Session III: Housing & Land Use Policy

What can the courts do to enforce fair housing? Panelists discussed the benefits and drawbacks to various approaches to providing affordable housing across metro regions, including strategies like low-income housing tax credits and suburban allocations of affordable housing.

Moderator: Josie Johnson, Former University of Minnesota Regent

Josie Robinson Johnson has played an active role in the civil rights movement all her life. In the early 1960s, Johnson lobbied professionally for passage of bills concerning such issues as fair housing and employment opportunities. Between 1971 and 1973, she served on the University of Minnesota’s Board of Regents. The University of Minnesota offered her a senior fellowship in 1987. Johnson directed its All-University Forum as diversity director from 1990 to 1992. That year, she became responsible for minority affairs and diversity at the college as the associate vice president for academic affairs. The University of Minnesota established the annual Josie Robinson Johnson Human Rights and Social Justice Award in her honor.

John powell, Kirwan Institute

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Professor john a. powell is an internationally recognized authority in the areas of civil rights, civil liberties, and issues relating to race, ethnicity, poverty and the law. He is the executive director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University. He also holds the Williams Chair in Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Moritz College of Law.
He has written extensively on a number of issues including racial justice and regionalism, concentrated poverty and urban sprawl, the link between housing and school segregation, opportunity-based housing, gentrification, disparities in the criminal justice system, voting rights, affirmative action in the United States, South Africa and Brazil, racial and ethnic identity and current demographic trends.

Phil Tegeler, Poverty and Race Research Action Council

Philip Tegeler is the Executive Director of the Poverty & Race Research Action Council (PRRAC), a not-for-profit civil rights policy organization based in Washington, D.C. (see www.prrac.org). PRRAC’s current focus areas include regional housing opportunity, educational equity, and developing advocacy responses to minority health disparities. PRRAC also publishes the bimonthly Poverty & Race, and is co-publisher of the award winning civil rights curriculum guide, Putting the Movement Back Into Civil Rights Teaching. Mr. Tegeler is a civil rights lawyer with more than 20 years experience in fair housing, educational equity, land use, and institutional reform litigation.

Kevin Walsh, Fair Share Housing Center

Kevin D. Walsh is the Associate Director of Fair Share Housing Center, a non-profit legal and policy center founded in 1975 to advance and protect the Mount Laurel doctrine. A graduate of Rutgers School of Law in Camden, Kevin joined the Center in 2000 following a clerkship with Associate Justice Gary S. Stein of the New Jersey Supreme Court. Under the direction of Peter J. O’Connor, Fair Share Housing Center has long been involved in litigation challenging exclusionary zoning in New Jersey, one of the most racially and economically segregated states in the nation.