Last week, a federal judge dismissed a legal claim accusing the city of San Diego of discriminating against white people. The dismissal was granted after the city dropped racial requirements from a program meant to assist households of color.
A 2022 study from the Urban Institute found that less than a third of Black households in San Diego own a home, compared to more than half of white households. Most Black San Diegans pay more than a third of their incomes to rent.
Racist housing and lending practices created that gap.
In 2023, the city of San Diego began offering grants and loans to help households of color buy homes.
They called it a first for San Diego to have a race-conscious program through a government agency.
“When you tout a program on those terms, you're putting a target on your back,” said legal analyst Dan Eaton.
Eaton said the 14th amendment was created after the Civil War to ensure rights for formerly enslaved African Americans, but the plain text says local governments can’t discriminate based on race.
That’s the argument the Californians for Equal Rights Foundation (CFER) used to sue.
The city dropped the race requirements from the program in November, and CEFR subsequently dropped the lawsuit.
Eaton said reverse discrimination suits go back to at least the 1970s.
They haven’t always succeeded — including in 2003, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor cast the Supreme Court’s deciding vote that schools could use race as part of a holistic review of an applicant’s file.
But under the current Supreme Court, these suits are increasingly successful. Eaton pointed to the recent lawsuit against Harvard and the University of North Carolina that barred the use of race in college admissions, essentially overriding the prior ruling.
“We have seen that ruling used in a variety of other settings to challenge programs that are explicitly or implicitly race or gender-conscious,” Eaton said.
The housing commission said only that they’re pleased the lawsuit was dropped.
CFER called it a victory for equality.
The foundation’s website says its mission is to defend merit. It describes a “culture war” against a “woke culture” that is “destroying America and its future generations!”
“Our growing track record shows CFER’s resolute commitment to equality,” a recent press release said, listing three legal victories since 2022 against California government programs assisting minority-owned businesses and trans people, and an ethnic studies curriculum.
U.S. Census data show that over the past decade, rates of homeownership fell slightly for San Diego County’s Black, Native American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander residents, widening a gap created a century ago.
From its founding in the 1930s until the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the Federal Housing Authority denied mortgage insurance to people of color, while providing massive subsidies for new home sales almost exclusively to white buyers. These deeds often included racial covenants, which restricted any subsequent sale of the home to white buyers.
Eaton said the city could still target assistance to a large portion of BIPOC households just by focusing criteria on income and lack of homeownership.
He also said they could legally defend the program’s former race requirements by proving that it served a “compelling interest” for the city, but they’d have to show also that it was “narrowly tailored” and that they had explored “race-neutral alternatives,” both of which the lawsuit challenged.
Bottom line, according to Eaton: “We are going to see more and more of these lawsuits.”
