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Enormous amount of inculpatory evidence for jury to consider.- In a bid to redeem more of the promise of the Fair Housing Act, HUD published in early February 2023 a proposed new affirmatively furthering fair housing rule. Comments on the rule were due by April 24, 2023. ADC's comment notes that the Proposed Rule represents an important set of substantial improvements over the 2015 Rule, but identifies several changes that are needed, including steps that each program participant would be presumptively required to take, and recognizing more clearly the primacy of the Fair Housing Act's desegregation mission.
- At the joint request of the U.S. Attorney (on behalf of HUD) and civil rights defendant Westchester County, federal District Court Judge Denise Cote has terminated the housing desegregation consent decree entered nearly 12 years ago. Commenting on the development, Craig Gurian, ADC's executive director, said, "Judge Cote has now signed the formal death certificate for what was intended to be a transformative consent decree. The promise of that decree, the outgrowth of landmark litigation, was killed by the very people who were sworn to enforce and oversee it. This was a golden opportunity to begin to make structural change in highly segregated Westchester County, and, despite initial promises to the contrary, there simply wasn't the political will to hold Westchester to its core obligations. There are many disappointments here, but perhaps the greatest, from a national perspective, is that the Biden Administration's Department of Housing and Urban Development has continued the see-no-evil, hear-no-evil perspective of predecessor administrations."
- Yes...with some caveats. (And, of course, there is a lot more work to do in the additional rulemaking HUD is contemplating.)
Extreme segregation: NYC metro areaWhile you're waiting for the 2020 Census results to come out, work with these new interactive maps -- down to the census block group level anywhere in the U.S. -- to see how much extreme segregation there still is.- 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.
- 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.