The unique and diverse nature of Florida’s population, as well as its recent history, makes attending to the needs of non-English-proficient language minorities in the voting process especially important. During the latter half of the twentieth century, Florida experienced enormous changes in the relative size, geographical distribution, and composition of its population. Some, but not all, of these changes can be attributed to national trends in population migration to the Sunbelt. Other changes can be explained by an increase in Hispanic or Latino population, again a national trend. Still other changes are the direct result of political changes in the Caribbean basin into which the peninsula of Florida extends, and United States’ policies that respond to those changes.
Page 2 of 3
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
Satisfying the Confrontation Clause has been described as the act of placing a witness face-to-face with the defendant, so that the defendant may cross-examine the witness in the presence of both the judge and jury. However, what happens if the witness is unavailable to testify in court?
Life insurance and other nonprobate assets such as annuities, pay-on-death accounts, and retirement planning accounts have become increasingly popular as estate planning tools. In 2004, Americans purchased $3.1 trillion in new life insurance coverage, a ten percent increase from just ten years before. Purchases made by Floridians accounted for nearly $154 million of this national total. At the end of 2004, there was $17.5 trillion in life insurance policy coverage in the United States. However, it is likely that some of those policies will not provide security for the individuals for whom they were intended, especially if the policyholder resides in Florida. An unfortunate but familiar scenario occurs when a divorced individual fails to change the designated beneficiary on his or her life insurance policy or other contractbased estate planning tool, and the ex-spouse receives the insurance proceeds upon that individual’s death. Whether due to oversight, mistake, or poor comprehension of the way contracts such as life insurance policies operate, the outcome is especially regrettable when the decedent policyholder leaves behind minor children or a financially struggling family.
At the outset, the Author begs your indulgence if the style of this Article seems a bit too informal for this context. The intent is to have a “conversation” with the reader that focuses on the case at hand, to wit, Michael Linet, Inc. v. Village of Wellington (Linet), and then discusses more broadly its practical implications.
The Author’s firm represented Michael Linet, Inc. in this case. When invited to compose a “Last Word,” the Author was tempted to write about everything that was wrong with Linet. It would likely be much more productive, however, to discuss only the most significant issue implicated by the decision: “What constitutes ‘substantial evidence’ sufficient, under the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (the TCA), to deny a permit to construct a personal wireless services (a/k/a telecommunications tower or cell tower) facility?”
In Florida Department of Revenue v. City of Gainesville, the Florida Supreme Court addressed the scope of Article VII, Section 3(a), of the Florida Constitution, which exempts from ad valorem taxation municipal property used exclusively by the municipality “for municipal or public purposes.” The Court held that municipal property is constitutionally exempt only where it is used to provide services “essential” to the health, morals, safety, or general welfare of the citizens of the municipality. Applying this gloss to the “municipal purpose” language of the constitutional exemption, the Court concluded that a statute purporting to subject to taxation municipal property owned and used by the City of Gainesville to provide telecommunications services was not facially unconstitutional. The Court, however, did not decide whether the statute would be unconstitutional as applied to Gainesville’s telecommunications property.
In its struggle to craft an appropriate test for the scope of the exemption under Article VII, the Gainesville Court arguably departed from the very principles of constitutional interpretation it expressly embraced. Even so, a careful reading of the opinion reveals that it does not impose a narrow limitation on the scope of the exemption, and lower courts would be mistaken to read it as doing so.
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.