Plaintiffs move for summary judgment against City in outsider-restriction case

Affordable Housing |

City: separate is equal

From plaintiffs’ statement of undisputed facts:

82. Defendant has taken the position that the disparate impacts identified in the foregoing are to be disregarded so long as localized disparities at the CD typology level balance out when aggregating results to a citywide level…

83. At his deposition, defendant’s expert was provided with an illustration demonstrating the operation of a preference in a hypothetical city where each of four boroughs was populated only by members of a single demographic group (that is Whites in one borough, Blacks in a second, etc.). The priority went to those who already lived in the borough where housing was being developed. In the hypothetical, there were three lotteries per borough, and, in each lottery, there were the same number of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian applicants and the same number of White, Black, Hispanic, and Asian apparently eligible applicants. Apparently eligible applicants reached by the developers were equally likely regardless of race to followthrough and be awarded a unit. Without the policy, 25 percent of the apparently eligible applicants reviewed by the developer in each lottery in each borough would be members of each of the four demographic groups, and 25 percent of the awards in each lottery and in each borough would goto members of each of the four demographic groups. With the policy, in each lottery in each borough, it was only members of the dominant group that were reviewed by the developer, and the dominant group in each borough in each lottery was the group that received 100 percent of awards in the corresponding borough (i.e. Whites got all the awards in the White borough and Blacks got all the awards in the Black borough, etc.)…

84. Because the results described in the preceding paragraph, when aggregated to the citywide level, showed that the same percentage of each demographic group was being reviewed by the developer and that the same percentage of each demographic group got awards of units, Dr. Siskin’s conclusion was that, “this would not have a disparate impact in terms of allocation of units”; “under my understanding of disparate impact, it would not have a disparate impact.”