Housing Discrimination in New Berlin?

The current controversy regarding “affordable housing” in New Berlin illustrates the weakness of federal law regarding housing discrimination based on socioeconomic class.

By way of backdrop, New Berlin is a suburb southwest of Milwaukee on the eastern edge of Waukesha County.  When a developer came forward with plans for low-cost rental housing in New Berlin, some members of the City’s largely white, bourgeois population expressed opposition.  New Berlin’s Plan Commission then hastily nixed the affordable housing idea.  This led in turn to an investigation by the United States Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. 

I anticipate the investigation will not lead to legal action.  No information has emerged suggesting New Berlin’s actions were explicitly aimed at racial or ethnic minorities, and this is significant when federal law is applied.  The federal Fair Housing Act, for example, was enacted with race and ethnicity rather than socioeconomic class in mind.  In addition, while race is surely a viable basis for an equal protection argument under the Fourteenth Amendment, socioeconomic classifications are not “suspect” and therefore can be justified with a conventional claim of rationality.

Has New Berlin engaged in housing discrimination by excluding affordable housing and the poor and working-class people who might rent such housing?  It appears that the dominant ideology as re-packaged by the federal law offers little help when facing exclusionary practices geared to socioeconomic status.  Under the law, the United States has no class.

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New Study Shows Regional Disparity in African-American College Performance

Racial disparities in education has been one of the central legal and cultural problems in post-World  War II America.  A recent study published by The Education Trust reveals yet another example of the problem of African-American underperformance, although the data compiled has a fascinating regional twist.

The Education Trust study focuses on comparative graduation rates for black and white students at the same colleges and universities.  Data was collected from 456 colleges and universities throughout the United States.  For the study as a whole black students are twenty percent less likely to graduate from college than their white counterparts who attend the same school.

However, the discrepancy in graduation rates is not uniform.  At some colleges and universities, African-Americans graduate at the same or nearly the same rate as white students.  At other schools, the gap is as wide as thirty-four percent.

Although the Education Trust study does not address the issue of regional variance, it is apparent from the results presented that the gap between white and black graduation rates is much lower in the South than it is in other regions of the country, and that the gap is particularly wide in Wisconsin.

Of the 29 public universities where black student graduate at the same (or greater) frequency as whites, 23 are in the South.  (I am defining any state that permitted slavery in 1860 as a “Southern” jurisdiction.)  In contrast, of the 25 public universities where the disparity between black and white graduation rates is the greatest, all are outside the South.  The latter group includes the Madison, Milwaukee, and Whitewater campuses of the University of Wisconsin.

The same regional pattern can also be seen in private schools.  Of the thirteen private schools listed in which black graduation rates equal that of whites, only one is outside the South.  In contrast, the twenty-one of the twenty-five private schools with greatest variation are outside the South.  Included among the twenty-one are Milwaukee’s Alverno College and Marquette University.

Why African-American college students appear to be playing on a more level playing field in the South is a fascinating question, as is the question of why African-American students at several of Wisconsin’s best universities have trouble obtaining the same graduation rates as their white peers.

The study can be found here.

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May It Please the Court…

“May it please the court.”

The words are enough to strike terror into the hearts of most attorneys I know.  They are the first words you speak when you address the Wisconsin Supreme Court in an oral argument.  The words are ritual, as standardized and formulaic as Kabuki theater.  And I was about to say them myself . . . if I just didn’t faint.

I have a framed photo on my desk at work.  It dates from perhaps a year before I started law school at the age of forty, and only a few months before I would break my back in a riding accident, spend three painful months in a body cast, and have the world as I knew it divide into “before” and “after.”

In the photo, I’m standing in a winter woods, with my four children gathered around me.  They range, in that picture, from about three years old to thirteen.  We are surrounded by pristine snow and bare trees, and framed in a pretty fieldstone archway.  I am beaming, and my entire universe revolves around keeping them safe and warm and out of harm’s way.  If you had walked up to me then and told me that in just a few short years I would not only be a criminal prosecutor but find myself arguing cases before the state supreme court, I would have given you the same stare as if you’d told me a genealogical search had just revealed that I was really the Queen of England, and a Lear jet was standing by to whisk me back across the pond.  Oh, and the roof at Buckingham Palace needs fixing.

I might have smiled pleasantly, rolled my eyes . . . and then called the police.

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