National Housing Law Project Housing Law Bulletin

Wright v. Roanoke Survives Again

Ten years ago, the Supreme Court ended an era in which public and assisted housing tenants had had a difficult time enforcing federal housing legislation in federal court. The case was Wright v. Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority, 478 U.S. 418 (1987). The plaintiffs had claimed that their housing authority had not been granting them a reasonable utility allowance to which they were entitled under the Brooke Amendment and its implementing regulations. The issue was whether that entitlement was a "right" that could be enforced pursuant to 42 U.S.C.A. ' 1983 (West Supp. 1997). In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court said it was. Relying upon Wright, the lower courts soon thereafter began opening up their doors to public and assisted housing tenants.

Questions about when plaintiffs may sue pursuant to Section 1983 to enforce federal statutory duties against state and local agencies have still been hotly debated in the Supreme Court.¹ Last month, Section 1983 returned to the Supreme Court, and the Court held that the plaintiffs that could not sue pursuant to Section 1983. Blessing v. Freestone, ___ U.S. ___, 117 S.Ct. ____ (1997). In doing so, however, the Court repeatedly cited Wright with approval and distinguished it from the pending case. Moreover, Justice O'Connor, who had dissented in Wright, wrote the opinion for the Court, which was unanimous.

Blessing was a suit brought by mothers in Arizona who were complaining that the state was not meeting its responsibilities to collect child support payments as required by Title IV-D of the Social Security Act.² Under Title IV-D, any state that participated in the former AFDC program was obliged to assist AFDC and other low-income mothers in collecting child support payments from fathers. The state's obligations were to run a program for establishing paternity, locating absent parents, obtaining support orders and collecting the payments. The program was to be set out in a plan that had to be approved by the federal government and had to conform to federal statutory requirements. Arizona had made those promises, but its performance was dismal and it had been found inadequate many times by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). As a result of those failures, the plaintiffs had not received any child support from the fathers of their children.

The plaintiffs alleged that the state had not substantially complied with Title IV-D, primarily because of short staffing, high caseloads, unmanageable backlogs and deficient accounting and record keeping. They claimed that they had a right to have the state "substantially comply" with Title VI-D and that they could enforce that right pursuant to Section 1983. They sought a declaratory judgment that the state's program violated substantive provisions of federal law and sought injunctive relief to order the state to achieve and sustain substantial compliance with the federal law.

The Supreme Court concluded that the plaintiffs did not have a privately enforceable right to have the state "substantially comply" with Title IV-D. In the Court's view, while plaintiffs might have rights to the state's compliance with specific, narrowly drawn provisions of Title IV-D, there was no right to compliance with the statute as an undifferentiated whole. There was no overarching right to have the state bring the program into substantial compliance with Title IV-D. Although the statute authorizes HHS to take action if the state is not in substantial compliance, it does not do that for the benefit of the custodial parents or the children. Instead, in the Court's view, that statutory provision was merely a device for HHS to measure the state's system-wide performance. It does not focus on the performance in individual cases. Nor does the statute grant HHS power to enforce compliance when individuals have been denied services.

In arriving at that conclusion, the Court drew a distinction between Section 1983 cases brought to enforce specific and narrow statutory provisions and suits for blanket enforcement of an entire statutory scheme. In drawing the distinction, the Court contrasted the Blessing case with Wright, in which the plaintiffs were seeking to enforce a particular statute on rents, not the entire United States Housing Act. The opinion even goes so far as to compliment those plaintiffs for articulating well defined claims. That praise for Wright should help federal housing tenants sustain Section 1983 claims in future cases, but it also indicates the need to draw the claims as specifically as possible.

The Court left open the possibility that the plaintiffs could allege violations of enforceable rights guaranteed by Title IV-D if they were more specific about the statutory provisions that had been violated. For that reason, the Court ordered the case remanded to the district court. Because of the remand, the Court had to address the second question, i.e., whether Congress had foreclosed private enforcement of any of the Title IV-D provisions pursuant to Section 1983.

On this question, Wright came out smelling like roses as well. The State of Arizona, in Blessing, argued that Congress had relegated all enforcement power to HHS and, by that alone, had precluded private parties from seeking enforcement under Section 1983. That same argument had been made in Wright, where the housing authority argued that HUD's monitoring and enforcement powers precluded Section 1983 suits. In rejecting the State's argument in Blessing, the Court relied upon its previous rejection of the same argument in Wright. It also noted that the availability of the public housing grievance procedure in Wright had not been considered a grounds for precluding a Section 1983 suit.

While all of this is good news for public and assisted housing tenants bringing suit to enforce specific provisions of the United States Housing Act under Section 1983, it does raise questions about the viability of such litigation under the changes to the federal housing legislation now being considered by Congress.³ Those revisions confer much more discretion on public housing authorities and landlords, rely much more on generalized plans than specific federal requirements, and may leave much less to enforce in court under Section 1983.

1. See, e.g., Livadas v. Bradshaw, 512 U.S. 107 (1994); Suter v. Artist M., 503 U.S. 347 (1992); and Wilder v. Virginia Hospital Ass'n, 496 U.S. 498 (1990).
2. 42 U.S.C.A. '' 651-669b (West Supp. 1997).
3. See Senate Takes More Moderate Approach to Public Housing Revisions, 27 HOUS. L. BULL. 51 (Apr. 1997); and House Introduces Low-Income Housing Program Changes, 27 HOUS. L. BULL. 1 (Jan. 1997).