Open Communities Alliance et al v. Carson: The plaintiffs filed their motion for preliminary injunction last week, seeking to reinstate the unlawfully suspended mandatory portion of the Small Area Fair Market Rent rule as soon as possible. PRRAC is working on the case along with NAACP LDF, Relman Dane and Colfax, the Lawyers Committee, and Public Citizen. You can read the motion and brief here.
Secretary DeVos nixes school diversity priority: The Department of Education requested comments on the Secretary’s proposed competitive grant priorities, which would eliminate the Obama Administration’s priorities for proposals that expand racial and economic diversity. We commented on behalf of the National Coalition on School Diversity. The National Education Association also commented to protest the elimination of the diversity priority. The new proposed priorities are consistent with Secretary’s DeVos cancellation of the Opening Doors, Expanding Opportunity grant program earlier this year – it appears that the Secretary generally supports school choice, except where it is in service of integration.
City of Oakland v. Wells Fargo: PRRAC joined the National Fair Housing Alliance, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and a number of housing scholars as amicus curiae to support the City of Oakland in its lawsuit against Wells Fargo in the Northern District of California, asserting a number of harms to the city flowing from the bank’s predatory lending practices. This case is an early battleground for defining the “contours of proximate cause” under the Fair Housing Act, as the Supreme Court instructed the lower courts to do in its decision in another predatory lending case, Bank of America and Wells Fargo v. City of Miami, this past spring. These emerging decisions on causation may be a major test for the Fair Housing Act’s viability in addressing the real-world complexities of discrimination, and its extensive harms.
NCSD conference gallery: We are still posting materials from the national school diversity conference “A Struggle We Must Win: Advancing School Integration Through Activism, Youth Voice, and Policy Reform,” but here are a few photos from Day 2, at Columbia Teachers College. You can also listen to some very interesting StoryCorps interviews from conference participants here (scroll to bottom of the page).
