Fair Housing / Lending News

The U.S Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments in a case that could potentially reverse decades of settled housing discrimination law.  The case deals with residents of a low-income neighborhood called The Gardens in Mount Holly, New Jersey. The residents sued the township when it bought and demolished homes in a predominately minority neighborhood.  Several years ago, the township adopted a controversial plan that called for the demolition of all of the existing homes in the township’s only predominantly African-American and Hispanic neighborhood. The town’s council voted to buy all the homes in the low-income neighborhood for existing market prices ranging from $32,000 to $49,000.  The plan was to replace the homes with 520 new homes ranging in price from $200,000 to $250,000 . The prices are well beyond what the current residents could afford. Approximately 260 families already moved out. Seventy remain, including approximately 30 that are parties ...

Thiago Derucio and his partner were denied an apartment because they are gay. They responded to an online ad for housing but were turned down once their sexual orientation was revealed. Their experience is not unique. Same-sex couples often have to pay more in taxes when they buy or sell a home, or transfer ownership interest, than married heterosexual couples do. In other instances, they are denied housing loans . This is mainly because; there is no national law that protects against sexual orientation discrimination in housing. The federal Fair Housing Act as Amended (FHAA) prohibits discrimination in housing on the basis of race, color, national origin, religion, sex, familial status or handicap but not sexual orientation and gender identity. A patchwork of state and local laws offers some of the much needed protections to gay and transgender people. But the lack of a comprehensive federal law means that people like Thiago and his partner, do ...

As often stated on this blog, the Fair Housing Act was enacted to protect certain groups of people against discrimination in housing. The Act extends this protection to any dwelling. The term “dwelling” has been broadly construed by the courts and can include any place where a person resides. “Dwellings” under the Act has been held to include vacation homes, residential hotels, migrant housing, dormitories, nursing homes, group homes, and homeless shelters where persons reside for extended periods of time.   Jails, motels and detention or correctional facilities do not qualify as dwellings under the Act, thus far. In an interesting housing case against the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), the University argued that, university housing does not qualify as a dwelling under the Fair Housing Act and compare its student housing to a jail! The U.S. Justice Department sued the university last year, saying it unlawfully denied former UNK student Brittany Hamilton the chance to...

African-American and Hispanic homebuyers pay more for homes than white and Asian buyers, according to research by four economists—and the biggest differential they found in the four cities they studied is for black buyers in Cook County, Illinois. Over the past 18 years , home buyers who are Latino and black paid 3.5 percent more than white home buyers for comparable homes in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. The study tracked more than two million housing transactions in those cities. But in Cook County, Blacks pay 5.4 percent more than whites, according to the study titled “Estimating Racial Price Differentials in the Housing Market.” The 3.5 percent actually translates to $5,000 to $10,000 per sale. Multiply that amount with the average number of times Americans move, every five to seven years, and you will come to a substantial amount . On the median transaction price of $179,999, the study notes, blacks in Chicago and ...