Opinion ID: 500653
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The City's Obligation With Respect to Subsidized Housing

Text: 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