Court Opinion

ID: 9462838
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-04 22:51:26.040442+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:37:48.652872
License: Public Domain

GURFEIN, Circuit Judge,
dissenting, with whom IRVING R. KAUFMAN, Chief Judge, concurs:
I concur in my brother’s Oakes’ trenchant analysis.1 I would like to add that I consider his opinion as an important contribution to a debate that is of historic significance. This type of case may become a watershed in the struggle for civil rights, and I am sorry that we could not muster a majority in this court. The history of civil rights in the next quarter century may be written in terms of procedural roadblocks or we may see an expansion of the role courts will play reminiscent of the expansion in John Marshall’s day. There is need for judicial action where Congress has mandated benefits for a class and where an agency of the Executive Branch fails to carry out that legislative mandate. The contrary would give the Executive a silent veto not provided in the Constitution.
This is not a case where general taxpayers are seeking judicial relief against governmental action. The plaintiffs here are not suing as general taxpayers or as officious busybodies. Nor are they seeking to declare any statute or ordinance unconstitutional. They are within the class, minority citizens of the area, whom Congress has sought to help. They are aggrieved persons protesting administrative action in a literal sense. If these plaintiffs have no standing, then who does?
Of course, all black citizens of the entire United States are not in a class to be benefited by a HUD study of the housing policy of New Castle in Westchester County, New York. The class obviously must be more *612restricted. The issue, to my mind, is simply whether a county is too large an area for its minority inhabitants to be a discrete class with standing. Since there must be some judicial determination of the nature of the class which is harmed by federal inaction in the face of a clear mandate, it is those minority residents who are reasonably close to the housing opportunity, if it should open up, who have a stake in the Congressional mandate enacted for their benefit.
Local zoning ordinances of the type considered in Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490, 95 S.Ct. 2197, 45 L.Ed.2d 343 (1975), have nothing to do with this case. The challenge there was a constitutional challenge to the local zoning laws. The laws were ostensibly not directed against the minority, but could be taken as directed against persons of low or moderate income. It was held that as a prelude to a constitutional claim of discrimination the plaintiffs must show injury in fact. Here Congress has ordered an administrative agency implementing a particular federal statute to determine whether racially discriminatory policies are being followed by towns which seek federal subsidies. If the finding is that such discrimination is practiced, the funds are to be withheld. But what happens if HUD fails to look into the matter as it is ordered to do, and, nevertheless, approves the federal funding? My brethren in the majority say nothing is to be done about it by anybody. But, as the Court said in Association of Data Processing Service Orgs., Inc. v. Camp, 397 U.S. 150, 154, 90 S.Ct. 827, 25 L.Ed.2d 184 (1970), “[wjhere statutes are concerned, the trend is toward enlargement of the class of people who may protest administrative action.” I believe that when Congress imposed on the Secretary of HUD the affirmative duty to administer all “programs and activities relating to housing and urban development in a manner affirmatively to further the policies of this sub-chapter,” 42 U.S.C. § 3608(d)(5), it did not mean that HUD may disregard that mandate in its discretion. And those who have an adversary stake in the inaction ought to be able to compel HUD to make whatever study the court finds is required. The analogy is found in the requirement of an environmental impact statement before a project is begun. The federal courts have taken jurisdiction in such cases. See United States v. SCRAP, 412 U.S. 669, 93 S.Ct. 2405, 37 L.Ed.2d 254 (1973). The present complaint presents no less a controversy.2
We talk of separation of powers. Yet, a narrow holding on standing can be the equivalent of a substantive repeal of the legislation. The issue is really not whether the courts should abstain by denying standing, but whether by rejecting standing the courts are impeding national policy as expressed in the legislative will.

. I have not again reviewed the case authority since my brother Oakes has done that so well.

. We are, of course, only at the pleading stage and we may not consider whether the appellants can prove their allegations.