Affordable Housing as a Non-Starter in the US Supreme Court
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2025
Chapter 6 explores five outlier cases, called “The Unfortunate Five,” in which the US Supreme Court rejected landowners’ challenges to land use and environmental regulations despite the Court’s strong protection of private property rights against regulations generally. These five cases have one factor in common: the developers’ plans to build affordable housing. After exploring the potential that Supreme Court justices are motivated by explicit race and class biases, the chapter delves into the potential for implicit bias to explain why these cases deviate from the norm: the justices believe that they are protecting the private property interests of neighboring landowners against unwanted affordable housing developments. Strategies are proposed, based on a number of empirical studies, for convincing courts that affordable housing does not pose a threat to the property values of nearby landowners and that, therefore, many government policies reflect an unconstitutional, irrational prejudice against low-income people of color who need affordable housing and the developers who seek to build it.
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge-org.demo.remotlog.com is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.