Housing as Holdout: Segregation in American Neighborhoods by Rashmi Dyal-Chand :: SSRN

Torts Today: Housing as Holdout: Segregation in American Neighborhoods by Rashmi Dyal-Chand :: SSRN
Chris Christie won the governorship of New Jersey by several appeals - the tough on corrupt politicians meme was important.  But his promise to remake the Supreme Court of New Jersey was an important appeal to white anxiety and resentment.  Central to that was his opposition to court-mandated aid to poor school districts and the pledge (carried out) to abolish the Council on Affordable Housing the agency that implemented the Court's Mount Laurel mandate to allow affordable housing in developing suburban municipalities.  Stymied by the Democratic state Senate having failed in his court-makeover, the New Jersey Supreme Court reclaimed jurisdiction and directed the lower courts to enforce the mandate.  It brushed aside the agency (COAH) which had issued no rules or regulations after the Court had held Christie had no right to abolish it by executive order.

Rashmi Dyal-Chand, a New Jersey litigator turned law professor, reviewing three books on the persistence and effects of racially segregated housing , observes:

Although the “Mount Laurel Doctrine” was meaningfully diluted by a 1985 statute that allows municipalities to meet their “fair share” of affordable housing by contributing financially to developments in other towns, the doctrine nonetheless has had an extraordinarily positive impact on affordable housing development in New Jersey.

- GWC

Housing as Holdout: Segregation in American Neighborhoods by Rashmi Dyal-Chand :: SSRN

by Rashmi Dyal-Chand  (Northeastern U. School of Law)

How far have people who are not African American gone to keep African Americans out of their neighborhoods? And how far might they go? These are the questions that link the three recent books on housing reviewed in this article: Jeannine Bell, Hate Thy Neighbor: Move-In Violence and the Persistence of Racial Segregation in American Housing; Richard R.W. Brooks and Carol M. Rose,Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law and Social Norms; and Douglas S. Massey et al., Climbing Mount Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb.