary property law and exemplify property theories such as progressive property theory, property as personhood theory, access versus ownership theories, and urban commons theories. These villages mitigate homelessness but also illustrate how communal relationships can provide more stability than traditional ownership during times of uncertainty. Due to increasing natural disasters and other increasingly unpredictable phenomena, municipalities may find these property forms adaptable and useful in minimizing housing insecurity and instability. This Article posits how localities can legalize stewardship and tiny homes villages for unhoused people. These insights reveal a new role for steward-ship and community building in American property law and theory

A Sociolegal History of Public Housing Reform in Chicago

This essay summarizes and compares Alexander Polikoff\u27s Waiting for Gautreaux: A Story of Segregation, Housing, and the Black Ghetto and Mary Pattillo\u27s Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City to convey the contributions and limitations of each book. Both works provide a rich sociolegal history of public housing reform in Chicago and illustrate the challenges Chicago has faced in implementing recent HOPE VI public housing reforms. I compare Polikoff\u27s forty-year battle to desegregate public housing in Chicago with Pattillo\u27s insightful observations of class dynamics between the new middle-class African-American power brokers of housing reform and public housing residents. Through this comparison, I seek to show that Polikoff\u27s long-term prescriptions for public housing reform are based upon a conception of the inner city that may no longer be entirely accurate. This comparison also conveys the social complexity inherent in HOPE VI reform efforts, a complexity often overlooked in the prevailing policy and academic debates

Reflections on Success and Failure in New Governance and the Role of the Lawyer

While the recent global economic downturn and the change in power in U.S. government force us to reexamine the efficacy of new governance approaches to public problem-solving and regulatory reform, the contributions of Symposium participants affirm that new governance will likely continue to be with us in the not-so-distant future. Thus, there is a continuing need to clarify the lawyer\u27s role in new governance. This Afterword begins that task by (1) reassessing the core normative goals of much new governance jurisprudence and practice, analyzing and critiquing the limited role for lawyers envisioned in this field; (2) positing how lawyers should proceed in a new governance world while still advancing distributive justice; and (3) analyzing the implications of these changes for legal education. The Afterword concludes by outlining further scholarly work that must be done to help lawyers navigate in a new governance regime

Stakeholder Participation in New Governance: Lessons from Chicago

The efficacy of the public-private partnership as a tool for social reform is the subject of continued scholarly and public debate. New governance theory, an increasingly popular form of jurisprudence, constructs an optimistic vision of stakeholder collaboration in public-private partnerships that justifies the use of the public-private partnership in regulatory reform. New governance scholars contend that recent governance trends such as devolution, deregulation, decentralization, and privatization create opportunities for previously marginalized stakeholders to more fully participate in public problem-solving. New governance scholars expect that both public and private stakeholders, with differing interests, skills and objectives, will effectively collaborate to solve public problems in the absence of traditional formal legal protections. New governance\u27s implicit promise is that traditionally marginalized stakeholders, such as poor public housing residents, will be empowered as a result of their participation in social reform. This Article examines stakeholder participation in Chicago\u27s landmark ten-year HOPE VI public housing reform experiment as a test of these claims. Chicago\u27s reform process is a national example as other cities replicate Chicago\u27s model. Specifically, this Article examines the effect of social fissures along race, class and gender lines on the participation of public housing residents in Chicago\u27s urban reform plan. This micro-study of Chicago\u27s process reveals that empowered stakeholder participation is difficult to achieve under conditions of social conflict in the absence of traditional rights-based protections. This Article proposes a balance between hard-law and soft-law measures to provide a public law framework for future national HOPE VI reform. These recommendations may guide future new governance reform efforts that include traditionally marginalized stakeholders in public-private collaborations