Organizational Standing in Fair Housing Cases – Background
Michael P. Seng
Professor
The John Marshall Law School
Chicago, Illinois
I.
The Constitutional Minimum for Article III Courts
Warth v. Selden, 422 U.S. 490 (1975), various organizations and individual residents
denied standing to sue municipality on the claim that the town’s zoning ordinance, on
its face and as applied, effectively excluded persons of low and moderate income
from living in the town in violation of their First, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendment
rights and in violation of 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981, 1982, and 1983.
Organizations cannot base their injury on the mere abstract interest in seeing that the law
is enforced. O'Shea v Littleton, 414 U.S. 488 (1974); Valley Forge Christian College v
Americans United, 454 U.S. 464 (1982); Lujan v Defenders of Wildlife, 112 S. Ct. 2130
(1992).
Wright v. Allen, 468 U.S. 737 (1984), parents of black public school children denied
standing to sue the Internal Revenue Service on the claim that the IRS had not
adopted sufficient standards and procedures to fulfill its obligation to deny taxexempt status to racially discriminatory private schools and thereby was interfering
with the ability of their children to receive an education in desegregated public
schools.
II.
The Language of the Fair Housing Act
42 U.S.C. § 3602 (i) states that an “aggrieved persons’ includes any person who –
(1) claims to have been injured by a discriminatory housing practice; or
(2) believes that such person will be injured by a discriminatory housing practice
that is about to occur.
III.
Supreme Court Cases Interpreting Standing under the Fair Housing Act
Trafficante v. Metropolitan Life Insurance Co., 409 U.S. 205 (1988), two tenants, one
of whom was white, held to have standing to allege that an apartment complex
discriminated against non-whites in violation of the Fair Housing Act because they
were denied the benefits of living in an integrated community, missed business and
professional advantages that would have accrued to them if they had lived with
members of minority groups, and had suffered embarrassment and economic damage
by being stigmatized as residents of a “white” ghetto.
Gladstone Realtors v. Village of Bellwood, 441 U.S. 91 (1979), village and five
residents of the village, one black and four white, and a black resident of a
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neighboring town found to have standing against real estate brokers who were
engaging in racial steering that created and maintained segregated neighborhoods in
the village. The individual plaintiffs were fair housing testers and were not
themselves seeking to purchase homes.
Havens Reality Corp. v. Coleman, 455 U.S. 363 (1982), testers and a fair housing
organization found to have standing. The testers claimed that they were given false
information when they inquired about the availability of housing. The fair housing
organization claimed that it had diverted resources to fight housing discrimination
and that its mission to secure equal access to housing was frustrated by a real estate
broker whose steering practices deprived members of the association the benefits of
living in an integrated community.
IV.
Standing for Administrative Investigations
Seng, Standing to Complain in Fair Housing Administrative Investigations, FH/FL
Commentary (2009), http://www.jmls.edu/fairhousingcenter/commentary.shtml,
Article III standing requirements are not applicable to administrative proceedings.
Congress intended that the enforcement of the Fair Housing Act to be as broad as the
Constitution allows; therefore, HUD may investigate complaints without determining
whether the person filing the complaint meets all the requirements of Article III
standing. The Secretary has standing to issue a charge if there is reasonable cause to
believe that a fair housing practice has occurred. 42 U.S.C. § 3610(g)(2)(A).
V.
Compensatory Damages
The question of recovery for compensatory damages is separate from whether an
organization has standing to file a complaint. Standing requires a complainant to
allege or plead an injury; to recover compensatory damages an organization must
prove injury through competent evidence. See Chicago v. Matchmaker Real Estate,
982 F.2d 1086 (7th Cir. 1992), cert. denied, 113 S.Ct. 2961 (1993); United States v.
Balistrieri, 981 F.2d 916 (7th Cir. 2992); Spann v. Colonial Village, Inc., 899 F.2d 24
(D.C.Cir. 1990).
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