Tenant Displacement Prevention Report - Research Instructions

Project Overview:

Lawyers for Good Government (L4GG) and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) are conducting research to identify legal pathways to ensure housing justice as the federal government encourages green transition efforts through the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. Namely, we are seeking legal remedies for state and local governments to mitigate and prevent “green gentrification” and consequent displacement caused by decarbonization and climate resilience development. Ultimately, this data will take the form of a report with example legal strategies for government officials and community advocates alike, coupled with relevant case studies from geographic regions across the U.S.

Our team is recruiting attorneys to conduct research on various forms of clean energy infrastructure (e.g., solar panels, heat pumps and electric stoves, resilient parks, greenways) and their respective legal interventions (e.g., land use parameters, rent control, diversity and equity impact assessments, speculation limits, community input requirements). 

About the Partner Organizations:

L4GG is a community of 125,000 lawyers, law students, and activists fighting to ensure equal rights, equal opportunities and equal justice under the law. We coordinate large scale pro bono programs and issue advocacy efforts, seeking not only to establish and enforce equality under the law, but to also create the social and economic conditions that lead to true equity.

NRDC combines the power of more than 3 million members and online activists with the expertise of some 700 scientists, lawyers, and other environmental specialists to confront the climate crisis, protect the planet's wildlife and wild places, and to ensure the rights of all people to clean air, clean water, and healthy communities.

This report seeks to provide comprehensive legal information around state- and city-level protections, including but not limited to:

1) each municipality and state’s spheres of legal authority and protections for tenants;

2) the applicable regulating state, municipal, and, where relevant, county agencies;

3) what communities in the municipality are considered “disadvantaged communities” (DACs) under Justice 40;

4) how the state and municipality regulate and permit for multi-family residence improvements;

5) whether the state has any stringency or pre-emption limitations with respect to existing federal law; and

6) procedures, timelines, and considerations for amending existing laws, programs, and policies.

The report will provide municipal decision-makers and advocates with references and links to publicly available legal citations, reports, and sources for all of the information provided.

Instructions for Participating Attorneys:

Note: L4GG strongly prefers that a single attorney be responsible for filling out one form per city. 

  1. Review the Questions.

    1. Before accessing the form, we recommend that you review all the research questions as formatted at the bottom of this document.

    2. Note that not all of the questions will be visible on the submission form unless you provide a certain response (e.g., “yes” to a yes or no prompt). 

  2. Conduct Your Research.

    1. Review key resources. When starting your research, your first step should be to review the existing research materials in key resources to expedite your research. These key resources include:

    2. Review the “Supplemental Tools and Resources” section below for additional background materials that you can use to guide your search. However, we strongly recommend that you prioritize the key resources above to focus your research.

    3. Brainstorm terms before you begin your search. Most topics can be described in numerous ways, and not all jurisdictions will use the same terminology. Develop a list of relevant terms up front and continue to refine it as you continue your research. For example, if you are searching for ordinances on emissions, you might also want to include terms like carbon dioxide and greenhouse gasses. Here, if you are looking to find an anti-displacement ordinance, you could also look up terms like renter’s bill of rights or homelessness prevention plan. Terms change, but the underlying policy driver remains.

    4. Look for newspaper coverage. News articles can help identify local governments that are implementing ordinances on your topic. One way to identify articles is to run a Google search for the topic. You might find an article that addresses how and why a specific city/county council considered adopting an ordinance and whether there was pushback. From there, you can go directly to the local government's code and search for the codified version. This technique works best for unique topics that have been considered by few, if any, jurisdictions as they are more likely to generate news coverage. Then use Westlaw or Lexis, if you have access, to take advantage of its powerful search engine and to refine your terminology.

    5. Consider using connector terms to specify where terms should appear in relation to one another within the documents in your search result. The idea is that the closer together your terms appear, the more relevant the document is likely to be. If a document describes your topic in a way you hadn't considered before, incorporate that terminology into your search strategy.

    6. Use the advanced search function within code publishing company websites. Some municipal code publishers, such as American Legal, allow you to search across all of the codes they publish with a single search. Otherwise, use Google's advanced search functionality to search across multiple codes from the same publisher. After you have entered your desired terms into the search boxes on the Google advanced search screen, enter the URL for the website you want to search in the "site or domain" box further down the page. Google will take the information you've entered into the boxes and will turn it into a search query that will look similar to the following: emissions OR carbon OR greenhouse site:https://library.municode.com/. All of the items in the search result should be part of the website that you specified in the "site or domain" search box.

    7. If none of the above work, try a plain-old Google search. If the municipal code publisher doesn't provide a search feature within their site, and using the "site or domain" box through Google's advanced search screen doesn't work, try a general Google search. Along with terms that describe your subject, make sure to include terms like city code, municipal code, or ordinances to help focus your results. This approach will also identify ordinances from municipalities that self-publish their codes.

  3. Compile Your Research.

    1. We recommend that during the legal research process, you gather your findings in a Word or Google document prior to completing the online form. Please do not rely solely on the existing research materials for your submission. All attorneys must confirm their responses to the form with their own research.

    2. Whenever discussing any laws, regulations, or cases in your responses, please provide both the Bluebook citation and link to the citation in Municode or Justia. You will likely find the citation or case in Westlaw or Lexis, but will then need to search for it in Municode or Justia to provide a publicly available link for the dashboard.

    3. Copy with Hyperlink. Whenever possible, please copy a link directly to the relevant section of the code you’re citing.  You can do this by right clicking on text in the relevant public web page and selecting the option to “copy link to highlight,” so whoever clicks said link is brought to the exact text you highlighted, helping readers navigate text-heavy documents.

  4. Submit Your Research.

    1. Once you have completed your research, please copy and paste your findings into the corresponding fields using this online form. 

    2. Submit the completed form online by Friday, June 21, 2024. 

    3. Please check your answers for accuracy before pressing “Submit.” 

Questions? Email Khadijah@L4GG.org and Nicole@L4GG.org. 

Tools:

When conducting this research, we request your assistance to ensure that the law is accurate, up-to-date, and based on all applicable state and municipal law – all relevant statutes, any relevant regulations implementing that statute, and any relevant case law that might affect the meaning of the statute.  Please do not rely solely on the existing resources identified above - all of your answers should be independently verified through your own legal research. 

We also separately request public versions of these laws, regulations, and cases so that readers of our reports (advocates, legislators, and the public) may freely and easily access the sources we cite.

Please use the legal tools we describe below:

  • Your Westlaw, Lexis, Bloomberg or Fastcase Account: We request that you begin all primary research in whichever subscription legal research tool you have access to and then ensure you have the newest version of the code through your municipality’s code site or state court site, searchable here. Lexis has the most extensive, up-to-date array of municipal codes but any of the above should  include references to the relevant municipal ordinance, state statute, case law and regulations.

    • Please feel free to use additional resources within these databases, including Lexis’ Lexis Advance, Capitol Watch, and State Net. Capitol Watch, an online tool provided by Westlaw for tracking legislation, may be useful when answering certain questions. State Net is a LexisAdvance-owned database of state-level proposed legislation and regulation that may also be helpful in answering certain questions.

  • Municode is Lexis’ free database of municipal codes. Upon review of all the free services, this is our preferred publicly available resource of the municipal codes, which allows advocates, legislators, and the public to quickly view most state codes without hitting a paywall. Please provide a hyperlink citation to municode for each statute cited unless it is unavailable, in which case public-facing codes should be discoverable on the municipality’s website or that of another code publisher, such as American Legal, General Code or Code Publishing Company.

  • HeinOnline is especially useful for finding state court decisions that modify municipal law. 

  • Justia: This is another publicly available resource of the state codes of each jurisdiction. However, Justia does not include Westlaw or Lexis’s keycite or red flags to show if there is superseding case law. If you need to cite a historical version of a state statute, please provide a Justia.com hyperlink citation to the most recent version of the statute or the relevant historical version of the statute as appropriate.

    • Make sure you cite Justia using Justia’s suggested universal citation, when possible, for state legislation. See here for a link to an example of Justia’s Universal Citation. When citing to proposed legislation, please cite to the state legislature’s website, because Justia cannot be used to cite to proposed legislation.  

  • Cornell Legal Information Institute: This is a publicly available resource of state regulations, maintained by Cornell Law School.

  • Google Scholar: This is a publicly available resource of case law.  While it is developed and maintained by Google, it is separate from a standard Google search and must be conducted from scholar.google.com and by clicking on the “case law” button.

  • Google: Please complete a general Google Search to see whether there is significant news in your municipality and its state not included in your form responses. Enter findings, with reference links, into the last question, “Is there anything else you think we should know?”

Supplemental Tools & Resources:

Tools on Tenant Anti-Displacement Protections:

Tools on Justice40 and other Environmental Justice Protections:

Tools on municipal law research:

RESEARCH QUESTIONS:

For your assigned municipality, please answer the following questions:

Tenant Protections — Existing Municipal 

  • Has the municipality codified an anti-displacement strategy into law, policy?

    • If yes, please provide the citation to the anti-displacement law.

  • Does the municipality have any housing protections identified in its city enabling documents (e.g., City Charter, City Constitution, etc.)

    • If yes, please provide citations to anywhere in the city’s enabling documents where it has protected housing access and any case law interpreting said protections.

  • Does the municipality have a process in place to consider community voices in land use decisions that could impact rental housing prices and stock?

    • If yes, please provide a citation to the process in the law.

  • Does the municipality complete regular housing needs assessments?

    • If yes, please provide a citation to where the regular housing needs assessment is mentioned.

    • If yes, how often and when was the last housing needs assessment completed?

    • If yes, please provide the link to the most recent housing needs assessment.

  • Does the municipality have a housing needs assessment dashboard? 

    • If yes, please provide the citation to the housing needs assessment dashboard.

  • Has the municipality undertaken an investments risk analysis for decarbonization investments to determine which neighborhoods are most at risk? (Along the lines of the Neighborhood Early Warning Systems approach used in San Francisco, Portland and Chicago or survey systems in Missoula and Puget Sound)

    • If yes, please provide the citation to the investments risk analysis for decarbonization investments.

    • If no, does the municipality have any analyses of investments that can be mined for data to create such an investments risk analysis? (E.g. Building permit and zoning variance data, demographic shifts, niche business permits.)

      • If yes, please cite to any such analyses of investments.

  • Has the municipality established a just cause eviction ordinance?

    • If yes, please provide the citation to just cause eviction ordinance.

  •  Does the municipality have rent stabilization ordinances for market housing?

    • If yes, please provide the citation(s) to the rent stabilization ordinance(s) for market housing.

Tenant Protections — Reserved to State 

  • What is the name of the state housing authority in this state?

  • Please provide the link to the state housing authority agency website,

  • Please explain the state housing authority's jurisdiction.

  • Does the state housing authority reserve the right to oversee any level of displacement prevention measures?

    • If yes, please provide citations to the state-level documents reserving the state housing authority's right to regulate or oversee displacement prevention measures

  • Does the state have a housing needs assessment dashboard?

    • If yes, please provide the citation to the state housing needs assessment dashboard.

Thank you for contributing to this important project. If you have any questions, please email us at Khadijah@L4GG.org and Nicole@L4GG.org.