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- Final round of briefing completed and motions submitted to judge. Data clear that policy causes disparate impacts and perpetuates segregation. City still relying on separate-but-equal and other defenses that Lawyers' Committee says would, if accepted, deal devastating blows to the ability of anyone in the United States to vindicate the rights guaranteed them by the FHA. Plaintiffs also submit mountain of evidence concerning City's knowing responsiveness to those who wish to maintain the segregated residential status quo.
- Little stands in the way of the final squandering of the promise of a historic housing desegregation court order.
- Trump is villainous, but he's not the only one. NYC's draft fair housing assessment was so bad that a Bar Association committee said it “fails to meet even the minimum requirements.”
- The Inside City Hall host focuses on the gutting of the "affirmatively furthering fair housing" rule. "The racism and the ignorance" of the president, Gurian says, "are unmistakable."
- As President Trump barrels on in his attempt to stir fear about what affirmatively furthering fair housing would do – ranting about how the “suburban housewife” wants to be made safe by his protecting her from an invasion of low-income housing (read: from minority residents) – he has repeatedly returned to the consent decree entered into by Westchester County. The president, as is his custom, gets everything wrong.
- Mayor de Blasio refuses to change an affordable housing lottery system that effectively says to African-American New Yorkers, “If you want to move to affordable housing in white neighborhoods, we’ll make it harder for you. But if you stick with affordable housing in your own neighborhood, we’ll tip the scales in your favor.”
- Different organizations focused strictly on their own agendas to the exclusion of all else. It's been a perennial problem, but the consequences are greater than they have even been. The integrity of our elections is hanging in the balance and a failure to #ProtectOurDemocracy (as it would be phrased in Twitter-land) will doom everything else. Given the prospect of multiple Supreme Court appointments and dozens of more Circuit Court judges, the damage could last for decades.
- Segregation of African-Americans todayStartling new interactive maps vividly show the depth and breadth of residential segregation in the U.S. at the state, county, census tract, and census block group levels in ways that most previous mapping has not.
- For all the recent outrage at instance after instance of well-known public figures being found to have engaged in sexual harassment, there has been surprisingly little discussion of any changes to the law that would affect the vast majority of victims of harassment who work in the civilian labor force. Unknown to most people, there is a judge-invented doctrine that throws must victims out of court. That doctrine says that harassment is not actionable unless it is “severe or pervasive.” But any state or municipality friendly to civil rights can throw that doctrine in the trash bin where it belongs.