Cruisin’ for a quagmire: San Francisco to suffer a “legal headache” for assistance and equity programs
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Even if SF’s Dream Keeper Initiative hadn’t been shrouded in scandal, it'll likely expose City Hall to legal challenges, writes SF Standard’s Sanjana Friedman, who details how it can be viewed as “effectively race-based” and therefore violating state and federal law. Already, a court has slapped down GIFT—the basic income program that was based on identity. She now predicts the Office of Racial Equity will get sued for employment discrimination.
Although Dream Keeper’s [Downpayment Assistance Loan Program] DALP eligibility requirements don’t explicitly state that applicants must be Black, they are given priority if they live in one of four HOPE SF public housing developments, receive Section 8 housing vouchers, or were displaced due to an earlier city redevelopment project. Dream Keeper money itself predominantly goes to programs serving Black residents, and the city has a separate DALP aimed at the general population. So it’s reasonable to infer that admission to the Dream Keeper DALP is effectively race-based — a straightforward violation of Prop. 209.
What’s more, Dream Keeper’s Economic Mobility grants, which provide “cash transfers through guaranteed income pilots and direct payments” to select Black recipients, may also be illegal under the Equal Protection Clause, thanks to the Fearless Fund precedent enforcing a federal ban on race-exclusive contracts.
Dream Keeper isn’t the only city program operating in questionable territory. The Guaranteed Income for Transgender People program, or GIFT, gave 55 low-income trans San Franciscans $1,200 a month for 18 months. It prioritized the enrollment of “Black, Indigenous, or People of Color” and “monolingual Spanish-speakers,” among others, until a recent lawsuit from the nonprofit Californians for Equal Rights Foundation ended the program, alleging violations of the 14th Amendment and other laws.
GIFT operated under the auspices of the city’s Office of Transgender Initiatives, which also helped coordinate the (now-defunct) Our Trans Home SF, a housing program providing 90 low-income people with five-year rent subsidies of up to $2,000 a month. The city additionally operates the Ending Transgender Homelessness Initiative, a $6 million program that earmarks short-term rental subsidies exclusively for trans homeless people — apparently in violation of the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibits identity-based discrimination in housing assistance.
Elsewhere, the Office of Racial Equity, which seeks to root out “structural and institutional racism in [San Francisco’s] internal practices and systems,” has spent the past few years mandating that all city departments — from the airport to the Arts Commission — draft plans to diversify their workplace demographics. The effort appears strikingly similar to Seattle’s Race and Social Justice Initiative; that is the subject of a lawsuit alleging a hostile work environment, brought by a city employee who claims the program violates Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits race-based employment discrimination.
It’s only a matter of time before San Francisco contends with a similar discrimination lawsuit. But whether it quickly shuts these programs down in response or litigates all the way up to the Supreme Court, one thing is clear: City Hall has a massive legal headache of its own making yet to come.
Read the whole thing here.
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