Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: The District Court's Findings as to Housing

Text: 61 After an extensive review of the evidence, Judge Sand ruled that, in view of the consistent and extreme segregative effect of the City's actions, which catered consistently to community positions that were in significant part racially motivated, plaintiffs had sustained their burden of proving that the segregated housing pattern in Yonkers had been caused or exacerbated by the City's pattern and practice of discrimination on the basis of race in its decisions on the location of subsidized housing. Id. at 1369-73. He found that this pattern had begun with the City's first selection of subsidized housing sites under the 1949 Housing Act and had continued through its 1982 attempt to sell the School 4 property for luxury housing. Id. at 1373. 62 The court rejected each of the City's arguments that persons and factors other than the City had been the cause of Yonkers's segregated housing pattern. It found that the cause was not HUD encouragement of subsidized housing construction in Southwest Yonkers, id. at 1328-30; rather, HUD had urged scattered construction sites, and the City had repeatedly risked the loss of federal funding by its refusal to select more widely distributed sites, e.g., id. at 1323, 1347, 1356. Nor was the cause a lack of private developer interest in areas outside Southwest Yonkers, id. at 1330-31; CDA had sought out developers only for Southwest Yonkers, id., and the City had thwarted the efforts of a developer who sought to build an East Yonkers project intended to attract 20% of its residents from minority groups, id. at 1350-51. Nor could the housing patterns be attributed to the desire of minority communities for concentration of subsidized housing in Southwest Yonkers; minority groups had begun at least as early as 1956 to express concern about the segregative effects of locating subsidized housing in heavily minority areas and had expressed a desire to hav[e] the opportunity to live elsewhere in Yonkers. Id. at 1332-33. Nor was there, as the City contended, a lack of suitable sites in East Yonkers, id. at 1333-37; some of the sites rejected by the Council had been considered by the planners to be ideal, e.g., id. at 1300. 63 The court also rejected the City's argument that its site-selection decisions were made pursuant to a race-neutral legitimate planning strategy for urban renewal, id. at 1337-42, for the City's site selections, far from revitalizing Southwest Yonkers, had brought revitalization efforts to a halt, id. at 1310, 1337. Rather, the court found that whenever a site was proposed for a predominantly white area, strong community opposition emerged. Id. at 1369. Though this opposition was not based wholly upon race, race was a significant factor, id. at 1371 (emphasis in original); the opposition was based, at least in significant part, upon fear of an influx of minorities into what were (and remain today) overwhelmingly white neighborhoods, id. at 1313. The court found that City officials consistently responded to that opposition. Id. at 1371. The inference that racial animus was a significant element in the community opposition to which City officials were responding was drawn from, inter alia, direct testimony to that effect, evidence of overtly racist comments, the racially divided quality of private housing in Yonkers, and a general pattern in which only sites proposed in the predominantly white Northwest or East Yonkers or the white areas of Southwest Yonkers engendered opposition. Id. at 1311-12. The court found that City officials came to view racially influenced opposition to subsidized housing in East Yonkers as a 'fact of life,'  id. at 1316, and made conscious decisions to concentrate on  'politically feasible'  sites, id. at 1313. In addition, the court found that numerous City officials not only responded to, but, in the words of the campaign literature of some, 'led the fight against subsidized housing in East Yonkers.'  Id. at 1373. 64 The court found further evidence of the City's intent to preserve segregation in housing in its conduct with regard to Section 8 Certificates. Its cut-off of applications for family certificates and its failure to use any already obtained family certificates for minority families outside of Southwest Yonkers were found inexplicable except by reference to the anticipated race of the certificate holders, id. at 1347, i.e., inexplicable except on the basis of fear that minorities might use the certificates to relocate to East Yonkers,id. at 1373. Similarly, with respect to the City's 1982 attempt to sell School 4 for luxury housing, the court found that the procedural innovations and the nature of the debate made it difficult to imagine a clearer case of an action taken for a discriminatory purpose. Id. at 1363; see also id. at 1518-21. 65 In sum, Judge Sand concluded that the extreme concentration of subsidized housing that exists in Southwest Yonkers today is the result of a pattern and practice of racial discrimination by City officials, pursued in response to constituent pressures to select or support only sites that would preserve existing patterns of racial segregation, and to reject or oppose sites that would threaten existing patterns of segregation. Id. at 1373. The court emphasized that its finding of the City's segregative intent rested not on a failure to act, but on a thirty-year practice of consistently rejecting the integrative alternative in favor of the segregative--a practice that had the unsurprising effect of perfectly preserving, and significantly exacerbating, existing patterns of racial segregation in Yonkers. Id. at 1368. 66 The court concluded that the conduct of the City and CDA violated the Equal Protection Clause and that their conduct since 1968 violated the Fair Housing Act as well.