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Jordan Marsh’s cover story “Targeted for Removal?” (October 23) rightly ponders the reasons behind the settlement, and nontrial, of the Addison lawsuit, characterized by Marsh as the “largest and most contentious housing-discrimination case in recent history.” But Marsh wrongly implies a conspiracy of silence between the Department of Justice and the Addison defendants. A more likely explanation, only hinted at in Marsh’s one-sided account, is that Addison had a solid defense of implementing an antiblight and anticrowding program in the six-county area’s most overcrowded suburban neighborhood.
Latinos, blacks, and Asians are the dominant ethnic residents of the Chicago area’s 557 most overcrowded neighborhoods. But the Fair Housing Act of 1968 does not exempt minorities from housing code laws. The Supreme Court decided in Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976) that a neutral rule, particularly one with a compelling public interest such as minimum housing standards, overrides the coincidental negative impact of such a rule on a minority, and the minority so burdened is not entitled to relief.
The plaintiffs’ argument, as I understand it, is not that Addison doesn’t have the right to protect itself against overcrowding and other ills, but that it cannot do so in a discriminatory manner or as a pretext for removing Hispanics from Addison. Whether the village’s actions were, in fact, unconstitutional or in violation of the Fair Housing Act was a decision for the courts.
