HUD Housing
Daniel & Beshara have litigated numerous housing discrimination cases on behalf of tenants, fair housing groups, advocacy groups, neighborhood groups, and developers involving U.S. Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) assisted housing. The cases have involved Housing Choice Vouchers, public housing, project-based rental assistance housing, disaster relief housing, and other HUD funded housing. The cases have been brought against HUD, housing authorities, cities, state and local governments, and landlords. Our cases often involve discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, color, sex, disability, and familial status. The firm represents tenants and tenant advocate groups seeking to obtain desegregated housing choices for low-income tenants outside of racially and ethnically concentrated neighborhoods and to halt the perpetuation of racial segregation. Other cases focus on obtaining equal resources for segregated communities. Unique remedies have been obtained including resources for additional housing and funding for counseling
Zip code rents for the Housing Choice Voucher program
Significant change in the voucher rent program that has assisted lower income Hispanic and Black tenants across the nation was brought about by a e case that Daniel and Beshara brought on behalf of the Inclusive Communities Project. A court ordered settlement in 2010 led to the calculation of higher subsidies for rents by Zip Codes. This allows for higher subsidies in higher income Zip Codes and allows Housing Choice Voucher tenants in the eight county Dallas area a wider range of desegregated housing options. in higher income Zip Codes ICP v. HUD, 2009 WL 3446232 (N.D. Tex. 2009).
The case challenged HUD’s rent setting method that set a single fair market rent subsidy amount for Housing Choice Vouchers in the multiple housing markets in the eight county Dallas area. HUD used the rents in the low-income racially concentrated areas to set the rent subsidy for the entire multi-county region. This one rent subsidy severely limited the availability of units for voucher tenants in high opportunity areas. For example, a subsidy of $600 set for the rents in low income, high poverty areas will not allow a low-income tenant to rent a $1,500 apartment in neighborhoods outside of those areas. This case and subsequent litigation opened up thousands of units for Housing Choice Voucher holders in desegregated locations as HUD now sets the subsidy for rents for voucher holders in the Dallas metropolitan area based on the subsidy needed to rent in all zip codes, not just low income, high poverty areas. HUD has adopted the zip code rent model nationally for numerous other metropolitan areas in the country as a result of this litigation.
HUD’s Housing Choice Voucher program is racially segregated in most areas of the country. Not only are the vouchers segregated by race of the families and the race of the neighborhoods the vouchers are segregated by poverty. White non-Hispanic voucher families are over 12 times more likely to live in a census tract with less than 15% poverty than Black or Hispanic voucher families. Conversely, Black and Hispanic voucher families are over 10 times more likely to live in a census tract with more than 30% poverty than White non-Hispanic voucher families. HUD Picture of Subsidized Housing, 2018HUD’s Fair Market Rent subsidy setting process has been a causal factor creating, maintaining, and perpetuating this racial segregation. Zip Code rent based subsidies are a tool for desegregation of the voucher program.
HUD assisted rental housing with private landlords
Our firm represents tenants in inequitable living conditions in HUD assisted housing. A current example, concerns some of HUD assisted projects that fail to provide decent, safe, or sanitary housing in the Houston and Galveston area.
HUD enters into contracts with private landlords to provide housing to 1.2 million low-income households nationally. In this Project Based Rental Assistance (PBRA) program, HUD contracts directly with private owners of multifamily complexes to provide housing assistance. The HUD contract and regulations require the owner to provide decent, safe, and sanitary housing. This HUD assisted housing offers different living conditions with a discriminatory effect. The majority of white PBRA tenants are in conditions without failing housing inspection scores and are located in White non-Hispanic neighborhoods. The majority of Black and Hispanic tenants are in housing in racially concentrated locations. The Black and Hispanic tenants are disproportionately living in HUD assisted housing units that fail to pass HUD’s inspections for decent, safe, and sanitary housing conditions.
In March 2021, the Houston Chronicle detailed the conditions of tenants at a PBRA project in Galveston in the article In Living Hell. In 2018 ProPublica wrote about the substandard housing conditions and HUD’s inspection program in HUD’s House of Cards: “Pretty Much a Failure”: HUD Inspections Pass Dangerous Apartments Filled With Rats, Roaches and Toxic Mold.
Daniel & Beshara in conjunction with Lone Star Legal Aid represent some tenants at PBRA complexes where HUD has issued Notices of Default to the owners for the owner’s failure to maintain the property in decent, safe, and sanitary conditions. At the Coppertree location in Houston, the tenants requested voucher assistance from HUD to relocate because of the imminent health and safety hazards at the property. After HUD refused to provide voucher relocation assistance to Coppertree tenants, Plaintiffs filed suit against HUD seeking judicial review under the Administrative Procedures Act regarding HUD’s decision to withhold the vouchers. The Fifth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the HUD duty to provide assistance for voucher families to relocate to decent, safe, and sanitary housing is required by law and is enforceable by those families. The Fifth Circuit opinion is here.