$1M fee award in successful Housing Segregation Case!

Three years ago, poverty attorney Parisa Ijadi-Maghsoodi, civil rights attorney Bryan Pease, and I sued the San Diego Housing Commission alleging the Commission’s implementation of a Section 8 housing voucher program increased segregation in San Diego and trapped families in low income, low opportunity, high crime, neighborhoods. Our lawsuit detailed how the Commission had been setting voucher levels standards woefully low in high opportunity areas, and relatively lower than in low opportunity areas. Last May, after years of tough litigation and tactical delay, the Commission, facing a trial this summer, made a fundamental change to the manner in which it sets its voucher payment standards and aligned them with those issued by the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Because the Commission’s payment standards had been so woefully low, this change constituted nothing short of leapfrogging over years of woefully inadequate voucher levels and was the largest one-year increase national fair housing experts had ever seen. This is a result we had fought hard for during three years of contentious litigation. It was a great result for our clients, for a lot of good San Diegans, and for the city of San Diego.