9th Circuit will rehear Oakland’s Fair Housing Act case en banc

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On April 20, a majority of nonrecused active judges of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit vacated a three-judge panel’s 2020 Fair Housing Act (FHA) decision and ordered that the case be reheard en banc. As previously covered by InfoBytes, the City of Oakland sued a national bank alleging violations of the FHA and the California Fair Employment and Housing Act, claiming the bank provided minority borrowers mortgage loans with less favorable terms than similarly situated non-minority borrowers, leading to disproportionate defaults and foreclosures causing (i) decreased property tax revenue; (ii) increases in the city’s expenditures; and (iii) neutralized spending in Oakland’s fair-housing programs. Last year, the three-judge panel affirmed both the district court’s denial of the bank’s motion to dismiss claims for decreased property tax revenue, as well as the court’s dismissal of Oakland’s claims for increased city expenditures. Regarding Oakland’s alleged municipal expenditure injuries, the panel agreed with the district court that Oakland’s complaint failed to account for independent variables that may have contributed or caused such injuries and that those alleged injuries therefore did not satisfy the FHA’s proximate-cause requirement. The panel further held that Oakland’s claims for injunctive and declaratory relief were also subject to the FHA’s proximate-cause requirement, and that on remand, the district court must determine whether Oakland’s allegations satisfied this requirement. The bank filed a petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc last October, arguing, among other things, that the panel had “fashioned a looser, FHA-specific proximate-case standard” in conflict with the U.S. Supreme Court’s decisions involving the City of Miami (covered by InfoBytes here). Oakland responded by noting, however, that the panel’s decision is consistent with the City of Miami decisions, and that, among other things, the Supreme Court’s decision did not establish “precise boundaries of proximate cause” but rather asked lower courts to define “the contours of proximate cause under the FHA and decide how that standard applies to the City’s claims for lost property-tax revenue and increased municipal expenses.”