Book Review: "Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See"

 

Excluded: How Snob Zoning, NIMBYism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don't See.by Richard D Kahlenberg. JPublicAffairs, 2023. 352 pages. Hardcover, $35.00. 

This is an indictment of America's housing policy that reveals the social engineering underlying our segregation by economic class, the social and political fallout that result, and what we can do about it. Kahlenberg integrates quantitative and qualitative evidence to illuminate one of the central controversies in contemporary America: how to reconcile the tension between class and race. He shows how ‘snob zoning’ leads to segregation by both race and class and thus blocks opportunity for all Americans.

While the American meritocracy officially denounces prejudice based on race and gender, it has spawned a new form of bias against those with less education and income.  Millions of working-class Americans have their opportunity blocked by exclusionary snob zoning. These government policies make housing unaffordable, frustrate the goals of the civil rights movement, and lock in inequality in our urban and suburban landscapes.

Through accounts of families excluded from economic and social opportunity as they are victimized through “new redlining” that limits the type of housing that can be built, Kahlenberg illustrates why America has a housing crisis. He also illustrates why economic segregation matters since where you live affects access to transportation, employment opportunities, decent health care, and good schools. He shows that astonishingly the most restrictive zoning is found in politically liberal cities where racial views are more progressive. Despite this there is hope. Kahlenberg tells the inspiring stories of growing number of local and national movements working to tear down the walls that inflicts so much damage on the lives of millions of Americans.

Attempt by the DOGE-linked General Services Administration to Sell the Alabama Freedom Riders Museum is Stopped

 

The attempt by officials of the General Services Administration (GSA) - which manages federal property - to sell the Freedom Rides Museum (210 South Court Street, Montgomery, Alabama 36104, 1-334-414-8647) was foiled by two outraged Alabama representatives working with a Republican Alabama senator. When U.S. Reps. Terri A. Sewell (D-AL7) and Shomari Figures (D-AL2) saw the GSA list, both immediately demanded that the station be spared. The site is “an essential historical landmark that not only honors the legacy of the Freedom Riders but also educates the public about our nation’s struggle for equality and justice.” The GSA officials included the building, which the Museum leases from the federal government, on a list of hundreds they planned to sell because they were “not core to government operations.”

Days later, ahead of a March 9th commemoration in nearby Selma marking the 60th anniversary of the protest known as Bloody Sunday, the lawmakers and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY8) blasted the Trump administration for trying to sell the site and vowed to protect it and the rest of the over-130 stops on the U.S. Civil Rights Trail that connects 15 states. The Trail is a collection of churches, courthouses, schools, museums, and other landmarks, primarily in the Southern states, where activists challenged segregation in the 1950s and 1960s to advance social justice.

Fortunately, Alabama U.S. Senator Katie Boyd Britt, an ally of President Donald Trump who had also attended the Selma commemoration, intervened and announced on April 9th that the Museum was no longer listed for closure. 

The Museum, which draws visitors from across the country, is now recognized as an official destination on the Trail. It also is on the National Register of Historic Places, and has been rated as the 28th most popular museums in Alabama. This rehabilitated bus station has been restored to how it looked in 1961 and is the site of the 1961 attack on Freedom Riders when they arrived at the station. Recently, administration officials have edited National Park Service websites to minimize events and individuals opposing slavery and Black Americans’ struggle for civil rights. The military removed mention of the famed Tuskegee Airmen and Navajo code talkers from its websites and training materials. Public outcry prompted reversals.

Alabama’s Democrats introduced legislation March 12th to protect civil rights landmarks on the National Register. The legislation forbids the sale of federally owned landmarks on register. If the federal government does want to sell such a property, Congressional approval would be required.

Read the March 13, 2025 Alabama Daily News article.

Read the March 11, 2025 AL.com article.

Supreme Court of Maryland to Hear Source-of-Income Discrimination Case Addressing Landlords’ Use a Minimum Income Requirement in Violation of the HOME Act.

Brown, Goldstein & Levy, along with the Ray Legal Group, have petitioned the  Supreme Court of Maryland to bypass the Appellate Court to hear a case involving Maryland’s HOME Act. In applying for an apartment owned by David S. Brown Enterprises, the tenant’s application for an apartment was denied because she did not satisfy a policy requiring applicants demonstrate an income equivalent to 2.5 times the full monthly market rent even though she would only be responsible for a small proportion of it after her voucher was applied. This policy would exclude the majority of voucher holders in the State.

In 2020, the State of Maryland passed a law forbidding landlords from discriminating against potential tenants based on their source of income. Although the HOME Act requires landlords to accept housing vouchers, landlords are using minimum income criteria divorced from voucher holders’ share of the rent in a way that harms tenants with rental subsidies. These policies are effectively a loophole that defeats the remedial intent of the HOME Act, which bans housing discrimination based on source of income in order to decrease segregation and provide more opportunities for economic mobility.

The Circuit Court of Baltimore County granted summary judgment to the landlord, reasoning that the policy did not violate the HOME Act because it was applied in a neutral way. The Supreme Court of Maryland will review the Circuit Court of Baltimore County’s decision. The Attorney General of Maryland submitted an amicus brief in support of the bypass petition. 

In addition to the amicus brief filed by the Attorney General, eight local and national organizations collectively joined as amici in the case, including The Public Justice Center, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, National Housing Law Project, Equal Rights Center, National Fair Housing Alliance, Homeless Persons Representation Project, Fair Housing Justice Center, and Disability Rights Maryland.

The Supreme Court will hear arguments during the May session.

Read the February 13. 2025 Brownstein & Levy article.

LA homeowners & Advocates are Suing Insurance Companies for not Covering Damages from the Fires

 

The wildfires that swept through Los Angeles neighborhoods in this January took 30 lives and burned thousands of homes. Many homeowners say that insurance companies are telling them they aren't required to cover the damages.  There are two categories of insurers in Los Angeles. There are private insurers who are, in some cases, denying these claims because they are injecting a higher standard for determining whether, in fact, smoke damage has occurred. Then there is the California FAIR Plan, the insurer of last resort that is a private association of the private insurers. In 2017-2018, the FAIR Plan submitted to the California Department of Insurance (CDI) changes to its fire insurance policy, requiring that there be permanent physical changes to the property, which is contrary to state law.

The insurance commissioner has issued a bulletin that made clear that smoke damage is still a covered loss in California, that insurers have a duty under California law to reasonably investigate smoke damage claims. The problem is that the department ultimately doesn't decide the claims, and so people are forced to resort to go to court to have these claims paid.

So insurers have been asking and getting substantial rate increases since the 2018 Camp Fire, where they lost about $12 billion. State Farm, after the LA wildfires, filed for an emergency rate increase of 22% in California. That's been estimated to mean an additional $600, on average, per policyholder. And now we're waiting to see what the insurance commissioner will finally decide with regard to that rate increase.

Clashes over covering smoke damage have become a growing issue in states that have had devastating fires in recent years - including California, Colorado and Hawaii, said Amy Bach, executive director of United Policyholders, a public interest advocacy group. Home insurance companies have responded by looking for ways to limit their financial risks. Some major carriers have fled wildfire-prone areas. A 2022 report by the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog found that others were adding new limits to their coverage and restricting investigations into the scope of fire damage.

Consumer Watchdog has just sued the CDI and Commissioner Ricardo Lara to protect California homeowners from hundreds of millions in surcharges that may soon be on their insurance bills. The surcharges result from a decision reached by the Commissioner last summer to allow the insurance companies that comprise and operate the California FAIR Plan to pass-through costs to their policyholders when the FAIR Plan is forced to assess those companies for funds after a catastrophe.  

Read the April 13, 2025 NPR article.

Read the April 15, 2025 Consumer Watchdog article.

Read the April 14, 2025 Consumer Watchdog Petition/Complaint.

Unreleased HUD Letter Shows D.C. Housing Authority Failing Disabled Tenants

 

The D.C. Housing Authority (DCHA) is negotiating a resolution with the federal government after being ordered this past summer to fix extensive violations of federal laws regarding the treatment of people with disabilities, including sometimes taking years to handle requests for elevator access or adequate doorway space for wheelchairs. This is after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) condemned the authority for remaining “woefully out of compliance” with federal law and, in a letter on August 23rd, specified a series of steps it must take to remedy the failures. Among the city’s largest landlords, the authority serves about 30,000 households through housing vouchers and mixed-finance and traditional public housing properties.

The letter came after a HUD report in 2022 lambasted the authority for dozens of findings of faulty governance and poor performance. In addition to noncompliance with HUD fair housing regulations, that report also covered issues such as the agency’s extremely high public housing vacancy rate, dangerous and unsanitary conditions, and problems with how it calculated rents for low-income housing voucher holders. In 2022, then-D.C. Attorney General Karl A. Racine (D) filed a lawsuit against the authority, alleging widespread discrimination against people with disabilities, some of whom the attorney general’s office said had waited as long as a decade for housing that met their needs. The suit remains ongoing.

The letter from HUD says that in 2023 it conducted on-site surveys of 33 public housing units out of over 700 that DCHA had said conformed to Uniform Federal Accessibility Standards. None of the inspected units were fully compliant, HUD said. The violations included wheelchair ramps that exceeded maximum slopes, playgrounds that had no ramps at all, handrails that were nonexistent or at improper heights, and doorways narrow enough to make it difficult or impossible for wheelchair users or others with mobility issues to get through. In one case, a woman spent years in a public housing unit where the bathroom doorway was too narrow for her motorized wheelchair. The deficiency required the woman “to undergo a painful routine of propping herself up using upper body strength to get into and out of the bathroom multiple times each day.” In 2022, after the woman filed a complaint with HUD, the authority moved her to a unit with accessible features that had been vacant for nearly three years. In another case, a 74-year-old woman who had a full knee replacement lived in a third-floor apartment and requested to move to a building with an elevator. DCHA did not approve her request until more than two years later. The letter described maddening paperwork delays and demands for verification from doctors about disabilities that were evident, such as an 81-year-old woman’s difficulty maneuvering in her bathroom, creating a need for grab-bars at her toilet and shower. DCHA failed to maintain adequate paperwork to document compliance with federal law, the letter said, and at times did not cooperate with HUD’s investigation. In another case detailed in the letter, a woman began at-home dialysis, and DCHA approved a larger apartment for her to accommodate the necessary equipment. It then took the authority almost four months to issue the new voucher, despite repeated emails from her lawyer and a caseworker at Miriam’s Kitchen.

DCHA has a long history of failing to comply with federal laws designed to ensure that people with disabilities are not shut out of access to housing. In 2001, The Post wrote about children who lived in inaccessible D.C. public housing and were forced to drag themselves up steps. That year, HUD required the housing authority to make over 500 units accessible to people with disabilities after finding the authority never complied with federal accessibility legislation.

HUD’s letter in August specified corrective actions DCHA must take, including conducting a needs assessment of all tenants and applicants to its public housing and voucher programs. DCHA was required to revamp policies and training, retain an architect to survey properties, and install a full-time coordinator “with sufficient expertise and staff” to handle requests for reasonable accommodations from those with disabilities. HUD spokespeople did not respond to a message requesting comment about DCHA’s compliance. The federal agency’s efforts to follow up on the demands of its Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, which focuses on eliminating housing discrimination, will be more complicated with the wave of recently-announced worker firings and spending cuts.

Burdo, the DCHA spokeswoman, said the housing authority’s steps so far have included moving its ADA compliance office to under the agency’s legal office, addressing requests from residents, examining its policies and trying to improve its data integrity. DCHA also has begun trying to hire an architect to confirm compliance of units with accessibility standards, Burdo said.

Sunny Desai, managing attorney at Legal Counsel for the Elderly, has advocated for DCHA clients for several years and spoken about the agency’s problems at D.C. Council housing committee meetings. He said intransigence, lack of transparency, and stonewalling were major problems under its past leadership. “They’re far more receptive” under Pettigrew, but change is not coming fast enough, Desai said.

Read the March 6, 2025 Washington Post article.

LDF Reaches Settlement on Behalf of Housing Opportunities Made Equal (New York), Requiring Improved Training and New Practices to Prevent Housing Discrimination

 

Read a PDF of the Legal Defense Fund's statement here.

The Legal Defense Fund (LDF) has reached a settlement in Housing Opportunities Made Equal Inc. (HOME) v. Avant Realty – a lawsuit born out of HOME’s investigation into the company’s real estate practices. The lawsuit and settlement come after HOME alleged Avant Realty limited housing opportunities for Black residents of Buffalo, New York through racial steering, a discriminatory practice where real estate agents or brokers direct people seeking homes into specific neighborhoods based on their race. While investigating real estate agents in the Buffalo area, HOME found that Avant Realty treated Black people seeking homes differently than their white counterparts. LDF and HOME alleged Avant Realty’s practices violated the Fair Housing Act and New York State Human Rights Law.

As a result of the settlement, HOME will provide additional training to Avant Realty’s staff on fair housing laws and best practices to avoid racial steering. Avant Realty will also adopt a non-discrimination policy and has agreed to ongoing monitoring of its real estate practices by HOME.

“Housing Opportunities Made Equal (New York) is satisfied by the amicable resolution of this matter and looks forward to working with Avant Realty and other real estate firms to ensure compliance with fair housing laws,” said Daniel Corbitt, Associate Director of HOME. “In Western New York and throughout our state, homeownership offers an unparalleled opportunity to attain security, stability, and intergenerational wealth. However, significant racial disparities in homeownership persist. We all have a responsibility to eliminate racially discriminatory policies and practices in the residential real estate market, thereby creating a more vibrant and just community for everyone.”

“We are pleased to have reached a settlement with Avant Realty,” said Morenike Fajana, Senior Counsel at LDF. “At LDF, we know that where you live matters and impacts every aspect of your life – from access to good jobs and high-performing schools, to safe streets and access to quality health care. We are grateful to HOME for their years of service dedicated to fair housing, especially the work done to root out differential treatment that forces Black people into under-resourced neighborhoods and blocks them from economic opportunity. Today is a win for the Black residents of Buffalo.”

“While segregation remains an entrenched problem in the Buffalo region, today’s settlement is a step in the right direction,” said Elizabeth Caldwell, Assistant Counsel at LDF. “We are thankful to HOME for their commitment to fighting housing discrimination and their work to uncover and combat racial steering. LDF will continue to work alongside HOME and others to help families find suitable housing, free from discrimination.”

The LDF is the country’s first and foremost civil and human rights law firm. It was founded in 1940 under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall, who subsequently became the first African-American U.S. Supreme Court Justice.

Read the April 4, 2025 LDF article.

Fair Housing Advocates Reach Agreement to Expand Accessible Housing Opportunities for Residents with Disabilities to Over 5,300 Apartments in the South

The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) and the Tennessee Fair Housing Council (TFHC) have announced an agreement with Gross Residential Properties that will expand accessible rental housing opportunities in Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Tennessee. The agreement covers 13 properties containing more than 5,300 apartments in these states. Under the settlement, Gross Residential has committed to making changes at 13 apartment complexes to ensure they are accessible to people with disabilities.

The agreement comes after a joint investigation by NFHA and TFHC that led to a housing discrimination complaint filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) in March 2024. Through HUD’s complaint conciliation process, the parties quickly and efficiently reached an agreement that will notably increase accessible housing for persons with disabilities. Under the Fair Housing Act, it is unlawful for a housing provider to refuse to make reasonable accommodations necessary to provide persons with disabilities an equal opportunity to use and fully enjoy their homes.

Under the agreement, Gross Residential will: (1) Comply with the Fair Housing Act, including its accessibility provisions; (2) Make accessibility modifications to the 13 properties named in the complaint;(3) Notify residents in affected apartments of their right to request a modification to remove the below-sink cabinetry; (4) Develop no new multifamily units that include a kitchen design with an angled sink as depicted in the complaint; (5) Require staff to undergo training about building accessible apartments and the requirements of the Fair Housing Act; (6) Require an independent inspection of the accessibility modifications at the 13 apartment complexes and certify that they meet the accessibility standards; (7) Include in all residential leases a statement of Gross Residential’s commitment to fair housing laws and its policy to provide reasonable accommodations to applicants and residents who have disabilities; and (8) Pay $525,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees.

“People with disabilities in Middle Tennessee will have more housing options as a result of this agreement,” said Martie Lafferty, TFHC’s Executive Director. “Searching for a new place to live is stressful for everyone. Imagine finding an apartment you like and realizing you can’t use the kitchen because there’s not enough turning space for your wheelchair. We appreciate Gross Residential’s willingness to work with TFHC and NFHA to identify solutions that ensure people with disabilities can use and enjoy their apartment and the common areas of their housing community.”

NFHA and TFHC were represented by Sara Pratt, Esq. and Nick Abbott, Esq., of the noted civil rights law firm Relman Colfax PLLC. NFHA was represented by Morgan Williams, NFHA’s General Counsel, and Scott Chang, Senior Counsel on NFHA’s Enforcement Team. TFHC was represented by Martie Lafferty, TFHC’s Executive Director, and William Cox, TFHC’s Staff Attorney.

A copy of the Complaint is here.

A copy of Read the HUD Conciliation Agreement is here.