To say that an affordable-housing symposium is particularly timely in the United States in 2007 seems an understatement. The issue has commanded the nation’s attention over recent months as many regions have struggled, and continue to struggle, with a new influx of homelessness in the aftermath of natural disaster. For other families, rising interest rates and other increasing expenses, coupled with changes in bankruptcy law and additional economic pressures, have taxed personal resources to the point of homelessness. Affordable housing is a complex issue presenting many challenges, and a number of groups have a role in crafting the solutions: among others, the legislators, judges, and others responsible for making and implementing the laws that govern affordable housing; the attorneys who represent lowincome clients; the academicians and law students who research solutions and participate in clinical programs; the architects who envision new kinds of affordable housing; and the city planners who help to incorporate affordable housing within the larger community context. Several of these groups have contributed to this symposium, which is meant to be of use and interest to each of the enumerated audiences and hopefully to others, as well.

Just as the size of the United States’ homeless population is difficult to calculate, assessing the economic and noneconomic costs of homelessness is a complex arithmetic. The direct economic costs include federal, state, and local government expenditures for housing, social services, public works, police and jails, food, and medical care. These government outlays are supplemented by private-sector expenditures by churches and other charitable institutions. In addition to money paid out, forgone economic opportunities enter into the costs of homelessness. Cities whose downtown streets are inhabited by homeless people, for example, forfeit sales tax and other revenue when homelessness leads to a decline in tourism or falling sales at local businesses.

The noneconomic costs of homelessness are both personal and social. Among communities, these include a degradation of the quality of life in public spaces where the homeless congregate. Among the newly homeless, the fiber of everyday life is entirely disrupted; dignity, choice, and ties to family and neighborhoods are lost. Those who remain homeless for long periods suffer a deterioration in mental and physical health, difficulties in finding and retaining employment, and a gradual alienation from everyday society. This chapter first looks at some of these costs, using San Francisco as an example. It concludes with a discussion of the cost of building housing for the homeless.

Zoning and other local, state, and federal housing policies are decidedly anti-family. Local planning accommodates, subsidizes, and encourages the production of single-family homes in the suburbs served by personal automobile transport. Zoning segregates the community, excluding the poor and members of minority groups. “The worst thing one can say about local planning officials is that they did their job well and followed the law.” The results are often poorly planned communities, dysfunctional public transport, and inadequate housing and neighborhoods for the poor and working classes.

Because the quality of public services and facilities is a function of a community’s tax base, suburban planners often choose to exclude multi-family and subsidized housing that requires the expense of schools and other services in favor of subsidizing commercial and industrial development that will generate jobs, as well as payroll, property, and sales taxes. The result is that central cities lose their jobs and stores to the suburbs but still house the bulk of the region’s poor.

How best to provide housing for low-income persons has been a topic of considerable debate. Studies indicate a serious shortage of low-cost housing, which appears to be worsening. United States government housing policy has promoted a variety of approaches to providing housing for the low-income population.

One approach involves housing that is owned and operated by the government—“public housing.” Today there are approximately 1.3 million households living in public housing units, managed by approximately 3,300 Public Housing Agencies (PHA). This Article recounts the experiences of public housing in Kansas City, Missouri, which in recent years has achieved much recognition for its success. The focal point of this article is the judicial receivership created through the case Tinsley v. Kemp.

Slums are man-made; therefore, they could be unmade. But the rules will be formed by people other than governments: the politician who urges a rent boycott; the property baron who assembles land and distributes plots for development; the industrialist ready to pollute the air and the water, but caring enough to let neighbors use his clinic and his borehole; the minor official with a flair for manipulating the administrative code for his people’s benefit. The rules of life and sustenance in the slums go beyond the statute book and the manual. In fact, it is not surprising that seemingly scientific methods of observation and analysis produce perplexing results. In many instances in the past, different methods of data collection gave different answers. The conflict between survey questionnaires and participatory methods of data collection is very apparent. There is also a problem with very localized case study approaches since they portray the special needs and preferences of a small community and draw no meaningful conclusions for the larger society of slum residents. The priorities indicated by the household survey (tenure, security, water supply and sanitation, and jobs) in a recent Kenyan study were rather different from those learned from group discussions (plot sizes, water, environment, and information/communications). Perceptions of need also varied according to gender, with women being more concerned about poor surroundings (smell, noise levels, insecurity, lack of water, and exposure to flooding) while men were more bothered by the physical hardware (poor housing and bad roads). Thus, family well-being, especially children’s welfare, comfort, and health, would seem to be uppermost in women’s minds.

The first time I went to court, as a brand new lawyer, I represented a tenant who was being sued for eviction by the local housing authority. My client was not in court with me that day because she had no transportation. I offered her a ride, but she did not show up at my office that morning. As I left the courthouse I was very glad to have a few minutes alone. The judge had ruled against us, in favor of the housing authority, because I had not been allowed to raise any defense on my client’s behalf. As I got in my car, I tried to formulate a way to tell my client that she had twenty-four hours to vacate her apartment.

When I got back to the office, my client was in the waiting room. I sat down beside her and told her that we had lost, that she would need to get out of the apartment immediately. She asked me, “Where will I go?” I had no answer. She had no family, no close friends, not even a car in which to sleep. Eviction from subsidized housing is the deadest of dead-ends.

For me, this was an inauspicious beginning to a legal career that has actually gone fairly well. For the client, on the other hand, it was one long step toward joining the ranks of the homeless. That feeling of utter helplessness has never left me.

The woman was frightened. She came to the clinic with a folder full of papers from her landlord. She was old enough to be everyone’s mother.

The student attorneys, with the ink still damp on their certificates from the Florida Supreme Court,1 treated her courteously. They puzzled over the legal significance of the notice from her landlord, analyzed the terms of her lease, pulled out the statute books, and fired up the Internet connection to do some preliminary research. They were searching for a legal solution to a problem that could have come out of a casebook or appeared on a law school exam.

And then one of the student attorneys found a connection—her Philadelphia accent. Suddenly, she was not a walking, talking legal problem. She was a person with shared memories of cheesesteaks and the kids’ television show Chief Halftown.

The Public Defender’s Office of the Sixth Judicial Circuit of Florida, Pinellas County, operates the Homeless Outreach Program to reduce the needless incarceration of individuals who are homeless or at risk of becoming homeless. This Article is intended to serve as a guide for others who may wish to learn from or replicate the program. It will discuss the program’s origins, its problems, and its measurable results as of December 31, 2005, as well as its future goals. The program’s flyer, distributed at shelters and service sites around Pinellas County, asks in bold letters, “Are You Worried About Going to Jail?” and reflects the program’s main objective—reducing the population of homeless individuals in jail. Individuals in the target population are repeatedly arrested in Pinellas County for reasons other than actual law violations.
The most common reasons are failure to pay fines and failure to appear for court hearings.

Wetland conservation is a national and international legal imperative. Wetlands provide a variety of “functions” in the natural environment and a number of “values” for human beings. Beyond their intrinsic value, wetlands serve as habitat for fish and wildlife, help to recharge groundwater and enhance water quality, and aid in the control of flooding and erosion. Wetlands also provide educational and recreational opportunities for human beings, including hunting, fishing, and boating. The prairie potholes of North Dakota, one of the prime examples of isolated, intrastate wetlands, provide between fifty and seventy-five percent of the waterfowl in America, thus contributing substantially
to the hunting industry. The destruction of such wetlands has led to a corresponding decline in migrant duck populations.

Historically, wetlands have been undervalued, leading to estimated losses over the last 200 years of approximately fiftythree percent of the wetland areas across the United States. While the rate of loss slowed somewhat in recent years, the United States continued to lose wetland areas at a rate of 58,500 acres per year between 1986 and 1997. This “areal” calculation does not include any reduction in “function and ecosystem integrity.” In response to these losses, various levels of government have implemented wetland protection programs and policies, including Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (CWA) and state wetland protection laws. Governments have also taken action to protect individual wetlands through outright purchase from landowners and have engaged in extensive public education programs. Various international efforts also aim to protect wetlands and reduce the rate of wetland losses worldwide, most notably the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance Especially as Waterfowl Habitat (Ramsar).

Antidumping law has been referred to as the “third rail” of United States trade policy. With American political rhetoric overwhelmingly equating the imposition of harsher antidumping duties with the expansion of fair trade, dumping issues have played a major role in the negotiation of virtually every modern international trade agreement. In most circumstances, the United States has succeeded in protecting the power of its administrative agencies, particularly the Department of Commerce, to investigate instances of alleged dumping and to levy antidumping duties on those foreign producers that sell goods in the United States for less than fair value. However, in recent years the conflict over zeroing, a controversial methodology the Department of Commerce uses in the calculation of dumping margins, has garnered
increasing attention in both United States courts and international dispute resolution fora.