Justices Void Apartment Bans if Segregation Results

The Supreme Court, giving civil rights attorneys another tool to use to desegregate housing, ruled Monday that a city may not reject the building of apartment units in high-income neighborhoods if the rejection has the effect of segregating blacks in poor areas.

On a 6-3 vote, the justices upheld an appeals court order requiring a suburban New York town to allow a developer to build subsidized apartments in a nearly all-white neighborhood of single-family homes.

In a four-page unsigned opinion, the high court said that the town’s rejection of the proposed apartments had a “disparate impact” on blacks and, therefore, violated federal housing laws.

Civil rights lawyers said the decision will make it easier to attack zoning rules that, even if not specifically designed to maintain segregation, may have that effect.

“This is a very encouraging decision,” said Grover Hankins, general counsel for the NAACP. He predicted that more NAACP chapters will file suits alleging housing discrimination based on restrictive zoning.

Many cities have zoning ordinances that restrict development in prime residential areas to single-family housing, which is generally more affordable for whites. Legal analysts said that discrimination challenges against those ordinances have been rare so far because the high cost of such property has deterred developers from even proposing low-income multifamily units in those areas.

Even with the new ruling, they said, the cost obstacle may continue to prevent projects accessible to blacks from being built in affluent white neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, Hankins hailed as crucial the justices’ finding that civil rights plaintiffs need not prove that city officials intended to exclude blacks to win discrimination actions.

Had they, he said, it would be nearly impossible to win such housing cases.

“You don’t often get a smoking gun, where someone offers blatantly racist reasons for their actions,” Hankins said in an interview.

Racial Quotas Overturned

Meanwhile, in a second housing case before the high court Monday, the justices said that managers of public housing units may not limit the number of black residents as a way to maintain an integrated community. Without comment, the high court let stand an appeals court order from New York saying that racial quotas are illegal under the federal housing laws, regardless of the reason for them.

Both cases arose under the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which makes it unlawful to deny housing “to any person because of race, color . . . or national origin.”

In 1981, the town council of Huntington, N. Y., rejected a proposal by a private developer to build multifamily rental units in a section of the town reserved for single-family homes. More than 98% of the residents of this section were white, and nearly all of Huntington’s black residents lived in an area designated for urban renewal. The council said that it wanted the new rental units to be built in the urban renewal area.

A local branch of the NAACP filed suit, charging that the council’s action discriminated against blacks. At first, the town won before a federal judge, who concluded that its actions were not based on an intent to discriminate against blacks. But a federal appellate court reversed that judgment, ruling that the town’s actions were unlawful because they had a discriminatory effect on blacks.

Administration Backed Town

The Reagan Administration urged the high court to hear the town’s appeal. Instead, the justices affirmed the appeals court (Town of Huntington vs. NAACP, 87-1961). “We are satisfied (based) on this record that disparate impact (against blacks) was shown,” the opinion said. Moreover, the town failed to offer a convincing nonracial reason for its having sought to limit multifamily housing to the urban renewal area, the high court said.

The case reflected some of the issues in the much publicized desegregation dispute in Yonkers, N. Y., earlier this year. In that case, a federal judge ruled that Yonkers officials were guilty of discrimination because they had placed public housing units in mostly black areas of the city. The Supreme Court refused to hear appeals of that ruling also.

The second case decided Monday concerned the Starrett City complex in Brooklyn, N. Y., the nation’s largest subsidized housing development. Its managers had reserved at least 55% of the units for whites on the grounds that the goal of the federal housing law was integration. As a result, blacks had to wait 10 times as long to get housing there as whites.

In this case, the Reagan Administration sided with the black plaintiffs in winning lower court orders throwing out the housing quota as a violation of the Fair Housing Act (Starrett City vs. United States, 88-82).

Drug-Case Confiscations

In other actions, the court:

--Agreed to decide whether the government may seize the funds of indicted drug dealers who need the money to pay for a lawyer. In 1984, Congress authorized federal prosecutors in advance of a trial to seize assets that may have been obtained illegally. But a federal appeals court in New York ruled that this law violates a defendant’s right to a fair trial. Two cases on the issue (Caplin and Drysdale vs. United States, 87-1729, and United States vs. Monsanto, 88-454) will be heard in the spring.

--Agreed to decide the constitutionality of a California law that says a person who fails to return a rental vehicle within five days of the expiration of the rental agreement “shall be presumed to have embezzled the vehicle.” In 1985, Eugene Carella, a Los Angeles lawyer, was convicted of car theft for having kept a rented auto for more than a month after he said he would return it. He contends that the law is unconstitutional because it presumes he is guilty until proven innocent, but the Los Angeles Superior Court said the law requires only that Carella supply evidence to explain his failure to return the car (Carella vs. California, 87-6997).