Case & Advocacy Summaries

Here are some examples of recent REP cases and advocacy efforts:

  • Representing a family whose Section 8 voucher assistance was terminated based on juvenile record information that the local police department obtained and shared with the local housing authority impermissibly.  LSNC seeks to challenge this practice, which has the effect of expelling and excluding primarily African-American and Latino families from a high opportunity area, on a systemic basis with respect to both agencies.
  • Investigating and gathering data regarding complaints from clients in a rural school district that students of color, particularly Native American students, are systematically disciplined more harshly than their white peers for the same infractions.
  • Working with leaders in the Hmong community and the Sacramento County Superior Court to implement a family court mediation program that incorporates Hmong cultural norms and mediation systems in response to the Sacramento area Hmong community’s systematic disenfranchisement from the justice system.
  • Successfully challenged a government committee’s system for allocating federal community benefit funds for parks and recreational activities that had the effect of discriminating against applicants representing African-American, Latino and Asian neighborhoods.  As a result, the committee reconsidered LSNC’s organizational client’s application and awarded the organization funds to create recreational programs for youth of color living in the most distressed areas in the South Oroville area of Butte County.  LSNC continues to monitor the committee’s allocation activities.
  • Investigating a specialty health care system in County with a significant Latino population in which white recipients of Medi-Cal benefits receive, per capita, nearly four times the dollar amount of benefits received by recipients of color with respect to mental health care.
  • Preserved the county’s most progressive inclusionary zoning ordinance, which includes a 3 percent set aside for extremely-low incomes households, by intervening on behalf of individuals and affordable housing groups and obtaining a dismissal order in developers’ takings challenge to the ordinance.  Building Industry Association of Superior California v. County of Sacramento (Sacramento County Superior Court, March 2005.)  LSNC complemented the litigation with a successful culturally competent outreach and education effort focusing on affordable housing needs in the Asian and Pacific Islander community.  One in four API households in the Sacramento region lives in poverty.
  • Representing the Avon-Glen Elder Neighborhood Association in its challenge to a proposal to pump and store seven billion cubic feet of volatile natural gas beneath a densely populated neighborhood of color in South Sacramento through vigorous advocacy in the administrative public utilities and environmental review processes.
  • Created a series of Lake Tahoe–Truckee area GIS maps illustrating the growing inequities in housing access and other opportunities for communities of color in the region, particularly Latino neighborhoods.  Based on this information, LSNC has reached out to area family resource agencies serving low-income Latinos, who are the backbone of the area’s tourism industry.  The partnerships LSNC has formed with these agencies improved LSNC’s individual service work in the area and will be the basis of efforts to  remedy racial disparities in housing availability, affordability, and conditions.
  • LSNC has found solid evidence of implicit and, in some instances, explicit bias among administrative law judges deciding claims for disability benefits vis-Ă -vis Southeast Asian and African American applicants.  LSNC is meeting with a senior administrative law judge to address the issue and to create a program to address this problem that includes training all ALJs.
  • In collaboration with the Sacramento Housing Alliance and the local redevelopment agency, LSNC worked to ensure that consistent with federal law, over $30 million in federal stimulus (Neighborhood Stabilization) funds received by the County and City of Sacramento for revitalizing areas most heavily impacted by the foreclosure crisis were appropriately allocated to the neighborhoods of color most affected and that low-income families from these neighborhoods had sufficient opportunity to purchase the revitalized homes.