Support for the challenge to NYC's outsider-restriction policy
New York City’s outsider-restriction policy in its affordable housing lotteries perpetuates segregation, and ADC, on behalf of three African-American clients, has brought suit in federal court to end the practice. We’re not the only ones to think that the policy must go. Here is what some of those standing with us have to say.
“The fundamental theme of ADC’s lawsuit is that there is no acceptable type or scope of housing segregation. That stance upsets lots of people who, for various reasons, support the segregated status quo. But it’s the only stance compatible with a vision of a just society, and it is why ADC’s lawsuit against New York City’s outsider-restriction policy needs to be supported by civil rights advocates and their allies all across the country.”
— Elizabeth Julian, President, Inclusive Communities Project (the plaintiff organization in the recent Supreme Court decision that upheld the use of “disparate impact” under the Fair Housing Act)
“Pay no heed to those who make excuses for racial segregation in housing, whether they are whites trying to keep blacks out or blacks and so-called ‘liberal’ politicians who prefer to have blacks cooped up in the concentrated poverty that translates to concentrated votes.”
— Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University; a leading national authority on matters of race for more than 30 years; and co-editor of and contributor to The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth
“Inclusion is very hard, but we must all fight for it. No one is entitled to exclude.”
— Sheryll Cashin, Professor of Law at Georgetown University and author of Place, Not Race: A New Vision of Opportunity in America
“As the principal fair housing testing organization in New York City, we know that housing discrimination based on race and national origin is still pervasive in 2015. But individual acts of discrimination are not the whole story. Our conspicuously segregated living patterns were shaped by decades of government action at all levels, including New York City. Instead of maintaining an outsider-restriction policy for housing lotteries that perpetuates segregation, the City should meet its legal obligation and moral responsibility to reject this policy and work to end residential segregation”
— Fred Freiberg, Executive Director, Fair Housing Justice Center
“Opportunity in American society is now largely apportioned by ZIP code. It is time to end ‘the tyranny of the ZIP code’ through open access for all to inclusionary housing even among the 186 ZIP codes within New York City, one of America’s most racially and economically segregated cities.”
— David Rusk, Founding President, Building One America
“Intense residential segregation remains the shame of the New York metropolitan area, and is a primary driver of virtually every social inequity. We stand with ADC in insisting that there is no place for a policy that contributes to continuation of these segregated patterns.”
- V. Elaine Gross, President, ERASE Racism
“A discriminatory residency preference is a truly pernicious housing practice that perpetuates residential segregation. The complaint filed in Winfield v. City of New York sends the message loud and clear that such preferences are just as unacceptable in Manhattan as they are on Long Island or in Westchester County.”
ADC also thanks New York Appleseed and the Poverty & Race Research Action Council for standing with us.
Plus: read this column about the case by Errol Louis in The New York Daily News.
Plus: read They’re Our Neighborhoods, Too.