InfoBytes Blog
11th Circuit rejects city’s FHA suit against bank
On July 30, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit dismissed the City of Miami Gardens (City) Fair Housing Act (FHA) suit against a national bank for lack of standing. This decision was the result of the appeal of a lower court decision previously covered by InfoBytes in June 2018. In the prior decision, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida granted the national bank’s motion for summary judgment. This was a loss for the City, which had argued that the bank made loans that were more expensive for minority borrowers as compared to non-minority borrowers, resulting in greater rates of default and foreclosure and leading to reduced property values and tax revenue for the City. The district court granted the national bank summary judgment based on the City’s failure to present sufficient evidence of discriminatory lending.
On appeal, the bank argued that the district court should have dismissed the claims for lack of standing because “‘the undisputed evidence confirmed that none of the 153 loans originated by [the bank] [within the limitation period] foreclosed,’ so the City could not have suffered an injury as a result of any of [the] loans.” The 11th Circuit agreed that the City lacked standing, concluding that the City’s evidence that certain loans may go into foreclosure at some point in the future “does not satisfy the requirement that a threatened injury be ‘imminent, not conjectural or hypothetical.’” Moreover, although the City referenced ten loans that had gone into foreclosure, the appellate court ruled that “the City did not produce any evidence of the effect of these foreclosures on property-tax revenues or municipal spending,” nor that the loans were issued on discriminatory terms. Accordingly, the 11th Circuit vacated the district court’s award of summary judgment, and held that the district court should have dismissed the action on standing grounds.