PRRAC Joins Amicus Brief in Defense of New York’s Prohibition on Source of Income Discrimination: On August 18, 2025, PRRAC, along with our partners at the National Housing Law Project and the National Homelessness Law Center, joined an amicus curiae brief that was filed in the Appellate Division of the Third Department of the New York Supreme Court in People of the State of New York v. Commons West, LLC. The law firm of Covington & Burling LLP provided invaluable pro bono assistance with the drafting and filing of the brief. The brief argued that New York’s prohibition on source of income discrimination, contrary to an adverse trial court decision, does not violate the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and seizures. Specifically, our brief provided an overview of the critical policy objectives served by New York’s ban on source of income discrimination, noted that the refusal to rent to voucher holders must still be unlawful where a landlord’s invocation of a privacy interest is pretextual, and illustrated why Housing Quality Standards inspections that are required under the Housing Choice Voucher program are not investigatory searches.
HUD Ignores the Notice and Comment Requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act to Further a Xenophobic Agenda: On September 4, 2025, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published an interim final rule that, if not stayed, will become effective on October 6, 2025 without HUD having received and considered public comments prior to publication. The rule relates to HUD’s Section 184 Indian Housing Loan Guarantee Program and purports to render immigrants who are not lawful permanent residents or citizens ineligible for mortgage loans under the program. This mirrors changes made to a sub-regulatory handbook for Federal Housing Administration-insured (FHA-insured) mortgages earlier this year. It is important to note that immigrants who were not lawful permanent residents but were previously eligible under these programs had some kind of documented status. To forgo notice and comment procedures in the case of Section 184, HUD invoked the “good cause” exception to notice and comment found in 5 U.S.C. § 553(b)(4)(B), claiming in support of its doing so that the putatively small number of people who would be affected by the rule and the alignment of the rule with the early changes to the requirements for FHA-insured mortgages (which did not go through notice and comment themselves) provide good cause. Neither of these putative reasons (the first of which was not backed up with an estimate of how many people would be affected) supplies the kind of good cause that would justify a failure to go through notice and comment before publishing a final rule. Notwithstanding the fact that HUD will not be required to take these comments into account, interested parties can submit comments at this portal by November 3, 2025 deadline.
Other news and resources
PRRAC at YIMBYtown: Our Executive Director Thomas Silverstein will be speaking on a panel at YIMBYtown on the role of lawyers in challenging exclusionary zoning (and bringing a healthy dose of market-skepticism to the conference) on September 15. This year’s gathering will be in New Haven, Connecticut. If you’ll be in attendance, come by the panel and say hi!
Tragic Loss of Environmental Justice Staff Capacity at the EPA: This informative piece from Inside Climate News covers the tragic loss of environmental justice staff capacity at the Environmental Protection Agency. The fight for environmental justice is a critical part of the fight for civil rights and racial justice. In the absence of meaningful federal enforcement, states will have to take the lead. One step that they can take to do so is to pass laws like the Illinois Civil Rights Act, which prohibits methods of administration of government programs that have an unjustified disparate impact.
