fair housing

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has ruled that an Ohio woman can pursue a claim that Blue Ash, Ohio, discriminated against her disabled daughter by banning her from keeping a miniature horse as a service animal, The Wall Street Journal's Jacob Gershman reports. Ingrid Anderson claims the city's ban on people keeping farm animals within municipal limits violates the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Fair Housing Act. Anderson further argues the city should make a reasonable accommodation to allow her family to keep the miniature hourse.

The next frontier in civil rights for LGBT Americans will be fighting bias in jobs and housing, The New York Times' Erik Eckholm reports. Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the right to marry as a civil right for gays and lesbians, many gay civil rights leaders are turning their attention to getting legal protections from discrimination by employers and in housing. The majority of states don't bar discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. However, religious conservatives are concerned that such laws will be used to force people to violate their religious beliefs, such as having to hire gays and lesbians in church-related jobs, Eckholm reports. Senator Jeff Merkley, a Democrat representing Oregon, said he planned to introduce a bill within the next few months to add protections for gays and transgender people to the Civil Rights Act, but he is not hopeful the bill will pass in the Republican-controlled Senate. He told Eckholm, "'People are going to realize that you can get married in the morning and be fired from your job or refused entry to a restaurant in the afternoon. That is unacceptable.”'

SCOTUSBlog's Lyle Denniston reports on oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday about a civil rights doctrine that rejects discrimination in housing even if it is not intentional, so long as it has a "disparate impact" on minorities: "At issue in the case of Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project is how far Congress went in 1968 in banning racial discrimination in home sales or rentals: did it only ban intentional bias, or did it also outlaw housing policies that simply have a negative effect on minorities?"

The Fair Housing Act, a key law in prohibiting racial discrimination in housing, was passed in 1968 shortly after Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.

Justice Antonin Scalia was on both sides of the issue during the oral arguments, reflecting the overall split in the bench on the issue, Denniston reports.

Fair housing advocates are concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court, with its five-member conservative majority, took up the case even though there is not a split between the circuit court of appeals in applying the disparate impact doctrine in fair housing cases. Elizabeth Julian, president of the Inclusive Communities Project and the former Assistant Secretary of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity at HUD, told ProPublica "the end of disparate impact policies and cases ... would severely hamper advocates’ ability to go after systemic housing discrimination in a nation where the segregation of black Americans has barely budged in many cities and where it is growing for Latinos."

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments today about a key civil rights doctrine in fair housing law: the disparate impact doctrine, which allows litigants to show that a policy is discriminatory by showing the results disproporionately affect one group of people, even if the discrimination isn't intentional, the Wall Street Journal's Robbie Whelan and Jess Bravin reports. At issue is the pattern of Dallas real-estate developers building the vast majority of government-subsidized housing in poor minority communities, not in wealthier, predominantly white communities. The Supreme Court will hear if the current system of tax subsidies violates the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and promotes racial segregation.

The Washington Post's Valerie Strauss blogged that the case is not just one that fair-housing advocates should watch but that public-education advocates should watch too  "'because the segregation of low-income minority schools undermines efforts to narrow achievement gaps between middle class and low-income minority students.'"

The WSJ notes that two other cases involving the disparate impact doctrine were settled before the U.S. Supreme Court could hear them.