Who has found (or is even looking for) the “racist” at the center of the foreclosure crisis? Granted, diverse and voluminous people have been harmed by the crisis across America; but growing data demonstrate brown and black renters and homeowners have been disproportionately impacted by the sub-prime mortgage meltdown. Searching for relief using our traditional model of discrimination would lead us down a trail for a single cause or single actor, an individual perpetrator with “intent” to discriminate, who is responsible for the present uprooting of families and utter demise of entire neighborhoods inhabited by people of color.

While there may be no shortage of people, institutions and other places to begin assigning blame, the ultimate root of the foreclosure problem is, in large part, the unfettered capitalist driven interests of financial institutions, mortgage brokers, securities dealers and investors. Certainly, that is not to suggest that people of color and limited income have not been the targets of irresponsible low- and no-money down adjustable rate lending options—which certainly is true in some cases. Rather, the point here is to bring front and center an illustrative example of how a constricted single actor with intent approach will hardly adequately rectify this and other complex systemic problems harming members of our society and impeding the achievement of racial equality in housing, health, employment, education, and other social and economic necessities.

Since Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976), the disregard of harm experienced by members of society and focus on the intent of decision-makers and institutional actors has placed confounding limitations on constitutional interpretation and the availability of remedies for victims of varying forms of discrimination. Specifically, this Supreme Court case gutted the protections of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution by setting a standard that places the burden on plaintiffs bringing discrimination claims to establish the intent of the alleged perpetrator to discriminate. Under this intent doctrine, the plaintiff alleging an equal protection violation must prove that the discriminating actor or agency “selected or reaffirmed a particular course of action at least in part ‘because of,’ not merely ‘in spite of,’ its adverse effects upon an identifiable [racial] group,” Personnel Administrator of Massachusetts v. Fenney, 442 U.S. 256, 279 (1979). More generally, this intent standard and its proliferation in antidiscrimination jurisprudence unjustly shifts the focus of our protective laws away from shielding members of our society and away from reaching restorative outcomes that begin to address institutional structures, practices and social norms that facilitate the kinds of sub-prime lending abuses and other racial inequities evident today.

Modern science explains why always seeking to finger a racist, or an individual with intent to discriminate, is an outdated approach to combating discrimination. Cognitive and social science research shows we all, at some level, have subconscious or implicit beliefs, attitudes and expectations about people based on our exposure to the race, gender, age or other groups to which such individuals belong. These implicit biases often influence our decisions and interactions with others even though we may not possess any explicit prejudice, ill will, or animus. By now, most of us have heard of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) that measures our subconscious biases or read about research studies looking at the implications of these biases in myriad sectors of society.

For example, the Washington Post ran an article about the reflection of the implicit attitudes of physicians in disparities in their medical judgments and treatment recommendations. (“The Color of Health Care: Diagnosing Bias in Doctors,” Washington Post, Aug. 13, 2007.) The New York Times covered a study on the National Basketball Association (N.B.A.) concluding that “players who were similar in all ways except skin color drew foul calls at a rate difference of up to 4 ½ percent depending on the racial composition of an N.B.A. game’s three-person referee crew.” (“Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls,” New York Times, May 2, 2007.) The USA Today discussed a study about immigrant skin tone and U.S. earning potential that found “[o]n average, being one shade lighter has about the same effect as having an additional year of education.” (“Study Says Skin Tone Affects Earnings,” USA Today, Jan. 26, 2007.) Ascribe Newswire reported that the risk of housing discrimination begins when prospective tenants simply send email inquiries signed with names commonly affiliated with particular racial or ethnic backgrounds. (“Name is Enough When it Comes to Discrimination,” AScribe Newswire, May 23, 2006.)

Additionally, examples of subconscious biases becoming institutionalized or built into the fabric of institutional structures, practices and norms have made their way into mainstream media. Fortune magazine highlighted the Dukes v. Wal-Mart, 474 F.3d 1214 (9th Cir. 2007), case as an example of the increasing prevalence of social science testimony on implicit bias in discrimination lawsuits. (“The War Over Unconscious Bias,” Fortune, Oct. 15, 2007.) Testimony in the early stages of that case suggested that managers involved in promotion and pay decisions unknowingly engaged in “‘spontaneous,’ and ‘automatic’ stereotyping and ‘in-group favoritism’” that systematically resulted in the most favorable jobs being filled by men, and the company’s historic and overly discretionary promotion and pay procedures allowed managers to unintentionally reinforce structural barriers to women’s advancement. Today, startling statistics of persisting disparities in the number of women and people of color represented in the upper ranks of corporate, academic, legal and other institutions often have little to do with overt gender and racial discrimination, but more to do with “locked-in” or “unquestioned” norms and habits and our country’s history of denying equal opportunities to certain groups in avenues fundamental to social and economic advancement.

As the Wal-Mart case illustrates, our courts have begun to acknowledge the existence and grapple with the implications of implicit and institutional bias. In some areas of law, the presence of implicit bias has provided a basis for judicial findings of discrimination. Courts have long recognized that unconscious biases can shape juror selection and jurors’ perception of plaintiffs and defendants. In the Supreme Court case Miller-El v. Dretke, 545 U.S. 231 (2005), which involved a prosecutor who peremptorily struck ten of eleven prospective black jurors, the existence of unconscious racial bias supported the Court’s ultimate conclusion that the prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenges constituted purposeful discrimination. In the immigration context, an officer’s unconscious bias proved sufficient to constitute a constitutional violation when a deportee was stopped solely on the basis of his Hispanic appearance, as the court noted, “…Border Patrol officers may use racial stereotypes as a proxy for illegal conduct without being subjectively aware of doing so.” Gonzalez-Rivera v. INS, 22 F.3d 1441 (9th Cir. 1994). In EEOC v. Inland Marine, 729 F.2d 1129 (9th Cir. 1984), the court ruled that African American employees alleging racial discrimination based upon a disparate wage structure proved intentional discrimination even though “[t]he company did not consciously set out to establish a two-tiered wage structure, and hence did not act maliciously.”

These cases and social examples briefly discussed here illustrate some of the progress advocates, litigators, scientists and other members of our society have made toward updating our understanding of discrimination and reversing the trend to always identify a racist in order to provide relief for racially disparate outcomes. Legal services and other civil rights advocates are uniquely positioned to continue identifying instances where race may be a factor and urge our courts to understand modern discrimination. Our courts must be encouraged to grapple with persisting racial disparities in areas such as housing, education and employment, and provide a remedy where a “racist” decision-maker may be nonexistent because subconscious and institutional biases may be causing the harm. Our combined efforts can avoid leaving individuals with evidence of discrimination without remedy.

This article was authored by Kimberly Thomas Rapp. Kimberly Thomas Rapp is the director of law and public policy at the Equal Justice Society, a national organization strategically advancing racial justice through law and public policy, communications and the arts, and alliance building.

In a courageous piece of advocacy, the Alameda County Homeless Action Center, argued that proposed cuts in the general assistance program would have a disparate impact upon African Americans in Alameda County. In support of their contention staff attorney, John Engstrom, crafted a Racial Impact Statement clearly demonstrating how the cuts would fall most heavily upon those in the African American community. He also challenged the “exemption process” that classified most unemployed African Americans as employable by describing the societal structures that prevented these recipients from accessing job opportunities. Kudos to Pattie Wall, John Engstrom and the clients of the Homeless Action Center for so effectively putting race on the table in their advocacy.

Joining Florence Wagman Roisman’s clarion call in End Racial Segregation: Build Communities that Look Like America, recently posted on this page, two other fair housing/civil rights heavyweights urge the social justice community to fully engage in strategic race-conscious fair housing and community development advocacy as the best way to fulfill the promise of the federal Fair Housing Act, now in its 40th year.

In An Unfinished Agenda: Fair Housing and Community Development To Fight the Vestiges of Segregation, recently published in the Black Agenda Report and ShelterForce Online, renown civil rights attorney Betsy Julian calls on social justice advocates to coalesce around and move forward with an agenda that demands implementation of a true anti-segregation approach in housing and community development policy at the local, state and national levels. Like Roisman, Julian reminds us of the direct connection between government-created and sanctioned housing segregation and discrimination and the ongoing “[r]acial disparities [that] exist in almost every indicator of health and well-being.” She rightly asks whether we in the justice community are complicit in maintaining structurally racist systems when we insist on “colorblindness” and “class over race” as paradigms in approaching our work when, in fact, the demographics reveal stark differences in access to opportunity and decent living conditions between poor whites and poor people of color. Citing successful examples, she urges advocates to pursue impact litigation to address disparities in housing and municipal services and to push Congress and other law-making bodies to remove from the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, HOPE IV Public Housing Program and other programs the components that perpetuate racial segregation.

In Is local housing really fair? (April 26, Press Democrat), civil rights and land use attorney David Grabill also links racially discriminatory zoning practices to school segregation in the context of a critique of Santa Rosa, California’s “inclusionary” zoning ordinance. The ordinance, states Grabill, fails to live up to its title because it allows developers to pay fees in lieu of building affordable units in affluent high opportunity areas, thus excluding low income people who are disproportionately people of color from such neighborhoods and exporting the inclusionary obligation to poorer, mostly of color areas. Grabill offers workable local solutions such as requiring that inclusionary zoning laws apply in single-family home areas and requiring jurisdictions to match their hunger for economic development with a commitment to fairly house the workers that make such development possible.

We made a few new additions to our resources today that we think you should take a look at:

The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity

• Site Summary: The Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’s “ultimate goal is to stimulate and facilitate transformative change to bring about a society that is fair and just for all people.” It approaches this goal “with the understanding that all communities of people are interconnected and that by fostering positive relationships through research, scholarship and collaboration, we will deepen the possibility for change.” The Kirwan Institute is a true pioneer in the fight to achieve equitable results for communities of color and its research and advocacy, particularly around opportunity mapping, represents some of the most innovative and effective advocacy currently being undertaken by advocates for race equity. The Institute also posts all of their PowerPoint presentations on their site. Available presentations cover topics ranging from GIS to framing to structural racism.

HealthyCity

• Site Summary: HealthyCity offers perhaps the most comprehensive access to community resources, demographic/health data, and cutting edge online GIS mapping technology that the REP has ever seen. For the time being, the site only offers geographic coverage for Los Angeles county. We hope that HealthyCity will be going statewide soon but until that time we will have to stew in our jealousy of the wonderful online mapping and data analysis tools that residents of the city of angels have access to.

• Suggested Uses: If you have any mapping or data analysis needs related to Los Angeles county and you are not adverse to free, powerful, user-friendly online mapping and data analysis tools than HealthyCity is for you.

We have spent much time exploring the many ways in which advocates can use mapping to highlight the social isolation and segregation from opportunity of their client communities, among other things, and advocate for positive change. (See REP Blog mapping archives.) However, mapping is tool available to everyone and, as this story may suggest to you, can have its downside, especially when applied to groups racialized as prone to radicalism and violence.

According to the NY Times in Protest Greets Police Plan Map Muslim Angelinos, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) plans to map the location of southern California Muslims under the auspices of the “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” Act. The “Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism” Act defines “ideologically based violence” as “the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.” That’s the place from which LAPD’s assumptions about Muslims run wantonly in the direction of implicit bias. As many are aware, the law of implicit bias is unsettled.

Though not listed among the LAPD’s official maps, the department never officially withdrew its proposal to map SoCal Muslims. Here’s what others had to say about the proposal.

Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. of Southern California, expressed the alarm many felt at hearing that the “starting point for a police investigation is ‘let’s look at all Muslims.’”

Mike German, policy counsel for the ACLU, called the plan “wrongheaded” because the bill calls for heightened scrutiny of people who believe, or might come to believe, in a violent ideology, which, the In These Times article notes, is perfectly legal.

Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Greater Los Angeles Area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-LA), debates an LAPD proposal to “map” Southern California Muslim communities on “NBC Nightly News.” See the video interview here. The video questions whether racial profiling can be good policing. For an historical view of the process of official state mapping of minority communities and racial profiling policy, see the LA Times article, “Community Profiling’s Long, Sad History” by Professor Richard Marcus of Cal State Long Beach.

Pr. Marcus points out that, under the Bush Administration:

The U.S. Department of Justice banned racial profiling, calling it unconstitutional. Under this definition, former Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft followed in February 2002, saying that using race “as a proxy for potential criminal behavior is unconstitutional, and it undermines law enforcement by undermining the confidence that people can have in law enforcement.” I guess the LAPD missed the memo.

A Pennsylvania judge has ordered three Spanish-speaking men to learn English or go to jail.

Diversity defines who we are as human beings. We cheer our diversity. We often times brag about America being a melting pot. It is part of the American makeup. If this is true, then why is there so much hostility against people of color today? I’m not sure whose remarks are worse, the judge or the attorney.

Justice Samuel A. Alito wrote the majority opinion in Snyder v. Louisiana, a case that reversed the first degree murder conviction of Allan Snyder. The court held that the prosecutor improperly used peremptory challenges to secure an all white jury in this trial of an African American man in Louisiana.

The case represents a significant elaboration on the court’s ruling 22 years ago in Batson v. Kentucky that opened the door to challenges of criminal convictions for racial discrimination in jury selection. Finding “clear error” Justice Alito held that “the very integrity of the courts is jeopardized” by racial bias in jury selection and found the prosecutors explanation of his actions to be unconvincing and pretextual.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia dissented.

The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Race Discrimination (CERD) issued its Concluding Observations on March 7. These Observations followed formal review of the U.S.’s report to the CERD under the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, a treaty the U.S. ratified in 1994. In the “positive aspects” section of the report on the U.S., CERD applauds California Housing Element Law as an effective anti-discrimination and anti-segregation tool. California Housing Element Law requires each jurisdiction in California to plan and zone for the housing needs of all economic segments of its population, including the needs of residents in the lower income strata who are disproportionately people of color. While many civil rights and affordable housing advocates advocate for a strong housing element law, many have used it to promote more equitable development policies and patterns. Such application is described in the January 08 REP e-newsletter article by Michael Rawson of the Public Interest Law Project (PILP). Other positives in the CERD report include the recent reauthorizations of the Violence Against Women Act and the Voting Rights of 1965.

Among the many concerns, with recommendations, listed in CERD’s report are persistent racial segregation in housing, persistent lack of access to opportunity among people of color, particularly African-Americans and Latinos, the failure of national and state law and jurisprudence to recognize and remedy discrimination caused by disparate impact, the U.S. Supreme Court decisions in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1 and Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and their after effects, and the ongoing displacement and disenfranchisement of African-Americans from the gulf region two years after Hurricane Katrina. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, the Poverty and Race Research Action Council, PILP and Public Counsel are among the organizations that contributed to the report.

See also the CERD Housing Report: Residential Segregation and Housing Discrimination in the United States.

The NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles (CRP) announce the release of Still Looking to the Future: Voluntary K-12 School Integration; A Manual for Parents, Educators and Advocates. The Manual provides valuable guidance and information about how communities and school districts can promote racial diversity and address racial isolation in schools nationwide. This Second Edition of the Manual is being issued on the heels of the Supreme Court’s June 2007 decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, which limited the ability of school districts to take race into account in achieving these goals.

This is a critical time on the ground. School districts and communities around the country are struggling to determine how to continue their voluntary integration efforts within the bounds of the Court’s decision. In some instances, school districts have hastily modified or abandoned diversity programs without carefully considering the options that are still viable under the Court’s decision and taking proper account of the significant harms of racially segregated schools.

The Manual addresses the practical questions of what parents, advocates and educators can now do to promote diversity and address the harms of racial isolation in their schools. It provides accurate and up to date information and a step by step guide for how you can strengthen diversity and expand opportunity in your schools, including:

• The history of court-ordered desegregation efforts;
• The causes, patterns and devastating impact of the rapid resegregation currently occurring in America’s public schools;
• A comprehensive discussion of many demonstrated benefits of racially integrated schools and the harms of racially isolated schools;
• A detailed review of the Supreme Court’s Parents Involved decision;
• Brief description of the common methods of student assignment;
• Case studies of school districts with widely discussed approaches towards promoting high quality, inclusive schools

A donut that is constantly being nibbled at the edges is perhaps an apt description of Boston’s Chinatown. During the four and a-half decades between 1950 and 1995, this 46-acre neighborhood was besieged with institutional expansion waged by the medical school and the hospital in its core and highway construction on its fringes. (For background of the land use history in Boston’s Chinatown, see Zenobia Lai, Leong and Wu, “ The lessons of the Parcel C struggle: reflections on community lawyering,” 6 Asian Pacific American L.J. 1 (Summer 2000); also Louder than words: lawyers, communities and the struggle for justice, c.6. p. 120 (Penda D. Hair, ed., March 2001)) During the past decade, gentrification brought on by mega development of luxury condominiums and apartments has replaced institutional expansion to threaten Chinatown’s survival. To protect this community from gentrification is immediate and urgent.

Land use and zoning is not within the traditional legal services practice areas, why did Greater Boston Legal Services take this up? It started when the community asked the Asian Outreach Unit in 1993 to explore legal handles to stop a proposed hospital garage on “Parcel C,” one of the last remaining urban renewal parcels. In the course of mapping out the land use history of Chinatown from the 1950s to that point, it is not difficult to see that facially neutral land use policies had robbed this community of much needed housing and open space. The urban renewal policy implemented pursuant to the 1948 National Housing Act and the highway plan of 1948 had worked in tandem to remove land and housing from Chinatown. Instead of implementing the urban renewal policy to replace dilapidated housing with new housing for existing residents, the policy was implemented to raze existing housing leading to the displacement of hundreds of residents from the neighborhood, only to clear the land to enable the hospital and medical school to expand in the heart of Chinatown. At the same time, the construction of two interstate highways stripped land and housing off two sides of the neighborhood, removing still more housing units and families in the 1950s and 60s. The effect of the urban renewal was to hollow out Chinatown from the inside whereas the effects of the highway construction was to box in Chinatown from the edges. While these government policies ravaged through Chinatown, the adjacent neighborhoods with mostly white residents were left untouched. The reason why such devastating land use policies could be implemented in Boston Chinatown but not in the neighboring communities was because the Chinese residents did not matter to the policy makers. Almost a century of exclusionary immigration and citizenship policies had deprived Chinese Americans from re-uniting with their overseas families, becoming citizens and hence voting.

By 1993, the legacy of the adverse land use policies has reduced Chinatown into a neighborhood that looked like a donut, with numerous surface parking lot dotting its landscape. The proposed hospital garage on Parcel C was particularly offensive, not only because of the history of the hospital’s land grab within the community, but also because the City had promised to preserve this piece of land for a Chinatown community center less than two years earlier. Moreover, this garage proposal would test the efficacy of the Chinatown Community Plan adopted by the city in 1990, which lays the ground rules and principles for future land use and developments for Chinatown.

The research into the community’s land use and social history quickly led us to conclude that the garage proposal was only “the miner’s canary.” (This is referring to the theme of the book of the same title by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres.) The battle to protect Parcel C from institutional expansion was thus not just the mechanical examination of land use law or development review, it called for a challenge to the underlying government policies and actions that sanctioned inequitable land use adversely affecting a community of color. GBLS represented the Coalition formed to fight for Parcel C through the city’s project review process (The city’s project review process followed Article 31 (has since been amended and re-codified as Article 80) of the Boston Zoning Code, which focused on the proposed development’s impact on the environment and not on the social fabric of the community.) and the state’s environmental review (MEPA) process. (The state’s Executive Office of Environmental Affairs oversee the environmental review pursuant to the Massachusetts Environmental Policy Act, M.G.L. c.30, Sections. 61-62H, 301 C.M.R. Sec. 11.00 (amended in 1998).) Although for the first time, the community was able to demand a bilingual public hearing, secured a skimpily translated draft environmental impact report and succeeded in convincing the state agency to require the hospital to redraft its environmental impact report, we knew that this review process would not stop the garage in the end. This realization led us to begin building a civil rights case along an environmental justice claim that centered on the continuing application of land use policies that produced disparate impacts on a community of color. The environmental justice claims that Boston Chinatown has developed are not about hazardous waste or toxic dump. They center around the municipality’s deliberate land use policies that have allowed highway construction, adult entertainment district siting and institutional expansion to take place in inner city neighborhood that produces adverse impacts on low income community of color. The case was never filed because the city negotiated with the hospital to withdraw the garage proposal a week before the planned filing date. The potential lawsuit, however, created a new dialogue within the community that had never before considered civil rights “their” issue.

Since the Boston Chinatown community won the Parcel C battle, the landscape of the land use in the community has changed. Instead of institutional expansion, Boston Chinatown has been experiencing downtown encroachment and gentrification. Since 2000, approximately 1200 units of housing has been built in and around Chinatown, which almost doubled the total number of housing units in this neighborhood. Of these new units, less than three percent is affordable to low income households, which account for the majority of those in Chinatown. Almost all of them are high rises with hundreds of units in a single development, apparently to advance the “smart growth” principles. The frontier of the Boston Chinatown’s land use battle has moved from the earlier environmental justice claims to zoning enforcement. The issue of contention is the municipality’s granting of illegal zoning variance to allow the building of luxury residential high rises in Chinatown to hasten gentrification that leads to displacement of low income residents. (In 2002, Greater Boston Legal Services represented a community based organization and a tenant in suing the City of Boston and the private developer for violating the zoning in proposing to build a high rise residential building at three times the height limit and twice the allowable density under the applicable zoning code. For a brief discussion of this case, see Raun Rasmussen, Zoning and Land-Use Laws: Tools to create housing and services for our clients, Clearinghouse Review Journal of Poverty Law and Policy, 441,454 (Nov. – Dec. 2002).) Instead of undoing its 1972 zoning that put the sex business into Chinatown in the first place, the city has chosen a circuitous and ineffective route. It has chosen to allow developers to violate zoning law to build luxury high rises that in the city’s view will “contain” the adult entertainment district.

Almost fifteen years after Greater Boston Legal Services took on the first land use case in Boston Chinatown, our practice on this issue has broadened beyond the project-by-project challenge. Recognizing that this community’s strength derives from its physical space marked by Chinatown, GBLS has been working with community-based organizations to build resident capacity and to map out broader economic and community development strategies to ensure this community’s survival. The upcoming challenge will focus on the future development of a 10 to 20-acre site made available by the completion of the “Big Dig,” part of which comprised land taken from the community in the 1950s and 60s. The next frontier of our work will be to combine our legal expertise in zoning law, inclusionary zoning policies, affordable housing policies, and civil rights laws with the expertise of urban planners to push through the community’s vision of survival and growth, both geographically and economically.

In devoting significant resources in preserving one community, Greater Boston Legal Services has not abandoned its practice in other areas. Its Asian Outreach Unit (AOU) that focuses on serving the legal needs of the low income Asian immigrant community has continued to have a general poverty law practice that covers employment, family, housing, immigration, and public assistance. The unit was founded in 1972 by the first generation Asian American law students to bring legal services to the growing Chinese community who could not access the mainstream legal services due to language barriers. Recognizing that the understanding and resolution of their legal problems also requires knowledge of cultural practices common in the community, the AOU and its predecessor also emphasize bringing in bilingual and bicultural staff and interns to aid in the delivery of legal services. Thirty-five years after it was formed, the core mission of the Asian Outreach Unit has remained unchanged. In fact, over the past decade, the Asian Outreach Unit has emerged as a model for other legal services programs in designing their service to better serve the needs of limited-English-proficient clients. (See e.g. The search for equal access to justice: Asian American Access to Justice Project Report, p.29 (The National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, May 2000); Expanding Legal Services: serving limited English proficient Asians and Pacific Islanders, p. 25 (Asian Pacific American Legal Center, Nov. 2003); the Asian Outreach Unit is also profiled in an abstract on the Legal Services Corporation resource library.) It is challenging to strike a balance between meeting the day-to-day legal needs of individual clients through the regular legal services delivery and taking on big projects that address the long-term economic, social and political advancement of the community. (Besides the land use work in Chinatown, the Asian Outreach Unit also served as the legal counsel to the Vietnamese American Initiative for Development (Viet-AID) during its early years in the mid-1990s. Viet-AID is the first and only community development corporation founded by and for the Vietnamese American community. It is the brainchild of one of the first seven NAPIL (now Equal Justice Works) fellows who joined the Asian Outreach Unit in the fall of 1993. The AOU helped with the formation of the family childcare center project and the community center by doing basic legal research on the applicable program regulations and property titles. Along the way, AOU has also helped form and incorporate tenant associations and the Boston Chinatown Resident Association.)

However, legal services need not evaluate its programming within an “either-or” construct. The collective advancement of the social and economic conditions of a community also benefits the clients who may come to legal services for assistance on individual legal problems. The solution to persistent poverty is in both helping the individuals get more income and correcting the underlying conditions that keep people poor. One approach is short-term and immediate, the other is long-term and perhaps indirect. With respect to the Boston Chinatown community, we are experimenting with using the tangible land use emergency to stimulate the community’s imagination, to find ways to capitalize on these developments to produce economic opportunities for the community burdened with these developments. We hope that by working with the community to create a vision for its physical and economic future, and by lending our expertise to support its implementation, the Boston Chinatown residents may one day afford to rent or own the gleaming new apartments that are rising in their neighborhood.

By Zenobia Lai, Senior Attorney, Greater Boston Legal Services