Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: the city's liability for segregation in housing

Text: 220
The Fair Housing Act makes it unlawful 221 (a) To refuse to sell or rent after the making of a bona fide offer, or to refuse to negotiate for the sale or rental of, or otherwise make unavailable or deny, a dwelling to any person because of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. 222 42 U.S.C. Sec. 3604(a) (emphasis added). The statute defines dwelling as any building ... intended for occupancy as[ ] a residence by one or more families, and any vacant land which is offered for sale or lease for the construction or location thereon of any such building.... Id. Sec. 3602(b). The City's contention is that neither the Fair Housing Act nor the Equal Protection Clause imposes on it any obligation to construct housing, that it has constructed housing that it has made available to all persons regardless of race, and that the law requires no more of it. In the circumstances of the present case, we disagree. 223 Though we know of no statutory or constitutional provision that imposes on a municipality a general obligation to construct subsidized housing, see Acevedo v. Nassau County, 500 F.2d 1078, 1081-82 (2d Cir.1974), more focused principles govern the present case. In Acevedo, the thrust of the complaint was that the defendant county had initially planned to build both senior citizen and family housing and that its abandonment of the plan to build family housing had a disproportionate impact on minorities. See id. at 1081. The district court, after a trial, found that the abandonment had neither discriminatory effect nor a discriminatory motive. See id. at 1079-80. Accordingly, we held that the abandonment violated neither the Constitution nor the Fair Housing Act. See id. at 1082. This does not mean that we would have reached the same conclusion in the face of findings that there had been discriminatory impact and discriminatory intent, for the absence of a general obligation to construct does not give the municipality license to proceed discriminatorily once it has started down the road to construction. Thus, the Sixth Circuit, for example, has upheld a pattern and practice claim under the Fair Housing Act, see 42 U.S.C. Sec. 3613(a), where the defendant city had applied for federal funds that it in fact wanted and needed, but had abandoned its application for reasons found to be racially discriminatory. United States v. City of Parma, 661 F.2d 562, 575 (6th Cir.1981), cert. denied, 456 U.S. 926, 102 S.Ct. 1972, 72 L.Ed.2d 441 (1982). 224 Nor, once a municipality has decided to construct housing, may it lawfully proceed with segregative intent and effect to confine housing for minority occupancy to areas in which minority residence is already concentrated, thereby enhancing and perpetuating racial segregation in residential patterns. In Otero v. New York City Housing Authority, 484 F.2d 1122 (2d Cir.1973), we noted obiter that Congress' desire in providing fair housing throughout the United States was to stem the spread of urban ghettos and to promote open, integrated housing, id. at 1134, and that, accordingly, [a]n authority may not ... select sites for projects which will be occupied by non-whites only in areas already heavily concentrated with a high proportion of non-whites, id. at 1133. The Third Circuit reached a similar conclusion in Shannon v. United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, 436 F.2d 809 (3d Cir.1970), which involved a challenge to HUD's approval of a rent-subsidy contract for a new building in an urban renewal area of Philadelphia. The thrust of the complaint was that the location of a rent-subsidy project in that area would have the effect of increasing the already high concentration of low-income black residents there, and that HUD had not properly considered the effect of such a subsidy guarantee on the racial concentration in Philadelphia as a whole or in that neighborhood in particular. Id. at 811-12. The court of appeals agreed that HUD had not considered those effects, and it vacated the district court's denial of relief, stating that [i]ncrease or maintenance of racial concentration is prima facie ... at variance with the policy underlying the Fair Housing Act. Id. at 821. Consistent with these views, when we held in Acevedo that there was no constitutional violation in the defendant's decision, made with no discriminatory intent, not to construct housing, we took care to distinguish cases in which municipalities had intentionally pursued their construction plans in a segregative manner, effectively restrict[ing] low income housing projects to segregated neighborhoods. See 500 F.2d at 1081 n. 3. 225 Accordingly, the district court properly rejected the City's contention that its decisions not to construct minority housing in any virtually all-white area were immune from scrutiny, and appropriately proceeded to determine whether housing in Yonkers was in fact segregated, whether that segregation was caused or enhanced in substantial part by the City's conduct, and whether that conduct was intentionally segregative.
226 The district court found that by 1980 an extreme condition of segregation ... exist[ed] in Yonkers. 624 F.Supp. at 1364. The evidence amply supports this finding. 227 The 1980 Census figures showed that 81% of Yonkers's minority residents lived in one quadrant of the City. Minorities constituted 19% of Yonkers's total population; yet the minority population of Southwest Yonkers exceeded 40%. Of the 10 census tracts within Southwest Yonkers itself, five had minority populations exceeding 50%. In contrast, outside of Southwest Yonkers, only 6% of the residents were minorities; and these minority residents were largely confined to two areas, one having a minority population of 29% and the other having a minority population of 80%. In light of these facts, we have no difficulty in upholding the district court's finding that housing in Yonkers was segregated. 228 Nor do we see a basis for upsetting the finding that the City's decisions to locate low-income housing only in or adjacent to areas already having high concentrations of minority residents was a contributing cause of the extreme condition of residential segregation that existed by 1980. From 1948 to 1980, some 144 sites were formally proposed to the City for subsidized housing, most of them in East or Northwest Yonkers or predominantly white neighborhoods of Southwest. More than 100 other sites, the vast majority of them in East or Northwest Yonkers, were also given official consideration. In all, 23 family housing sites were approved; of these, 21 were in Southwest Yonkers; one was in Northwest, abutting a heavily minority neighborhood of Southwest; and one--the only family project approved for an area that was neither within nor abutting Southwest Yonkers--was in the predominantly black Runyon Heights. See Appendix B. Of the 21 family housing sites approved for Southwest, 18 were in or adjacent to neighborhoods already having high minority concentrations, one was a half-block away from such a concentration, and the other two were but five blocks away. 229 Only one subsidized housing project was approved for a nonminority area outside of Southwest Yonkers: it was not a family project but a senior citizen project which, as expected, was occupied predominantly by white persons. Thus, over a period of more than three decades, the City approved no housing for minorities in any area that was not in or close to an already heavily minority area. 230 The demographic effect of concentrating minority-intended housing in the already concentrated minority areas was predictable. From 1960 to 1970, while the minority population of East and Northwest Yonkers increased by 1,879 persons, or 61%, the minority population of Southwest Yonkers increased by 10,333, or 5.5 times as many, persons. In percentage terms, the minority population of Southwest increased by 186%, from a starting base that was nearly twice as large as that in East and Northwest Yonkers combined. From 1970 to 1980, when the minority population of East and Northwest Yonkers increased by 43%, the minority population in Southwest Yonkers increased by 87%; in raw numbers, the net increase of minority residents in Southwest Yonkers outpaced the minority increase in other parts of Yonkers by 13,783 to 2,119. In all, during the period 1960 to 1980, when virtually all of the low-income minority housing at issue here became available for occupancy, all of it confined to areas that already had high minority concentrations, the minority population of Southwest Yonkers increased by 24,116 persons, or 434%, while elsewhere in Yonkers the minority population grew by only 3,998 persons, or 130%. 231 There was expert testimony that by concentrating subsidized low-income housing in the minority areas of Yonkers, the City had stigmatized those neighborhoods and thereby made them both less likely to attract new white families and less likely to retain the white families already there. This is consistent with evidence of denigrating comments made by white residents of other parts of Yonkers about the Southwest Yonkers neighborhoods, and with the demographic statistics. As the minority population in Southwest Yonkers increased from 5,559 in 1960 to 29,675 in 1980, the white population in Southwest declined steeply from 75,952 in 1960, to 66,523 in 1970, and to 41,124 in 1980, a net decrease of nearly 35,000 white residents. Elsewhere in Yonkers, the number of white residents increased from 1960 to 1980 by some 6,000 persons. 232 Other City acts also served to confine minority residents to predominantly minority areas. For example, in the period 1968 to 1974, when CDA sought out private developers, it focused efforts solely on sites in Southwest Yonkers. In 1975, when a private developer, who had planned a housing project on an East Yonkers site described by City planners as well suited for Housing for the Elderly, revealed that he hoped to rent 20% of the space to minorities, the City prevented the project. In the late 1970's, the Council obstructed the potential movement of minority families to existing buildings in East Yonkers by curtailing the use of Section 8 Certificates by families and by steering minority families to buildings in Southwest. 233 From all the evidence, the court could reasonably infer that the City's actions accelerated and enhanced the process of concentrating minority housing in Southwest Yonkers.
234 Intent to discriminate may be established in a number of ways. Often it may be inferred from the totality of the relevant facts, including the fact, if it is true, that the law bears more heavily on one race than another. Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. at 242, 96 S.Ct. at 2048. Such impact may be an important starting point. Other probative sources may include the historical background of the decision ..., particularly if it reveals a series of official actions taken for invidious purposes; [t]he specific sequence of events leading up to the challenged decision, such as zoning changes for a given site enacted upon the decisionmaker's learning of plans for the construction there of integrated housing; contemporary statements by members of the decisionmaking body, minutes of its meetings, or reports; [d]epartures from the normal procedural sequence; and [s]ubstantive departures ..., particularly if the factors usually considered important by the decisionmaker strongly favor a decision contrary to the one reached. Arlington Heights I, 429 U.S. at 267-68, 97 S.Ct. at 564-65. In the present case, a wealth of evidence in each of these categories supports the district court's finding that the City intended its housing decisions to result in the confinement of minorities to existing minority areas. 235 The impact of the City's decisions has been discussed in the preceding section. The historical background of these decisions included the City's 1930's decision to build a housing project especially for blacks, its rejection of a number of sites on the ground that the level of minority concentration there was not sufficiently high, and its eventual selection in 1940 of a site in one of the most heavily minority areas of Southwest Yonkers. 624 F.Supp. at 1312. 236 Many sequential clusters support the proposition that the City's decisions in the ensuing decades were similarly purposely segregative. The most commonly recurring sequence consisted of a site proposal for a white area, followed by vehement community opposition (e.g., letters on behalf of 2,000 residents; 1,000 attending public meetings), followed by City Council disapproval of the site. There was virtually never a site proposal for low-income family housing in a white area that was not met with opposition; there was virtually never white-community opposition that was not followed by withdrawal or rejection of the site. 237 There was ample evidence that much of the white-area residents' opposition to low-income housing was race-related. Both the Council and the community equated low-income family housing with minorities and senior citizen housing with whites. Thus, a group of white Catholics urged that the housing project proposed for their area be changed from family to senior citizen, stating that they feared an influx of blacks. Virtually all councilmen from East Yonkers stated that they were concerned about community opposition to low-income housing in their areas; many acknowledged explicitly that that opposition was race related. Iannacone testified that his own facially race-neutral public opposition to a proposed low-income housing project had been pretextual, masking his response to his constituents' racial concerns; some of those constituents had stated, pretextually, that they feared of loss of a parking lot, but others who knew him better told him they didn't want the housing because they didn't want any blacks there. Speakers at meetings, officials at trial, and contemporary news articles reflected the view that many of Yonkers's white residents were opposed to having to absorb the overflow from Puerto Rico or Harlem, and were not ready to accept racial integration. Officials describing public meetings said racial motivations were definitely a consideration and were thick in the air. Councilmen discussing Section 8 Certificates and forbidding MHA to obtain such certificates for family housing exhibited their concern[ ] about the possibility that members of the minority community would, in fact, seek and probably find units on the east side of the city. 238 The inference that the City intended to preserve racially segregated neighborhoods was also supported by evidence of its swift zoning obstructions of specific prospects for desegregative construction. For example, as to three sites submitted by CDA and tentatively approved by HUD in 1980, the Council rezoned one site for use as a shopping center; it refused to rezone another to a category consistent with a housing project; and as soon as the third was mentioned as a possibility for low-income housing, the Council rezoned it to remove it from the category appropriate for a housing project, in order to give the community some peace of mind. The Council indicated that it would rezone the site to the original category to permit luxury housing but not minority housing, stating, we will change that zone when the concept fits the people, not before. 239 The record also reflects numerous instances in which the City deviated from its normal procedural sequences or ignored the usual substantive standards in order to place low-income housing in Southwest Yonkers or to prevent its construction in East Yonkers. For example, in the 1950's the City constructed 415 units of low-income housing on a minority-area site though the Planning Board recommended a limit of 250 units; the City rejected every site recommendation from the Planning Board, even those the planning experts rated as superlatively suitable, if the site was in a virtually all-white neighborhood. In the 1970's, when Planning Board opposition to further low-income housing construction in Southwest Yonkers was known, the City simply began construction there without consulting that body. In the 1980's, when the Council wished to have the School 4 site used for luxury housing rather than for low-income housing, it again bypassed the Planning Board and, in an unprecedented move, appointed a five-person advisory committee, four members of which had no planning or zoning experience; their major qualification appears to have been that they were white residents of the School 4 area. 240 Finally, the City's intent to preserve the existing racial imbalance between Southwest and other areas of Yonkers was made clear by the words and actions of Mayor Martinelli. In 1971, HUD had warned the City that in order to retain federal funding, the City would have to build minority housing in nonminority neighborhoods. Thereafter, Martinelli won election on a campaign platform that included the promise of no more subsidized family housing in Yonkers. He was true to his word, and no more such housing was built. He further sought to ensure the preservation of the predominantly white neighborhoods by appointing school board members who would not approve busing, stating that a Board of Education fully committed to neighborhood schools ... is of critical importance to neighborhood stability.... 241 Neither this summary nor our more detailed summary in Part A.I.A. recounts all of the evidence that supports the district court's finding that the City's housing decisions were intentionally segregative. Given even that fraction of the proof recited here as to the impact of the City's decisions, the sequences of events, the procedural deviations, the convenient disregard of substantive standards, and the explicit and veiled statements of racial concerns, we regard as frivolous the City's contention that the evidence is insufficient to support the district court's finding that the City made its subsidized housing decisions with a segregative purpose. 242
243 Finally, the City argues that it is entitled to judgment in its favor on the housing discrimination claim because its housing decisions only responded to the concerns of its citizens, and race was not found to be the citizens' dominant concern. We reject this argument on factual, procedural, and doctrinal grounds. 244 First, we note that the City's factual premise--that City officials themselves displayed no race-related concerns but merely sought to follow the wishes of their constituents--is contradicted by the district court's findings and by the record. Although the City argues that the district court foundthat officials ... were entirely well-meaning public servants acting in accordance with their perception of what was feasible in the political and socio-economic circumstances of Yonkers and in the best interests of that community, 245 and argues that [t]hus, the Court below expressly found that the public officials themselves lacked any racial animus in any of the housing decisions reviewed by the Court, (City brief on appeal at 34, quoting 624 F.Supp. at 1289 (emphasis and ellipsis in City's brief)), the City's view of the facts and the findings is untenable, for it is plainly contradicted by the district court's well documented opinion. To begin with, the quoted passage, which appears in a brief introductory portion of the court's opinion, is preceded by the word [m]any; the district court stated that [m]any officials were entirely well meaning, not that all officials were well meaning. Further, the rest of the opinion makes clear that by well-meaning and in the best interests of the community, the district court was giving recognition to the view of certain officials that racially influenced opposition to subsidized housing in East Yonkers [w]as a 'fact of life,'  624 F.Supp. at 1316, and their position that they had made conscious decisions to concentrate on  'politically feasible'  sites, id. at 1313, i.e., sites that could be approved without incurring race-based opposition. Most importantly, although the court found that the City's actions consistently responded to the racial concerns of white community members, it did not find that City leaders had no racial concerns of their own. To the contrary, it found that numerous City officials not only responded to, but ... 'led the fight against subsidized housing in East Yonkers.'  624 F.Supp. at 1373. 246 The record amply supports the finding that many City officials were leaders, not mere puppets, of their constituencies. Thus, on several occasions, the mayor or councilmen exhorted their constituents to action. For example, a councilman whose ward was near the School 4 area sent letters to all of his constituents, urging them to support the sale of the property for luxury housing and defeat the wishes of the NAACP for low-income housing. Similarly, with regard to another site proposed to HUD in 1980, then-mayor Gerald Loehr sent a mass mailing to residents of the area, taking the position that the low-income housing would place an unacceptable burden on the neighborhood and urging the residents to respond. Nor did the City confine its segregative actions to the simple disapproval of housing sites whose proposal provoked white residents' opposition. The actions of Martinelli in packing the Board with opponents of busing in order, in his words, to preserve neighborhood stability, the refusal of the Council to approve use of Section 8 Certificates by families, and the Council's eventual order to MHA not even to apply for Section 8 Certificates lest members of the minority community ... seek and probably find units on the east side of the city, provided further confirmation for the finding that in the fight to preserve segregation in housing, the Council was not just a reactive body. 247 Second, even if we were to accept the City's legal premise--that the City could not be held liable for the racially segregative impact of its decisions made in response to the concerns of the citizenry unless race were found to be the citizens' dominant concern--we would not order the entry of judgment in favor of the City. The district court did not find that race was not the protesting citizens' dominant concern in their opposition to low-income housing. It found that race was a significant factor. Neither this finding nor the finding that race was not the sole factor is inconsistent with a hypothesis that race was their dominant concern; and since a finding that race was the dominant factor would not have been clearly erroneous, the best the City could gain on this appeal, assuming our acceptance of its factual and legal premises, would be a remand for the district court to make additional findings. 248 Finally, we reject the City's doctrinal contention that elected officials may lawfully act with the purpose of achieving or preserving racial segregation in response to the urgings of their constituents so long as race is only a significant, but not a dominant, factor in the constituents' motivation. Even assuming, contrary to the findings and record in the present case, that the actions of the municipal officials are only responsive rather than leading the fight against desegregation, we conclude that the Equal Protection Clause does not permit such actions where racial animus is a significant factor in the community position to which the city is responding. See, e.g., Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. 429, 433, 104 S.Ct. 1879-82, 80 L.Ed.2d 421 (1984); Smith v. Town of Clarkton, 682 F.2d 1055, 1063-66 (4th Cir.1982); Dailey v. City of Lawton, 425 F.2d 1037, 1039 (10th Cir.1970); United States v. City of Birmingham, 538 F.Supp. 819 (E.D.Mich.1982) (City of Birmingham ), aff'd as modified, 727 F.2d 560 (6th Cir.1984); cf. City of Cleburne v. Cleburne Living Center, 473 U.S. 432, 448, 105 S.Ct. 3249, 3259, 87 L.Ed.2d 313 (1985) (Cleburne Living Center ); Lucas v. Colorado General Assembly, 377 U.S. 713, 736-37, 84 S.Ct. 1459, 1473-74, 12 L.Ed.2d 632 (1964). 249 The Supreme Court has long held, in a variety of circumstances, that a governmental body may not escape liability under the Equal Protection Clause merely because its discriminatory action was undertaken in response to the desires of a majority of its citizens. In Palmore v. Sidoti, the Court overturned a state court judgment that divested a natural mother of the custody of her infant child because of her remarriage to a person of a different race. The Court noted that community biases might subject the child to undesirable stresses that could be avoided if the child lived with parents of her own race, but it ruled that the state, although having a substantial interest in the welfare of the child, could not lawfully remove the child from the custody of her natural mother in order to cater to the racial biases of its constituents. Noting that this was by no means the first occasion on which it had struck down a law that responded to popular racial prejudice, and pointing to its invalidation of laws in areas such as housing in Buchanan v. Warley, 245 U.S. 60, 81, 38 S.Ct. 16, 20, 62 L.Ed. 149 (1917), the Court stated as follows: Private biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect. 'Public officials sworn to uphold the Constitution may not avoid a constitutional duty by bowing to the hypothetical effects of private racial prejudice that they assume to be both widely and deeply held.'  466 U.S. at 433, 104 S.Ct. at 1882 (quoting Palmer v. Thompson, 403 U.S. 217, 260-61, 91 S.Ct. 1940, 1962-63, 29 L.Ed.2d 438 (1971) (White, J., dissenting)). 250 In Lucas v. Colorado General Assembly, the Court invalidated a discriminatory legislative apportionment plan that had been expressly approved by the electorate, stating that [a] citizen's constitutional rights can hardly be infringed simply because a majority of the people choose that [they] be. 377 U.S. at 736-37, 84 S.Ct. at 1473-74 (footnote omitted). In Cleburne Living Center, the Court held that a city requirement that a permit be obtained for use of a dwelling as a home for mentally retarded persons, where no permit requirement was imposed with respect to similar types of uses for such dwellings, violated the Equal Protection Clause in light of the city's inability to articulate a legitimate governmental purpose to which the permit requirement was rationally related. The Court rejected the notion that the city was entitled to adopt such a requirement in response to the prejudices of residents of the neighborhood in which the home was to be located: 251 It is plain that the electorate as a whole, whether by referendum or otherwise, could not order city action violative of the Equal Protection Clause, ... and the city may not avoid the strictures of that Clause by deferring to the wishes or objections of some fraction of the body politic. Private biases may be outside the reach of the law, but the law cannot, directly or indirectly, give them effect. 252 473 U.S. at 448, 105 S.Ct. at 3259 (citation omitted) (quoting Palmore v. Sidoti, 466 U.S. at 433, 104 S.Ct. at 1882). 253 The circuit courts have applied these principles in the context of challenges to segregation in both schools and housing, ruling that discriminatory action is not lawful simply because it was taken in response to the racially motivated opposition of a segment of the community. In City of Birmingham, for example, the district court ruled that a city was liable for its obstruction of a racially integrated housing project even though six of the seven members of the decision-making body in fact favored the project, and that body's impedance of the project was simply responsive to the racial animus of a majority of its virtually all-white community: 254 The government need not prove that the [decision-making body] itself intended to discriminate on the basis of race in order to establish that the City acted with a racially discriminatory intent. In order to demonstrate a city's racially discriminatory intent, it is sufficient to show that the decision-making body acted for the sole purpose of effectuating the desires of private citizens, that racial considerations were a motivating factor behind those desires, and that members of the decision-making body were aware of the motivations of the private citizen[s]. United States v. City of Blackjack, Missouri, 508 F.2d [at 1185 n. 3]. Any other rule of law would permit a legislative body to place its official stamp of approval on private racial discrimination. 255 538 F.Supp. at 828. The Sixth Circuit affirmed the district court's judgment that the actions of the decision-maker had been racially motivated, quoting the lower court's findings that unlawful racial motivation was properly inferred from, among other things,  'the views expressed by a significant number of opponents of [the low-income housing project] (uttered both on the public record and within the hearing of those who testified at trial),'  and a decision-making body  'that knowingly pursued policies that appeased those who expressed these bigoted views.'  727 F.2d at 564 (quoting 538 F.Supp. at 826). 256 In Smith v. Town of Clarkton, a town was found liable under the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act for withdrawing from a joint plan to construct low-income housing, where its withdrawal was a response to town residents' opposition that was motivated in significant part by racial considerations. 682 F.2d at 1063 (citing district court's findings of fact). Though there was no evidence that the town officials themselves had a history of racially discriminatory acts or that in their individual capacities they were racially motivated, the circuit court upheld the imposition of liability, stating that [i]t is not necessary, in proving a violation of the equal protection clause, to show that the challenged actions rested solely on a racially-discriminatory intent in order to demonstrate that the involved officials acted with an intent to illegally discriminate, id. at 1066 (emphasis in original), and concluding that there could be no doubt that the defendants knew that a significant portion of the public opposition was racially inspired, and their public acts were a direct response to that opposition, id. 257 Other circuits have reached the same conclusion. See Dailey v. City of Lawton, 425 F.2d at 1039 (holding city liable for refusing zoning change to permit minority housing project in white area because of the opposition to the project by the residents of the white area); Gautreaux v. Chicago Housing Authority, 436 F.2d 306, 307-08, 313 (7th Cir.1970) (holding city council's delay in submission to HUD of low-income housing sites proposed for predominantly white neighborhoods not justifiable by the fact that it was responsive to political considerations and community hostility), cert. denied, 402 U.S. 922, 91 S.Ct. 1378, 28 L.Ed.2d 661 (1971); Resident Advisory Board v. Rizzo, 564 F.2d 126, 144 (3d Cir.1977) (inferring improper racial motivation from city's sudden shift in ... position from passive acceptance [of low-income housing project] to active opposition, in the face of protests by demonstrators manifesting racial bias) (footnote omitted), cert. denied, 435 U.S. 908, 98 S.Ct. 1457, 55 L.Ed.2d 499 (1978); Hoots v. Pennsylvania, 672 F.2d 1107, 1115 (3d Cir.) (holding that  '[s]chool authorities may not, consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment, maintain segregated schools or permit educational choices contributing to the development and growth of segregated schools because of community sentiment or the wishes of a majority of voters '  (quoting district court opinion in Hoots reported at 359 F.Supp. 807, 822 (W.D.Pa.1973) (emphasis in Third Circuit opinion)), cert. denied, 459 U.S. 824, 103 S.Ct. 55, 74 L.Ed.2d 60 (1982). 258 We do not read these cases to imply, as the City would have us do, that if invidious discrimination is a significant factor in the community position but is not the dominant factor, the municipality is permitted to cater to that prejudice with impunity. Just as many concerns inform a given legislative decision, making it difficult to pinpoint a single or dominant factor that motivates a legislative body, it may be equally difficult to isolate as dominant a motive shared by a given segment of the populace at large. It is sufficient to sustain a racial discrimination claim if it has been found, and there is evidence to support the finding, that racial animus was a significant factor in the position taken by the persons to whose position the official decision-maker is knowingly responsive. Given the district court's finding, which is unimpeachable on the basis of the present record, that racial animus was a significant factor motivating those white residents who opposed the location of low-income housing in their predominantly white neighborhoods, the City may properly be held liable for the segregative effects of a decision to cater to this will of the people. 259