Housing Law

Eviction cases make up over a quarter of all cases filed in the federal and state civil courts and have enormous consequences for tenants, who are nearly always unrepresented by counsel. These cases overwhelmingly settle, yet settlement scholars have entirely overlooked eviction both empirically and theoretically. The Article presents results from the first empirical study of eviction settlement negotiations. The study involved rigorous analysis of an original dataset of over one thousand hand-coded settlements, observations of settlement negotiations in the hallways of housing court, and dozens of interviews. The findings demonstrate that unrepresented tenants—who make up the vast majority of tenants in the eviction system—have no meaningful influence over settlement terms. Rather, the terms are set by landlords and their attorneys. Drawing on the empirical findings and scholarship about contracts of adhesion, the Article develops the theoretical concept of “settlements of adhesion.”

Historic discrimination in the process of siting and constructing physical infrastructure has sacrificed the Black communities that bear the costs associated with new roads, power lines, and sewage plants while receiving few of the benefits. This Essay advances a "community equity" framework to recognize and protect the sources of value that people hold in their communities. This approach looks beyond the traditional domains of civil rights and land use law. Instead, it embraces analogies in public nuisance and common law torts doctrines as mechanisms for recognizing community harms above and beyond the aggregate of individual claims.

The Fair Housing Act (FHA) makes it unlawful to deny people with disabilities “reasonable accommodations.” But courts have long split over how to interpret this provision. At the center of the divide is the statutory requirement that an accommodation be “necessary to afford . . . equal opportunity to use and enjoy a dwelling.” Some courts interpret this language to impose a strict-necessity standard, requiring that an accommodation be truly indispensable. Other circuits instead read the statute as imposing a lenient-necessity standard, requiring only that the requested accommodation ameliorate the plaintiff’s disability. Rather than pick one interpretation, this Comment suggests that courts should tailor the necessity standard they employ to the type of case that is brought. Analyzing the text of the statute, Ben Griswold argues that the term “use and enjoy” invokes common law property ideas that should inform the interpretation of the reasonable accommodation provision. This textual analysis indicates that courts should apply a lenient-necessity requirement to cases brought by housing occupants requesting a specific accommodation, but should apply a strict-necessity requirement in cases brought by developers seeking zoning variances. Further, this interpretation addresses important information asymmetries, enabling courts to more optimally select for societally beneficial accommodations.

This Comment analyzes the entrance of institutional investors into the single-family rental market after the Great Recession of 2008. The collapse of the housing market during the Great Recession fundamentally changed the ownership structure of U.S. single-family homes. This post-recession reality has introduced a housing puzzle: the pricing trends of single-family rentals in the decade after the Great Recession suggest that institutional investors have captured monopolistic power over the single-family rental market despite owning a relatively small market share. Thus, this Comment evaluates the housing puzzle through the lens of antitrust law.

While a potential antitrust case appears to suffer from the critical weaknesses of low entry barriers and market shares, analyzing the institutional entrance into the single-family rental market under antitrust merger doctrine reveals that the case is stronger than it may initially seem. After evaluating the antitrust case, this Comment considers how the housing market can instruct antitrust doctrine’s further evolution, since commentators across academia, the media, and politics all criticize institutional entrance. By highlighting how unique market facts in housing obfuscate market power, this Comment suggests expanding the merger analysis to include not just levels and changes in concentration, but also orders of magnitude.

The Fair Housing Act is a groundbreaking federal law enacted in 1968 during the civil rights movement. Reflecting a policy judgment that the public’s interest in eliminating housing discrimination outweighs a prejudicial landlord’s property right to exclude, it prohibits landlords from rejecting tenants on a discriminatory basis. However, as the Act’s promises remain in the process of fulfillment, the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid has placed it into unprecedented danger: by holding that a regulation authorizing temporary occupations of private property constituted a per se taking that requires compensation under the Takings Clause, Cedar Point threatens the constitutionality of the Act, which grants tenants a similar temporary right to access rental properties. This Comment takes up the task of finding an escape valve for the Act within the current legal landscape.