Group #7 Housing
• On the Road to Nowhere: The FHA's Administrative Complaint Process
Lucia Blacksher Ranier & Sam Brandao, Tulane Law School
When individuals who have experienced housing discrimination seek relief through an administrative complaint, too often their case goes nowhere. Under the Fair Housing Act, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development can either handle those complaints itself or refer them to a competent state agency. Congress intended the Fair Housing Act’s administrative complaint process to be an easy and free way to investigate and address complaints of housing discrimination even for folks who cannot afford lawyers. But through representing our Louisiana clients during the administrative complaint process, we have seen a pattern of cursory, inadequate investigations by both HUD and the Louisiana Department of Justice, along with a pattern of sending claimants to mediation and tossing, without regard to merit, all those that fail to settle. Hoping to understand the investigative approaches employed by HUD and LADOJ, we have sent public records requests to both agencies from which we will determine the total number of complaints filed and the basis and outcomes of these complaints for the past ten years. Through a review of this data, we can evaluate the performance of these agencies and suggest practical steps to improve their work, mindful that their effectiveness is crucial to Congress’s purposes and to the majority of victims who have no other practicable option for seeking justice.
• Eviction Abolition
Larisa Bowman, University of Iowa College of Law
The eviction crisis in the U.S. today is the civil equivalent of mass incarceration. Eviction, like mass incarceration, is a racialized and gendered system of social control heavily supervised by the state. State court judges order evictions, and law enforcement officers execute them. Eviction’s mechanisms of control are to punish, exploit, and surveil. Tenants are forcibly removed from their homes as punishment for their poverty or else made to pay their last dollar to remain housed. Tenants routinely are subjected to onerous “probationary” terms that place them under heightened surveillance. Black women face the highest rates of eviction, while white landlords and investors net high profits in poor, majority-Black neighborhoods. Eviction exhibits the hallmarks of the carceral state, despite being a civil proceeding.
Theorizing eviction as a “carceral continuum” institution of racial and gender capitalism and punitive social control opens the door to abolitionist critique. Abolition orients us toward the transformation of society and the role of the state within it. Past reforms to the summary process of eviction have failed to shift the underlying power structure. In contrast, the grassroots demand to “cancel the rent” in response to COVID-19 economic hardship envisions a profound remaking of society in which housing is a social good and eviction is obsolete. Eviction, like mass incarceration, cannot be reformed. We as legal scholars must engage with eviction abolition as a critical facet of the reimagination of the state as responsible for the lives of Black women rather than the profits of white men.