Strategy

The Center will: (1) educate the public about exclusionary housing policies and their correction; (2) identify jurisdictions in which rights of lower-income people to opportunities for affordable housing are unfulfilled; (3) determine the bona fides of lower-income people in those jurisdictions who claim to have been deprived of those rights; (4)  represent bona fide victims before government agencies and courts; and (5) interact with legislative and rulemaking bodies to promote appropriate statutes and regulations protecting opportunities for affordable housing.  Its initial focus will be on its local area — the Washington metropolitan area. 

Distinctive attributes

(1) Unique focus. The Center apparently is the only organization whose mission is centered on the state constitutional rights discussed above — nationwide, and in the Washington metropolitan area – as those rights relate to opportunities for affordable housing.

(2) Promising, practical approach. The Center’s distinctive focus is calculated to lead to opportunities for affordable housing for all Americans. The Center will concentrate on cases for which American law generally provides a remedy — cases involving individual legal rights and unwarranted government interference with those rights. The state Supreme Court decisions that have invalidated exclusionary housing policies have relied on those factors. The Center will emphasize practical results and maximum production of affordable housing, to catch up with actual needs. The reality of America’s federal system is that general jurisdiction to protect most basic individual rights rests in state governments.  The Center will heed the advice of the late U. S. Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, who urged greater attention to state constitutions as a source of individual rights.  E.g., William J. Brennan, Jr., State Constitutions and the Protection of Individual Rights, 90 Harv. L. Rev. 489 (1977).

(3) Strategy provides new remedy for affordable housing shortages. Enforcement of the state constitutional rights mentioned above provides certain benefits that public aid (or “welfare”) programs do not provide. For example, upholding those constitutional rights involves prohibiting unwarranted, government-sanctioned restrictions on the provision of goods and services (such as housing) by private persons to people in need. Thus, those constitutional rights provide remedies for shortages of housing and other basic commodities that are related to government policies, and for the cost inflation that results from such shortages. Public aid programs to persons in need do not deal with such underlying economic problems, which have a disproportionately large impact on the poor.

(4) Strategy is not dependent on legislation, appropriations, increased taxes, or new government spending programs. Unlike public aid programs, the state constitutional rights mentioned above: (a) do not depend for their fulfillment on the outcome of elections, legislation, or appropriations; and (b) are not generally dependent on increased taxes and government spending. It also bears noting that those rights ultimately will have applications around the world, because essentially the same rights are found in national constitutions of representative governments worldwide.