Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Buchanan v. Warley Centennial Symposium on Race & Zoning

On November 5, 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Louisville’s race-based zoning ordinance in a landmark case, Buchanan v. Warley. The centennial of this famous case will be marked on Friday, November 10, 2017, at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law with a national symposium on Racial Justice in Zoning: 100 Years after Buchanan. The symposium will explore current racial injustices in land use, housing, and environmental conditions, as well as the history of race and zoning in the U.S. and Louisville. It will feature presentations on eight nationally renowned scholars, as well as a presentation on redlining in Louisville.

 

The symposium begins at 8:30 a.m. and ends at 2:30 p.m. on Friday, November 10, and will be held in Room 275 of Wyatt Hall, which is the Brandeis School of Law on the University of Louisville’s Belknap campus, 2301 S. Third Street. The symposium is free and open to the public, and includes a free light continental breakfast at approximately 8:30 a.m., and a free lunch at approximately 1:00 p.m., both on a first-come, first-serve basis until food runs out. Please do not confirm your attendance; just come. If you have questions, please contact Tracie Cole at [email protected] or 502-852-1230. Individuals requiring accommodations should also contact her as soon as possible.

 

All attendees will be responsible for finding and paying for their own parking. Visitor parking passes are available for purchase through the U of L Parking website.  On this page, you are able to pay for and print your visitor permit that you will place on the dash board of your car while you are parked on campus.  You are also able to view maps and directions to campus.  To obtain your visitor pass, click on “Printable Visitor Permits”, under “Permits” click on “Get permits” and under “Customer Authentication, click on “create a guest account”.  From here, you will create an account, and be able to select the $5 per day printable visitor permit.  You are able to park in the Green Lot on 3rd Street across from the Reynolds Lofts. The UofL Parking website also contains information about other visitor parking options, such as the lot at 4th and Cardinal or the Floyd Street Garage, which charge based on the length of time you park. Also, the Speed Museum (not the University) operates a parking garage next to the Speed Museum on Third Street, which charges by the hour.

 

The symposium is sponsored by the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, with support from the Caudill-Little Speakers Fund, and co-sponsored by the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research at the University of Louisville.

 

The details of the symposium schedule and speaker information are provided below:

 

Buchanan v. Warley Symposium Agenda

Racial Justice in Zoning: 100 Years after Buchanan

Friday, November 10, 2017

 

8:30 a.m.: Light continental breakfast

8:40 a.m.: Dean's Welcome: Lars Smith, Interim Dean

8:50 a.m.: Organizers' Welcome: Tony Arnold, Symposium Chair

 

Session I: The History of Race, Zoning, and Buchanan Case

9:00 a.m.: Cate Fosl, The Buchanan Case and the Long Movement for Civil Rights in Louisville

9:20 a.m.: Laura Rothstein, What Would Louis Do?  The “Brandeis Brief” on Zoning and Its Present Impact on Racial Segregation

9:40 a.m.: Michael Wolf, Caudill-Little Distinguished Presenter, There’s Something Happening Here: Affordable Housing as a Nonstarter in the U.S. Supreme Court

10:20 a.m.: Q&A for Session I

10:30 a.m.: Break

 

Session II: Contemporary Perspectives on the Persistence of Racial Inequality in Land Use

10:40 a.m.: Cedric Merlin Powell, Race Displaced: Buchanan v. Warley and the Neutral Rhetoric of Due Process

11:00 a.m.: Michael Lens, Caudill-Little Distinguished Presenter, Why Segregation Matters: The Inequality of Opportunity

11:40 a.m.: Audrey McFarlane, Caudill-Little Distinguished Presenter, The Properties of Integration: Managing Discrimination Through Mixed Income Housing

12:20 p.m.: Tony Arnold, From Zoning Injustice to Environmental Injustice to Resilience Injustice

12:40 p.m.: Q&A for Session II

12:50 p.m.: Break

 

Session III: Luncheon Keynote

1:00 p.m.: Lunch

1:10 p.m.: Keynote by Sheryll Cashin, Caudill-Little Distinguished, Integration as a Means of Restoring Democracy and Opportunity

1:50 p.m.: Q&A for Keynote

 

Session IV: Bringing It Home

2:00 p.m.: Jeana Dunlap, Redlining Louisville: The History of Race, Class and Real Estate

2:15 p.m.: Final Remarks by Organizers and Conclusion

2:30 p.m.: Symposium Ends; Book-Signing by Sheryll Cashin

 

Speakers:

Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold, J.D. is the Boehl Chair in Property and Land Use at the University of Louisville, where he teaches in the Brandeis School of Law and the Department of Urban and Public Affairs and directs the interdisciplinary Center for Land Use and Environmental Responsibility.

Sheryll Cashin*, M.A., J.D., is Professor of Law at Georgetown University, and an active member of the Poverty and Race Research Action Council.

Jeana E. Dunlap, M.P.A., M.S., is the Director of Redevelopment Strategies, Louisville Forward.

Catherine Fosl, Ph.D., is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Louisville, where she also teaches in the History Department and directs the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research.

Michael Lens*, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Urban Planning at the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs, where he is the Associate Faculty Director of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies.

Audrey McFarlane*, J.D., is the Dean Julius Isaacson Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore.

Cedric Merlin Powell, J.D., is Professor of Law at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law, where he is the Interim Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.

Laura Rothstein, J.D., is a Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of Louisville Brandeis School of Law.

Michael Allan Wolf*, J.D., Ph.D., is the Richard E. Nelson Chair in Local Government Law and Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law.

* denotes Caudill-Little Distinguished Presenter

October 25, 2017 in Conferences, Constitutional Law, Environmental Justice, History, Housing, Race, Scholarship, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (0)

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

Atlantic Interview of Myron Orfield on Sustainable Integration

The Atlantic uploaded yesterday an interview by Amanda Kolson Hurley of Myron Orfield (Minn).  Titled "The Persistence of America's 'Easy White Enclaves,'" the interview explores policy decisions about the siting of subsidized housing development, which issues are so topical now that SCOTUS has remanded the Inclusive Communities litigation.  But, Orfield also discusses what his research has shown about what levels of integration (read: diminution of white predominance) lead to resegregation.  The short piece links to a 2013 Housing Policy Debate article Orfield co-authored with Thomas Luce as well as a more recent study of the causes of segregation in the Twin Cities.

Jim K.

February 23, 2016 in Affordable Housing, Housing, Inclusionary Zoning, Race, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday, October 2, 2015

The Nation on Community Land Trusts and Homelessness in Baltimore

The Nation has a new story today entitled "Can Community Land Trusts Solve Baltimore's Homelessness Problem?" written by Michelle Chen.  A community land trust (CLT) is a community-controlled nonprofit organization that holds land in perpetuity for the benefit of the local community.  Typically, CLTs act as stewards of subsidized homes that they have built or rehabilitated.  In areas where land values are high, CLTs can be an opportunity for low- and moderate-income residents to own homes that will also be affordable to similarly qualified future homebuyers.

Chen's article explores the possibilities for such a strong community stewardship model in the struggling inner-city neighborhoods of Baltimore.   I think the piece can be interesting for students and others who wonder why aren't vacant houses being made available to the homeless, but it also leads the reader to make connections between the many components that make for a strong neighborhood.

October 2, 2015 in Affordable Housing, Race, Redevelopment | Permalink | Comments (1)

Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Online Professional Development Course in Adaptive Planning & Resilience

Land Use Prof colleagues -- please share the following information about an online self-paced course in adaptive planning and resilience as broadly as possible.  It's especially relevant for professionals who are engaged in planning and would benefit from skills to make their planning processes more adaptive and resilience-oriented.  Students, professors, and other professionals are welcome too.  Thanks for your interest and help!  All best wishes, Tony Arnold

I’m writing to let you know about an online self-paced professional development course in adaptive planning and resilience.  This course is aimed at any professional who engages in planning under conditions of uncertainty, complexity, or unstable conditions, whether in the public sector, private sector, local community, or multi-stakeholder partnerships. 

The course is ideal for professionals in sectors such as urban planning, community development water supply, water quality, disasters/hazards, environmental protection, land management, forestry, natural resources management, ecosystem restoration, climate change, public infrastructure, housing, sustainability, community resilience, energy, and many others.  I hope that you and the employees and/or members of your organization will consider enrolling in this course.

 The 12-hour course is offered by the University of Louisville for a cost of $150 and is taught by Professor Tony Arnold, a national expert in adaptive planning and resilience, and a team of professionals engaged in various aspects of adaptive planning.  The online lectures are asynchronous, and the course is self-paced; this offering will last until November 22.

 More information is provided below and at the registration web page: http://louisville.edu/law/flex-courses/adaptive-planning.  This offering of the course begins October 12 but registration will be accepted through November 15 due to the self-pacing of the course.  We are seeking AICP CM credits for the course in partnership with the Kentucky Chapter of the American Planning Association, but cannot make any representations or promises until our application is reviewed. 

Please share this blog post or information with anyone who might be interested.  Please contact me at [email protected], if you have any questions. 

Adaptive Planning and Resilience

Online and self-paced

Oct. 12 – Nov. 22, 2015

Adaptive Planning and Resilience is a professional development course in which professionals will develop the knowledge and skills to design and implement planning processes that will enable their governance systems, organizations, and/or communities to adapt to changing conditions and sudden shocks or disturbances.

Adaptive planning is more flexible and continuous than conventional planning processes, yet involves a greater amount of goal and strategy development than adaptive management methods. It helps communities, organizations, and governance systems to develop resilience and adaptive capacity: the capacity to resist disturbances, bounce back from disasters, and transform themselves under changing and uncertain conditions. Adaptive planning is needed most when systems or communities are vulnerable to surprise catastrophes, unprecedented conditions, or complex and difficult-to-resolve policy choices.

The course will cover the elements of adaptive planning and resilient systems, the legal issues in adaptive planning, how to design and implement adaptive planning processes, and case studies (including guest speakers) from various communities and organizations that are employing adaptive planning methods.  Enrollees will have the opportunity to design or redesign an adaptive planning process for their own professional situation and get feedback from course instructors.

The six-week course totals about 12 hours broken into 30-minute segments. It is conducted online and is asynchronous. Cost is $150.

 About Professor Tony Arnold

Professor Craig Anthony (Tony) Arnold is the Boehl Chair in Property and Land Use at the University of Louisville, where he teaches in both the Brandeis School of Law and the Department of Urban and Public Affairs and directs the interdisciplinary Center for Land Use and Environmental Responsibility. Professor Arnold is an internationally renowned and highly-cited scholar who studies how governance systems and institutions – including planning, law, policy, and resource management – can adapt to changing conditions and disturbances in order to improve social-ecological resilience. He has won numerous teaching awards, including the 2013 Trustee’s Award, the highest award for a faculty member at the University of Louisville.

Professor Arnold has clerked for a federal appellate judge on the 10th Circuit and practiced law in Texas, including serving as a city attorney and representing water districts. He served as Chairman of the Planning Commission of Anaheim, California, and on numerous government task forces and nonprofit boards. He had a land use planning internship with the Boston Redevelopment Authority, did rural poverty work in Kansas, and worked for two members of Congress. Professor Arnold received his Bachelor of Arts, with Highest Distinction, Phi Beta Kappa, in 1987 from the University of Kansas. He received his Doctor of Jurisprudence, with Distinction, in 1990 from Stanford University, where he co-founded the Stanford Law & Policy Review and was a Graduate Student Fellow in the Stanford Center for Conflict and Negotiation. He has affiliations with interdisciplinary research centers at six major universities nationwide and is a part of an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars studying adaptive governance and resilience.

 Professor Arnold will be joined in co-teaching the course by a team of his former students who are

professionals knowledgeable in adaptive planning. They include:

  • Brian      O’Neill, an aquatic ecologist and environmental planner in Chicago
  • Heather      Kenny, a local-government and land-use lawyer in California and adjunct      professor at Lincoln Law School of Sacramento
  • Sherry      Fuller, a business manager at the Irvine Ranch Conservancy in Orange      County, California, and former community redevelopment project manager
  • Andrew      Black, who is Associate Dean of Career Planning and Applied Learning at      Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, and a former field      representative for two U.S. Senators in New Mexico
  • Andrea      Pompei Lacy, AICP, who directs the Center for Hazards Research and Policy      Development at the University of Louisville
  • Jennifer-Grace      Ewa, a Postdoctoral Fellow in Inequality and the Provision of Open Space      at the University of Denver
  • Alexandra      Chase, a recent graduate of the Brandeis School of Law who has worked on      watershed and urban resilience issues with the Center for Land Use and      Environmental Responsibility and now lives in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Dates

October 12 – November 22, 2015,

Online, asynchronous, and self-paced

Cost

$150

For more information

Visit louisville.edu/law/flex-courses.

 

September 23, 2015 in Agriculture, Beaches, Charleston, Chicago, Coastal Regulation, Comprehensive Plans, Conferences, Conservation Easements, Crime, Density, Detroit, Development, Economic Development, Environmental Justice, Environmental Law, Environmentalism, Exurbs, Federal Government, Finance, Financial Crisis, Food, Georgia, Green Building, Houston, HUD, Impact Fees, Inclusionary Zoning, Industrial Regulation, Lectures, Local Government, Montgomery, Mortgage Crisis, New York, Planning, Property, Race, Redevelopment, Scholarship, Smart Growth, Smartcode, Sprawl, State Government, Subdivision Regulations, Suburbs, Sun Belt, Sustainability, Transportation, Water, Wind Energy, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, September 14, 2015

Edsall in NY Times on Milliken v. Bradley and Overconcentration of Poverty

Last week in the NY Times, Thomas Edsall (Columbia-Journalism) had an op-ed that looks at the past, present and future of overconcentration of poverty in the U.S.   In "Whose Neigborhood Is It?", Edsall begins with the U.S. Supreme Court's refusal in Milliken v. Bradley to extend school desegregation remedies across a municipal boundary without a showing that a defendant suburban district had a history of de jure racial segregation.   Legal scholars have frequently pointed to this 1974 case as a signal from SCOTUS that the suburban schools would be protected from inner-city decline. Interestingly, Edsall emphasizes the resulting exodus of middle-class African-American families to inner-ring suburbs.  The op-ed moves on to discuss the findings of Thomas, David Card and Paul Jargowsky, quickly bringing the reader into strong insights on a crucial issue. 

Today's op-ed is just one in a series that Edsall has written this year on the metropolitan geography of poverty.  Although  I found his criticism last month of low-income housing developers misplaced, that op-ed and others on the political fallout from the Inclusive Communities litigation and educational opportunities for low-income children make good resource material for supplemental assigned reading.

Jim K.

September 14, 2015 in Affordable Housing, Housing, Inclusionary Zoning, Planning, Race, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Call for Submissions: Journal of Affordable Housing & Comm. Dev. Law Racial Justice Issue

Next month, I will end my nearly four-year tenure as Editor-in-Chief as the Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law.  I am so happy to be passing the torch to my very experienced Associate Editor, Laurie Hauber, who directs the Community Economic Development Program for Legal Services of Eastern Missouri in St. Louis.  Recent events there and in my former home, Baltimore, have prompted Laurie to put together a feature issue on racial justice and community development.  Here's the call for submissions:

ABA Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law

 

Call for papers

 

The Journal of Affordable Housing & Community Development Law invites submissions for its next issue (Volume 24:2). We are seeking articles on racial justice as it relates to affordable housing or community and economic development. We encourage a broad range of submissions on this topic, which could range from discussion of the implications of siting low income housing tax credit developments in areas of high (or low) concentrated poverty to articles that consider the relationship between local government boundaries and community development initiatives. Submissions on topics other than racial justice are encouraged and will be considered for publication in future issues.

 

Interested authors should send a one- to two-paragraph abstract describing their proposals to the Journal’s new Editor–in-Chief, Laurie Hauber, at the email address below.

 

The Journal welcomes articles (typically 7,000-10,000 words (30–50 pages) as well as essays (usually 4,500–7,500 words (20–40 pages) from practitioners, academics, and students. Submissions of final articles and essays for Volume 24:2 issue should be made by September 1, 2015.  

 

 Please do not hesitate to contact any of us with questions:

 

Laurie Hauber, Editor–in-Chief , [email protected]

Laura Schwarz, Co-Editor, [email protected]

Brandon Weiss, Co-Editor, [email protected]

 

 Jim K.

July 2, 2015 in Affordable Housing, Race | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thursday, December 11, 2014

Urban Decay Theory v. Broken Windows Theory

Brent White (Arizona) , Simone Sepe (Arizona) and Saura Masconale (AZ-Gov't & PP) have published Urban Decay, Austerity, and the Rule of Law, 64. Emory L.J. 1 (2014).  In the article, the authors offer a "make 'gov', not war" alternative to the Broken Windows Theory (BWT) and its support for order-maintenance policing.  Building upon an intuitively compelling social contract theory insight, the article sets out the theoretical and empirical cases for the authors’ contention that sustained investment in highly visible, essential local public goods provides crucial support for rule of law. Focusing on the refusals of the U.S. and Michigan governments to bail out Detroit and avoid the need for it to file for bankruptcy, the authors use their Urban Decay Theory (UDT) to support their proposal that all municipal governments receive at least some level of fiscal insurance to sustain continuous investment in urban infrastructure, which, according to the UDT is predictive of citizen commitment to rule of law.

At the invitation of the editors of the Emory Law Journal, I wrote a response to Urban Decay for the Emory Law Journal Online.  In "All Good Things Flow . . .":  Rule of Law, Public Goods, and the Divided American Metropolis , 64 Emory L. J. Online 2017 (2014),  I welcome the article’s introduction of the rule of law paradigm to domestic urban policy, find fault with its selection of public goods that purportedly influence rule of law, and contend that the UDT has far greater potential than the poor support it can offer the authors’ flawed policy proposal. By conceptualizing the domestic urban policy goal as rule of law rather than order, the authors open measurements of success to go beyond crime rates and majoritarian perceptions of personal safety. Without losing the groundedness necessary for empirical investigation, rule of law can incorporate ideal aspects of lawful order that address sustainability and inclusion of minority perceptions of legitimacy. While the White/Sepe/Masconale article does not succeed in constructing as compelling an understanding of the most salient public goods, an improved analysis of the root causes of the fiscal degradation of America’s legacy cities can unlock a potentially valuable reframing of urban, metropolitan, and regional policy debates.

In focusing their policy proposal on fiscal guarantees for municipal creditors, the authors, from my perspective, have missed the role that the urban-suburban divide has played in the inability of city governments to provide basic public goods.  But, their expansion of the public policy goal to rule of law allows us to get a more holistic picture of the foundation of a truly inclusive, flourishing community. All in all, I think that, by altering the paradigm from order maintenance to rule of law, the authors have, in formulating the Urban Decay Theory, offered a useful complement to the Broken Windows Theory rather than a truly competitive alternative to it.  

 

Jim K.

December 11, 2014 in Community Economic Development, Crime, Detroit, Federal Government, Financial Crisis, Local Government, Race, Scholarship, Smart Growth, State Government, Urbanism, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (0)

Sunday, November 30, 2014

Addressing American Indian Land Tenure – by Jessica A. Shoemaker

For my last guest post this month, I want to return to my primary area of research to date: American Indian land tenure. As I’ve written about here already, one of my primary interests is in thinking broadly about the many varied factors that influence landowners’ decision-making about how they use their lands. Our essential land tenure institutions are foundational in this sense and directly impact land use decision-making before anything like zoning or other direct regulation of land use even has a chance to take effect. Nowhere is the influence of the design of foundational property rights more apparent than in the land tenure relationships in the modern American Indian reservation, where significant swaths of Indian-owned lands are currently not used by Indian landowners themselves but instead sit idle or are leased to non-Indian users. In fact, I have a hard time imagining a property system better designed to discourage Indian prosperity on Indian land than the top-down system of property imposed on indigenous people in this country today. 

In this post, I want to give at least an overview of some of what I think are the most important and influential aspects of American Indian land tenure and then talk just a bit about why I think further scholarly engagement in this arena would be incredibly valuable in a range of settings.

    I.    The Indian Land Tenure Challenge

To start, I appreciate that there is a wide spectrum of knowledge regarding the nuances of modern American Indian land tenure. For some of us, it’s just a mystery how land is owned and held within reservation boundaries. For others, the system is so complex that once we start to study it at all, conversations and work regarding indigenous land rights devolve into a level of generality that isn’t as productive as it could be. Thus, a significant part of my current research agenda is trying to do the deep work required to develop a really rigorous understanding of the modern property rights framework within this very complex reservation setting. This post won’t be able to do all of this work justice.  Nonetheless, here is a brief overview.

Two of the biggest and most widely recognized challenges for Indian landowners are the federal trust status on many Indian-owned lands and the fractionation (or extreme co-ownership) conditions within many of those same properties.

Many, but not all, Indian-owned lands within federal Indian reservations are held in a special trust status over which the federal government acts as trustee for the benefit of the individual or tribal landowner. This trust status’s history is complex, but the important point for this purpose is that the trust status has been extended indefinitely and, to many eyes, appears to be perpetual.

This federal trust status certainly has some legal advantages—as evidenced, for example, by ongoing efforts by many Indian tribes to have additional lands taken into trust. The primary benefits include cementing a stronger case for exclusive federal/tribal (as opposed to state) jurisdiction over the space and also clarifying that state property taxes may not be imposed on that trust land. (The property tax issue is not quite that black and white. Many tribes still make special payments in lieu of taxes to state and local government in exchange for services and to help eliminate conflicts over fee-to-trust conversions.)

The trust status, however, also has significant disadvantages for Indian landowners. It is restrictive and extremely bureaucratic. The federal government exercises significant land management control, and most Indian-owned trust lands cannot be sold, mortgaged, leased, or otherwise developed or used without a formal approval from the Department of Interior after a cumbersome process of appraisals, oversight, and multi-level review. This trust system very dramatically increases the transaction costs for any land use and is often inefficient and even demoralizing for Indian landowners (not to mention extremely expensive for the federal government to maintain).

The second problem, fractionation, is closely related to the trust status issues. Fractionation refers to the fact that many individually owned Indian trust lands (often called allotments) are now jointly owned by many, many co-owners—sometimes as many as several hundred or more. Fractionation makes any kind of coordinated decision-making among all of these co-owners practically difficult and, as an individual co-owner’s interest size diminishes, reduces the likelihood that the co-owners will so cooperate. This then increases co-owners’ reliance on the federal government’s ongoing trust management role over these lands.  All of these tiny interests, in turn, overwhelm the federal trust system, as evidenced by the recent Cobell class action litigation which uncovered the federal government’s gross inability even to account accurately for all of these small interests. 

The federal government has explicitly acknowledged that this fractionation problem is a direct consequence of its own failed federal policies on Indian lands. For example, historic prohibitions on will writing for Indian landowners and the modern alienation restraints on Indian trust land have all exacerbated fractionation. Implementing any kind of solution to consolidate these small interests has been exceedingly difficult. This is true both because of the general idea that it’s much harder to reassemble property than it is to disassemble it and because of a host of other political, legal, economic, and even moral issues. Possible solutions do exist, and part of the Cobell settlement funds are currently going to fund a limited buy-back program that will purchase some individual small interests from willing sellers and re-consolidate them in tribal ownership. However, the general trend has been that any such effort at a solution moves so slowly and addresses such a small proportion of the problem that new tiers of fractionation outpace any improvements, with exponentially more small interests continually being created through further subdivision of already small interests over new generations of heirs. 

While these two issues—the federal trust status and the fractionated ownership patterns—are complex enough, I don’t think they give a complete picture of all of the issues going on in American Indian land tenure. For example, in a piece called No Sticks in My Bundle: Rethinking the American Indian Land Tenure Problem that I’m currently wrapping up edits on for the Kansas Law Review, I argue that a third significant problem for Indian land use is the gradual elimination over time of any informal use and possession right for co-owners of Indian trust land. Although co-owners in any non-Indian tenancy in common would have a default right to use and possess their own jointly owned land presumptively and informally and without any prior permission from their other co-owners, that is not the case in fractionated Indian lands. Modern federal regulations have recently evolved to require Indian co-owners to get permission or a formal lease from co-owners before taking possession of their own land and also to pay those co-owners rent. I think preserving some route for direct owner’s use of jointly owned land is important and valuable, even in highly fractionated properties, and as noted, I am writing about this more here

In addition, in another piece I’m currently writing and calling Emulsified Property, I am exploring the problem of uncertain and sometimes overlapping jurisdictional authorities within Indian Country as it relates to land use. This piece explores new dimensions of these property-related jurisdictional issues, but at a high level, the fact is that modern Indian reservation are uniquely plagued by a mind boggling array of unsettled, case-specific, or otherwise unresolved jurisdictional questions. Part of this stems from the fact that most reservations include not only Indian-owned trust lands but also fee lands, which might be owned by non-Indians, Indians of another tribe, tribal citizens, or the governing tribe itself. The state or local government is likely to assert jurisdiction at least over the non-Indian fee properties, but where that state and local jurisdiction ends, and when and if it overlaps with tribal or federal jurisdiction as well, turns on a complex balancing of multiple factors, depending on the type of jurisdiction being asserted. It continually shocks me (and my research assistants) how many unresolved questions there are in terms of who governs what in Indian Country.  In my property law class, we often talk about the importance of certainty in property rules. So many of our social and economic institutions rely on having clearly established, easily communicated entitlements and responsibilities with respect to a given thing. In Indian law, there is often very, very little of that certainty.

This just scratches the surface of the American Indian land tenure paradigm, but it is already easy to see why land use is such a challenge in Indian Country. Despite significant reserved lands and natural resources, Indian people suffer some of the worst poverty in the United States.

    II.    Why It Matters

Now for my plug for why I think more of us should be engaging in this important work around Indian property and land use. Of course, immediately and most importantly, there is the compelling problem of justice and fairness for indigenous people, who suffer the consequences of these failed property systems most directly. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development has found repeatedly that Indian people having the power and the liberty to make their own decisions with respect to their resources and their futures is the best and most effective solution to the persistent problems, including persistent poverty, in Indian Country. In many respects, it is the law that stands most in the way of this, and it will take legal minds to dismantle the current ineffective system. And legal minds who are uniquely interested in the transformative potential of property institutions are especially well suited to begin this task. 

On another practical note, the problem of American Indian land tenure also matters economically for all of us. The federal government has acknowledged again and again that it using (wasting) incredible resources continuing to maintain this broken property system.

However, as land use legal scholars, there are other important reasons to work in this rich area. I believe a sustained and careful understanding of these unique Indian property institutions, and the evolution of these property relationships through various federal land reforms over time, can help us address property and land use challenges not only in Indian Country but in other venues as well. Other scholars have sometimes analogized to Indian land tenure issues for this kind of purpose, but that work has sometimes lacked a real detailed and deep understanding of how complex Indian land tenure issues actually are. However, with more careful analysis, there could be very fruitful comparative work.  Let me give just two immediate examples, both of which I'm just beginning to work on.  

First, the co-ownership institutions in Indian Country are unique, but the fractionation (or heir property) issues are not. Paying attention to the default co-ownership rules for individually owned Indian lands can help us learn about and address co-ownership challenges in other settings—such as the role of default co-tenancy rules in balancing flexible use arrangements with land preservation strategies for at-risk communities. It can also inform property theory and practice on how co-ownership institutions can best be designed to promote coowner cooperation and efficient use of resources more generally, how anticommons properties actually work, and what methods are most useful to re-aggregate overly fractionated property rights.

Second, I am also excited about how learning from indigenous land planning practices across multiple potential stakeholder jurisdictions within a given reservation (i.e., local municipalities and county governments, state governments, federal governments, and the tribe itself) may translate to inform other work on moving land use planning more generally to more regional, cross-jurisdictional models. Cooperation among multiple levels of government is a persistent challenge in efforts to plan more broadly on a regional, resource-based, or ecosystem level, and yet almost any natural resources or planning person would tell us that this is the kind of decision-making we must do. These kinds of jurisdictional conflicts are being addressed at the reservation level on an ongoing basis, and work on indigenous planning may teach us a lot about how we can plan across jurisdictional boundaries in wider settings. (This is not to suggest that there is a broad literature on indigenous planning or land use issues within reservation legal settings that already exists. There is not. However, for anyone looking to start to review the literature, I recently read an interesting dissertation on comprehensive planning on American Indian reservations and on the Oneida reservation in Wisconsin specifically by Dr. Rebecca Webster, a former law school classmate of mine, that provides a nice place to start and can be found here.) The challenges of planning within a reservation are different and, in some ways, arguably even more complex than the challenges of regional planning generally. Notably, within reservation boundaries, jurisdictional uncertainty may increase concerns about any decision that would jeopardize a future case for asserting jurisdiction, and there are long conflicted histories between neighboring sovereigns. Still, it is a comparison I hope to continue to explore.

This long post only barely skims the surface of all the rich and fascinating land use issues at play in American Indian land tenure. Please consider this an invitation to reach out any time for further discussions on this subject. I would love to continue to engage with more colleagues in this critical subject area and to build more critical learning connections across subject areas and disciplines.

Thanks again for the opportunity to discuss this and other issues here this month.

-          Jessica A. Shoemaker

November 30, 2014 in Community Economic Development, Comparative Land Use, Comprehensive Plans, Economic Development, Federal Government, History, Local Government, Planning, Property, Property Rights, Property Theory, Race, State Government, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (0)

Monday, April 28, 2014

The Guardian Calls Out Donald Sterling for Being a Racist...Landlord

Usually the intersection between land use law and sports comes in the siting of sports arenas.  But, today I happened across an article in The Guardian about the LA Clippers/Donald Sterling racism scandal that takes issue with the NBA's non-action, for years, on his racism in his business practices:

But all those years, not enough people looked at Donald Sterling as the racist landlord the law so bore him out to be.

Neither the league, nor the players, nor the sports media paid much if any attention to Sterling's agreement in 2003 to pay upwards of $5m to settle a lawsuit brought by the Housing Rights Center charging that he tried to drive non-Korean tenants out of apartments he bought in the Koreatown section of Los Angeles. Only a few observers noted in 2006 that the Justice Department sued Sterling for allegations of housing discrimination in the same neighborhood. The charges included statements he allegedly made to employees that black and Hispanic families were not desirable tenants.

And while a handful of us in the media excoriated Sterling and the NBA in 2009 when Sterling settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay $2.73m following allegations he refused to rent apartments to Hispanics, blacks and families with children, the story didn't resonate – despite it being the largest housing discrimination settlement in Justice Department history.

Read the entire article, "The real tragedy of Donald Sterling's racism: it took this long for us to notice," here.

Jamie Baker Roskie

April 28, 2014 in Affordable Housing, California, Race | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Monday, October 21, 2013

Kirp in NY Times on Mt. Laurel Today

David Kirp (UC Berkeley--Public Policy)  has published an op-ed in the NY Times entitled "Here Comes the Neighborhood."  In it, he discusses the overwhelmingly positive impact of the affordable housing built in the New Jersey township of Mt. Laurel.  Referencing the recently published book, Climbing Mt. Laurel: The Struggle for Affordable Housing and Social Mobility in an American Suburb by Douglas Massey (Princeton-Sociology) with others, Kirp counters the claims of those who saw the judicial response to exclusionary zoning as grafting urban cancer onto healthy suburban tissue.  The cancer metaphor comes from Mt. Laurel's then-mayor Jose Alvarez and seems absurd in light of the overwhelmingly positive effects documented four decades later.

My good friend and NDLS clinic colleague, Bob Jones, sent the link to me because I am working on a paper looking at Catholic Social Teaching's response to overconcentration of poverty.  I think this anectdotal account from the birthplace of judicially mandated inclusionary zoning should complement the 2011 study American Murder Mystery Revisited by Ingrid Gould Ellen, Michael Lens and Katherine O'Regan undercutting some loose talk about spreading violence and disorder through the Housing Choice Voucher program that followed the controversial eponymous 2008 Atlantic Monthly article.

 

Jim K.

October 21, 2013 in Affordable Housing, Housing, Inclusionary Zoning, Race, Suburbs, Zoning | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Tuesday, June 18, 2013

Godsil on a Fair Housing Response to Gentrification

Rachel Godsil (Seton Hall) has posted The Gentrification Trigger: Autonomy, Mobility, and Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing, 78 Brook. L. Rev. 319 (2013).  It's wonderful to have Rachel's civil rights scholarship back in the (urban) neighborhood again.  Here's the abstract:

Gentrification connotes a process where often white “outsiders” move into areas in which once attractive properties have deteriorated due to disinvestment. Gentrification creates seemingly positive outcomes, including increases in property values, equity, and a city’s tax base, as well as greater residential racial and economic integration; yet it is typically accompanied by significant opposition. In-place residents fear that they will either be displaced or even if they remain the newcomers will change the culture and practices of the neighborhood. Gentrification then is understood to cause a loss of community and autonomy – losses that have been well recognized in the eminent domain literature.

This article focuses on gentrifying neighborhoods that were abandoned during the government sponsored suburban migration of the 1950s through the 1980s. Racially discriminatory practices of government and private actors often denied Black and Latino families the option either to join the migration to the suburbs or to maintain their homes in city neighborhoods. This article argues that in-place residents of now gentrifying neighborhoods should have access to rental vouchers or low-interest loans to restore the autonomy they were previously denied, providing them with viable, self-determining options to remain or exit the neighborhood. Such a remedy – which is consistent with the Fair Housing Act’s obligation to HUD and its grantees to “affirmatively further fair housing” – has the potential to alter the political terrain of gentrification.

Jim K.

June 18, 2013 in Affordable Housing, Race, Scholarship | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Monday, May 27, 2013

Memorial Day & Land Use

The U.S. tradition of Memorial Day has a long and complex relationship with land, history, and memory.  This post has some thoughts on the subject from last year.

Today was Memorial Day in the US.  There are lots of land use issues that we can associate with Memorial Day, which, stripped to its essence, is designed as a day to remember the military members who died in service to the nation.  There is the obvious land use issue of cemeteries, and the related legal and cultural norms governing how we memorialize the dead (check out any of the interesting blogposts or scholarship by Al Brophy and Tanya Marsh on cemeteries).  It gets even more relevant when we start talking about government-owned national or veterans' cemeteries, and the attendant controversies about First Amendment and other issues.  [The photo is from last year's Memorial Day ceremony at Houston National Cemetery, which my daughter attended to honor fallen Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Sauer Medlicott.]  Of course, there are always land use and local government issues involved with things like parades and public ceremonies, and in many communities there are specific rules that govern the "summer season" informally commenced on Memorial Day weekend.

Check out the whole post for some info about a couple of little-known and interesting events from the early history of Memorial Day and land use, including what may be the first Memorial Day celebration, by African-Americans in Charleston on the former planters' racecourse, and a U.S. Supreme Court case about eminent domain for historic preservation on Gettysburg National Battlefied.

We hope you had a safe and happy Memorial Day.

Matt Festa

May 27, 2013 in Eminent Domain, Federal Government, Historic Preservation, History, Property, Race, Scholarship, Supreme Court | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Rose on the History of Racially Restrictive Covenants

Carol Rose (Yale & Arizona) has posted Property Law and the Rise, Life, and Demise of Racially Restrictive Covenants, which is available in the 2013 edition of Powell on Real Property.  Here's the abstract:

This article was given as the 6th Annual Wolf Family Lecture on the American Law of Real Property, University of Florida Levin College of Law (2013). It draws on property law discussions in Richard R.W. Brooks and Carol M. Rose, Saving the Neighborhood: Racially Restrictive Covenants, Law, and Social Norms (Harvard Univ. Press 2013). The article outlines the ways in which constitutional law and property law engaged in a dialog about white-only racial covenants from their early twentieth-century origins to the middle of the twentieth century and beyond. After a shaky beginning, both constitutional law and property law became relatively permissive about racial covenants by the 1920s. But proponents of racial covenants had to work around property law doctrines — including seemingly arcane doctrines like the Rule Against Perpetuities, disfavor to restraints on alienation, "horizontal privity," and "touch and concern." Moreover, property law weaknesses gave leverage to civil rights opponents of covenants, long before Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), the major constitutional case that made these covenants unenforceable in courts. Even after Shelley's constitutional decision, property law continued to be a contested area for racial covenants, with echoes even today.

Jim K.

April 18, 2013 in Constitutional Law, Property, Race, Scholarship, Servitudes, Supreme Court | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Friday, April 12, 2013

AALS Workshop on Poverty, Immigration and Poverty/Perry on Gentrification and Transracial Adoption

I got my registration brochure this past week for the AALS Midyear Meeting to be held in San Diego in early June.  Along with two criminal justice programs, it features a Worskhop on Poverty, Immigration and Property that brings together a fascinating mix of presentations from scholars frequently referenced on your favorite land use law blog. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend; but, I look forward to seeing the papers. 

One panel that drew my eye features work from David Reiss (Brooklyn), Marc Poirier (Seton Hall)  and Twila Perry (Rutgers-Newark).  We have previously blogged about related work by David and Marc.  Prof. Perry has written extensively about transracial adoption, but I was not familiar with her work prior to receiving the mailing.  She will be presenting in June on Gentrification: Race, Class Law and the Integrationist Ideal.  I came across an earlier work she published comparing gentrification and transracial adoption entitled Transracial Adoption and Gentrification: An Essay on Race, Power, Family, and Community, 26 B.C. Third World L.J. 25 (2006).  Here's the abstract:

In this article, Professor Perry finds common ground between the two seemingly disparate contexts of transracial adoption and gentrification. Professor Perry argues that both transracial adoption and gentrification represent contexts in which, in the future, there may be increasing competition for limited resources. In the former case, the limited resource is the healthy Black newborn. In the latter, it is desirable, affordable housing in the centers of our cities. After explaining how a competition between Blacks and whites over Black newborns could arise, Professor Perry argues that in any such competition, Blacks will increasingly find themselves at a disadvantage stemming from the consequences of institutionalized racism. The article argues that there is a public discourse in both contexts that blames Blacks for the problems facing Black families and Black communities and valorizes whites who transracially adopt or move into inner-city neighborhoods undergoing gentrification. Professor Perry urges increased government involvement to preserve Black families and to protect Blacks against the displacement that often results from gentrification.

Jim K.

April 12, 2013 in Property Theory, Race, Scholarship, Urbanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Saturday, December 22, 2012

Urban Gun Violence

Today I stumbled across this compelling Associated Press story about how urban advocates have very mixed feelings about how the Newtown shootings have seemingly changed the national debate around gun control.

The moment also is causing some to reflect on the sudden change of heart. Why now? Why weren't we moved to act by the killing of so many other children, albeit one by one, in urban areas?

Certainly, Newtown is a special case, 6- and 7-year-olds riddled with bullets inside the sanctuary of a classroom. Even in a nation rife with violence, where there have been three other mass slayings since July and millions enjoy virtual killing via video games, the nature of this tragedy is shocking.

But still: "There's a lot of talk now about we have to protect our children. We have to protect all of our children, not just the ones living in the suburbs," said Tammerlin Drummond, a columnist for the Oakland Tribune.

In her column Monday, Drummond wrote about 7-year-old Heaven Sutton of Chicago, who was standing next to her mother selling candy when she was killed in the crossfire of a gang shootout. Also in Chicago, which has been plagued by a recent spike in gun violence: 6-year-old Aaliyah Shell was caught in a drive-by while standing on her front porch; and 13-year-old Tyquan Tyler was killed when a someone in a car shot into a group of youths outside a party.

Food for thought.

Jamie Baker Roskie

 

December 22, 2012 in Crime, New York, Race, Suburbs, Urbanism | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Friday, October 19, 2012

Johnson on the Economic Crisis, Homeownership, and Race

Marcia Johnson (Texas Southern) has posted Will the Current Economic Crisis Fuel a Return to Racial Policies that Deny Homeownership Opportunity and Wealth to African Americans?, published in The Modern American, Volume 6, Issue 1, Spring 2010.  From the introduction:

Perhaps the greatest threat to the continued realization of the American dream is the latest economic crisis rooted in the sub-prime mortgage collapse.12 Some blame the CRA of 1977 for creating a market that they claim provided housing loans to noncreditworthy borrowers – particularly African American families – in the low and moderate income range.13 However, this charge is without direct factual support as the post-CRA period saw a decline in homeownership for African Americans but a mild increase for White homeowners.14 Illegal and fraudulent practices in property appraisals and income reporting directed program benefi ts away from those the program was meant to aid. . . .

This paper is written to examine the potential effect of the market collapse on our nation’s homeownership policies. Part I reviews America’s historical housing and homeownership policies. Part II considers the expansion of homeownership opportunities to historically non-participating communities, particularly the African American community. Part III reviews the culprits of the economic crash of 2008 and explains why sub-prime borrowers often get blamed. Part IV examines solutions to maintain America’s pro-homeownership policy, and Part V concludes that America’s homeownership policy should continue to be vigorously pursued with a goal of including African Americans who have long been excluded by government policies and sanctions from building wealth and thereby stabilizing their communities.

Matt Festa

October 19, 2012 in Federal Government, History, Housing, Houston, Race, Real Estate Transactions, Scholarship | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Proposed Final Settlement in Baltimore Fair Housing Case

The Baltimore Sun reported this past weekend on the proposed final settlement in Thompson v. HUD, a fair housing case that dates to 1995. 

The case arose when the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland sued HUD, saying that it demolished old public housing high-rises where mostly African-Americans lived — only to move the residents to equally segregated housing and poor conditions in other parts of the city.

Attorneys for the residents said Friday that the government in effect “perpetually locked” African-American families in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, violating federal civil right laws. The settlement, which would cover all claims in the case, was filed in conjunction with Baltimore City and the Housing Authority of Baltimore City.

As the Legal Defense Fund, which worked with the ACLU on the case, notes in its press release, the court had ruled in 2005 “that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (“HUD”) violated the Fair Housing Act by unfairly concentrating African-American public housing residents in the most impoverished, segregated areas of Baltimore City.  Judge Garbis held that HUD must take a regional approach to promoting fair housing opportunities throughout the Baltimore Region.” 

The settlement requires HUD to allocated money towards expansion of the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program, which has been in place since a partial settlement in the 1990s.  The program has enabled over 1,800 families to move to neighborhoods in other parts of the city and to surrounding suburbs.  Under the settlement, the program will, among other things, fund vouchers and counseling over the next seven years for up to 2,600 additional families.

The case is particularly interesting given its regional approach to questions of housing and segregation.  Housing vouchers can be used throughout the region, enabling participants to voluntarily move to suburban areas with greater employment and educational opportunity.  The program provides extensive housing counseling and mobility assistance to aid families interested in moving to lower-poverty neighborhoods.  For more details, see this  2009 report discussing the progress of the program at that time. 

John Infranca

August 29, 2012 in Affordable Housing, Federal Government, Housing, HUD, Local Government, Race, Suburbs | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Saturday, August 4, 2012

Anaheim Police Shooting and At-Large Elections: Is there a link?

A major news item here in Orange County has been the rash of protests in the county's largest and most well-known city, Anaheim, sparked by a pair of police shootings of two suspected Latino gang members.  Activists and the media have drawn a link between the shootings and Anaheim's system for electing city councilmembers.  In Anaheim, as in most cities in California, all five members of the city council (technically four members plus the mayor, but the mayor is really just a fifth councilmember who gets to hold the gavel at meetings) are elected at-large, meaning the city as a whole is a single electoral district and candidates can reside anywhere in the city.  It has been alleged by the ACLU that the at-large system dilutes Latino voting power because it diminishes the ability of geographically concentrated groups (which often include minority communities) to elect representatives from their own neighborhoods, and places a premium on the ability to gather a huge war-chest, which advantages candidates with support from the more affluent constituencies.  In Anaheim, indeed, there is not a single Latino member of the city council despite Latinos representing more than 50% of the city's population, and four of the five councilmembers live in Anaheim's wealthy, largely white "Anaheim hills" area.  Thus, the argument goes, it is because the city government is out of touch with the concerns of its major constituency that incidents like these police shootings are able to happen.

This story hits home to me because I wrote an article a few years ago that made a very similar argument, although it was more focused on land use: The at-large electoral system deployed in most California cities means that neighborhoods have little voice on land use matters, which tends to favor the interests of the pro-development "growth machine."  I further argued that this system tended to dilute minority voices on land use issues (especially eminent domain, of blessed memory).  In my article, however, I argued that neighborhood interests did not simply fade away but necessarily expressed themselves outside the political system, either in the form of the initiative process or in the form of urban riots.  Indeed, the famous anti-tax initiative Proposition 13 has been referred to (although I could not definitively verify the original quote) as "the Watts riot of the middle class."   In the paper, I called for the jettisonning of the at-large system and the implementation of district or ward systems, which is precisely what the activists in Anaheim are calling for. 

It appears in Anaheim we may be seeing "the Proposition 13 of the disenfranchised."  Stay tuned.

Hat tip to my colleague Ernesto Hernandez-Lopez for some of these links and for alerting me to some of the details of the story.

Ken Stahl

August 4, 2012 in California, Local Government, Politics, Race, Sun Belt | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Clowney on Landscape Fairness and Discrimination in the Built Environment

Stephen Clowney (Kentucky), our colleague over at Property Prof, has posted his latest piece, called Landscape Fairness: Removing Discrimination from the Built Environment, forthcoming in the Utah Law Review (2012).  It looks very interesting.  The abstract:

At its core, this Article argues that the everyday landscape is one of the most overlooked instruments of modern race-making. Drawing on evidence from geography and sociology, the paper begins by demonstrating that the built environment inscribes selective and misleading versions of the past in solid, material forms. These narratives — told through street renamings, parks, monuments, and buildings — ultimately marginalize African-American communities and transmit ideas about racial power across generations.

After demonstrating that the landscape remains the agar upon which racial hierarchies replicate themselves, the Article then pivots and examines current efforts to rid the built environment of discriminatory spaces. I put forth that contemporary attacks on the landscape are doomed to fail. The approaches suggested by academics in law and geography either turn a blind eye to the political economy of local decision-making or fail to consider entrenched legal precedent.

The final section of the manuscript lays out a policy proposal that could spark a new focus on issues of “landscape fairness.” I argue in favor of a set of basic procedural requirements that would force jurisdictions to reconsider the discriminatory places within their borders. Procedural mandates would force government to internalize values it might otherwise ignore, allow citizen-critics to challenge dominant historical narratives, and push communities to view the past (and future) in much more diverse terms.

This article touches on one of the most important but least discussed aspects of land use and the community landscape, and it builds on some of Steve's earlier work.  Check it out.

Matt Festa

July 17, 2012 in Community Design, History, Local Government, Planning, Politics, Race, Scholarship | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Monday, May 28, 2012

Memorial Day

Memorial Day Houston National CemeteryToday was Memorial Day in the US.  There are lots of land use issues that we can associate with Memorial Day, which, stripped to its essence, is designed as a day to remember the military members who died in service to the nation.  There is the obvious land use issue of cemeteries, and the related legal and cultural norms governing how we memorialize the dead (check out any of the interesting blog posts or scholarship by Al Brophy and Tanya Marsh on cemeteries).  It gets even more relevant when we start talking about government-owned national or veterans' cemeteries, and the attendant controversies about First Amendment and other issues.  [The photo is from last year's Memorial Day ceremony at Houston National Cemetery, which my daughter attended to honor fallen Marine Lance Corporal Matthew Sauer Medlicott.]  Of course, there are always land use and local government issues involved with things like parades and public ceremonies, and in many communities there are specific rules that govern the "summer season" informally commenced on Memorial Day weekend.

For this post, though, I'll go back to the origins of the holiday.  Interestingly, it started as a private or quasi-public endeavor (perhaps like most civic affairs in the nineteenth century).  In the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War--and for much of the rest of the lives of the generations that fought it--Americans on both sides focused a great deal of attention on preserving its history and creating/controlling its public memory.  In 1868 General John Logan, head of the Union veterans' organization the Grand Army of the Republic (a private society with a great deal of government involvement), issued General Order No. 11, creating what became known as Decoration Day:

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land. In this observance no form of ceremony is prescribed, but posts and comrades will in their own way arrange such fitting services and testimonials of respect as circumstances may permit.

Even though this Decoration Day was only adopted in Union states until after World War I (when it was renamed Memorial Day and formally associated with all American wars), the former Confederate states had their own versions to remember the war dead at cemeteries and public venues.  And according to eminent Yale historian David Blight, the first Memorial Day celebration was performed in Charleston, SC, by newly-liberated blacks:

Thousands of black Charlestonians, most former slaves, remained in the city and conducted a series of commemorations to declare their sense of the meaning of the war. The largest of these events, and unknown until some extraordinary luck in my recent research, took place on May 1, 1865. During the final year of the war, the Confederates had converted the planters' horse track, the Washington Race Course and Jockey Club, into an outdoor prison. Union soldiers were kept in horrible conditions in the interior of the track; at least 257 died of exposure and disease and were hastily buried in a mass grave behind the grandstand. Some twenty-eight black workmen went to the site, re-buried the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery. They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, "Martyrs of the Race Course" . . . . Then, black Charlestonians in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged an unforgettable parade of 10,000 people on the slaveholders' race course. The symbolic power of the low-country planter aristocracy's horse track (where they had displayed their wealth, leisure, and influence) was not lost on the freedpeople.

Anyone interested in the contested history of these issues--with full attention to the negative aspects as well--should read the magnificent book by Prof. Blight (with a name like that, it's a shame he didn't go into land use!), Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory.  And a related part of this history, along with the Decoration/Memorial Day commemorations, was the incipient historic preservation movement.  This confluence of impulses, as well as the also-new movement for environmental conservation, led to the novel idea of having the federal government acquire and administer large tracts of land for the purpose of preserving Civil War history.  As noted in the fascinating monograph by the late National Park Service Historian Ronald F. Lee, The Origin & Evolution of the National Military Park Idea, this was a new and not-uncontroversial exercise of government power over land use:

The idea of the Nation acquiring an entire battlefield and preserving it for historical purposes was new in 1890. It is therefore not surprising that it soon engendered a serious controversy, which arose, fittingly enough, at Gettysburg. The controversy involved two questions of fundamental importance to the future of historic preservation by the Federal Government. Is preserving and marking the site of an historic battlefield a public purpose and use? If so, is it a purpose for which Congress may authorize acquisition of the necessary land by power of eminent domain? The circumstances of this dispute, which had to be settled by the Supreme Court of the United States, are of unusual interest and provide an appropriate introduction to our story.

Lee describes the case, United States v. Gettysburg Electric Ry. Co., 160 U.S. 668 (1896), in the on-line version of the book provided by the NPS.  The case was brought by a railway which objected to the federal government's use of eminent domain to condemn their right of way for construction of a railway to take tourists to the significant "Devil's Den" area of the battlefield, "claiming that establishment of Gettysburg National Park was not a public purpose within the meaning of earlier legislation and that 'preserving lines of battle' and 'properly marking with tablets the positions occupied' were not public uses which permitted the condemnation of private property by the United States."  [What a long way from Kelo that was!]  Justice Rufus Peckham wrote for the unanimous majority in upholding the taking for preservation purposes (and not simply because members of the public could visit the park):

Such a use seems necessarily not only a public use, but one so closely connected with the welfare of the republic itself as to be within the powers granted Congress by the constitution for the purpose of protecting and preserving the whole country.

The Court thus established the constitutionality of taking land by the federal government for national parks, and struck an important legal blow for historic preservation generally.

So from cemeteries to public memory to national parks and historic preservation and much more, Memorial Day is tied to land use law in many ways.  I hope that our US readers have had a good one, and with remembrance for those whom the holiday commends.

Matt Festa

May 28, 2012 in Caselaw, Constitutional Law, Eminent Domain, Environmentalism, Federal Government, First Amendment, Historic Preservation, History, Houston, Politics, Property Rights, Race, Scholarship, State Government, Supreme Court, Takings | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)