Supreme Court Case could weaken Fair-Housing Enforcement by Requiring Proof that Discrimination was Intentional

Along with a friend, Demetria Johnson strolls the area s he 
now calls home. The question of whether states discriminate
 by awarding most subsidies for low-income real-estate to 
projects in mostly-minority areas is the underpinning 
of a case now before the U.S. Supreme Court. 
Photo: Robbie Whelan/WSJ

Demetria Johnson, a 32-year-old beautician, used to sleep on a couch at her cousin’s apartment in Pleasant Grove, a low-income neighborhood in south Dallas. When she came home from work, she said, she was often greeted by drunks in the parking lot and the occasional sound of gun shots.

On a wait list for her own place at the time, the single mother of four worried about her luck of the draw. “My next house doesn’t have to be the biggest house or the nicest house,” she said. “I just want somewhere nice and clean and peaceful.”

Greg Briette and his family were able to move to a nicer
 neighborhood last year-but only after some locals in Frisco,
 Texas, bitterly opposed the low-income housing project. 
Photo: Robbie Whelan/WSJ

But for years, real-estate developers have built the vast majority of this city’s government-subsidized, low-income housing in poor, minority communities where land is relatively inexpensive and local opposition is limited.

That pattern has long come under attack by housing advocates who argue that developers who receive subsidies should be held to account, in part by building more low-income housing in the city’s wealthier, predominantly white communities.

Demetria Johnson signed a lease to live in low-income 
housing built with tax credits. She had been on a 
wait-list for months. Photo: Robbie Whelan/WSJ

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will take up the matter when it hears oral arguments about whether the current system for doling out tax subsidies promotes racial segregation and violates the Fair Housing Act of 1968—a civil-rights landmark signed by President Lyndon Johnson a week after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

The suit began in 2008 as a Dallas housing dispute brought by advocacy group the Inclusive Communities Project Inc. against the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs. It has since blossomed into one of the weightiest housing lawsuits in a generation.

Under Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court
 has scaled back civil rights laws.

An array of industry and conservative groups are backing Texas in its effort to roll back Fair Housing Act enforcement. Civil-rights organizations, along with 17 states and more than 20 large cities and counties, are siding with Inclusive Communities.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

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