WASHINGTON — A housing discrimination case scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court next month has been settled, the parties announced Wednesday night. Civil rights groups, wary of a Supreme Court ruling that they feared could weaken protections for victims of housing discrimination, welcomed the development.
The settlement, which concerned a housing development plan in Mount Holly, N.J., will leave open a question some of the justices seem eager to decide: whether claims under the Fair Housing Act require proof of intentional discrimination.
The court has agreed twice in the past two years to resolve whether proof of “disparate impact,” shown through statistics, is sufficient. But both cases were settled before the justices could rule.
The more recent one concerned a plan to demolish homes in Mount Holly Gardens, a mostly black and Hispanic section of the township, to make way for more expensive ones that housing advocates said were less affordable. Residents and a community group in Mount Holly, which is about 25 miles northeast of Philadelphia, sued, arguing that the plan violated the Fair Housing Act.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia, allowed the case to go to trial under the disparate-impact theory.
The settlement, which resolved a decade-long litigation, was approved at an evening meeting of the Mount Holly Township Council. It will increase the number of homes to be built and set some of them aside for current residents. Others will receive relocation allowances. The balance of the development project will proceed.
“Our goal was to ensure that Mount Holly Gardens would remain a viable community, not just a redevelopment parcel,” the township’s lawyer, George Saponaro, said in a statement.
A lawyer for the plaintiffs, Olga Pomar, said in a statement that the settlement “offers our clients the opportunity they have always wanted — to be able to remain in Mount Holly and participate in the revitalization of their community if they so choose, rather than being uprooted from the homes they have lived in for many years, separated from their neighbors, friends and families.”
The parties said they will ask the Supreme Court to dismiss the case, Mount Holly v. Mount Holly Gardens Citizens in Action, No. 11-1507. It had been scheduled to be argued on Dec. 4.
Last year, officials in St. Paul, under pressure from the Obama administration, settled a Supreme Court case presenting the same issue.