Legality of Housing Reparations
<p>Evanston, IL is <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-63165668" rel="nofollow noreferrer">offering</a> $25,000 grants for housing costs to black residents who owned homes before 1969, but denies assistance to Asian, Hispanic, or white residents.</p>
<p>My impression is that the Civil Rights Act and the 14th amendment prohibit discrimination based on race, and yet this law explicitly only applies to black residents. Some laws target races by saying &quot;we will compensate for X past action&quot;, but then the law is for people who suffered from the action, like discriminatory housing policies, which Hispanic and other residents suffered from too.</p>
<p>Is it legal for Evanston to give grants to black residents and not, say, Asian residents?</p>

<p>As a starting point, and because it is a common occurrence, we can conclude that the government <em>can</em> give a benefit to someone without having to give the same benefit to everyone. It is a political matter that a divorced spouse is entitled to Social Security benefits based on a marriage that lasted at least 10 years, and not 9 years. More such restrictions on benefits are listed <a href="https://www.ssa.gov/pubs/EN-05-10035.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">here</a>. Equal protection does not &quot;everybody gets the benefit&quot;.</p>
<p>Second, the government can give benefits to people whom it has harmed, again a point that hopefully does not require extensive justification. Third, and this leads to a concrete example, under the Japanese-American Evacuation Claims Act of 1948, $37 million was paid by the federal government to 26,000 who were sent to the Japanese-American concentration camps during WWII, so there is an &quot;effects-based&quot; racial discrimination that this benefit was only given to a specific racial group, because the underlying wrong was also racially-based, and likewise Aleut residents of the Aleutian Islands and the Pribilof islands were likewise compensated for harm done to them by the government. A person is not barred from compensation by wrongful government action just because the persons and others who are compensated for governmental wrong were the victims of a racially discriminatory wrong (therefore there is a racal correlate to the class of victims).</p>
<p>Victims of government harm can be conceptually divided into two groups: direct victims, and indirect victims. There is no controversy over the legality of the government compensating individuals for its wrongful actions. The only plausible point of legal objection would be over compensating people who descended from victims of government harm. There is a legal difference between lineage-based discrimination and race-based discrimination, simply because lineage-based discrimination is <em>not</em> racial discrimination, which is forbidden. There is a greater chance that lineage-based reparations could pass strict scrutiny, in that it more narrowly tailors the benefit to exactly reach the compelling government interest, as opposed to a policy that broadly gives a compensatory benefit to anyone who self-identifies as being of a particular race.</p>
<p>Finally, the question might be asked whether a program of government compensation for wrongful acts can be selective, in which victims it identifies for compensation. Yes, it can, for example the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensation_Act" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Radiation Exposure Compensation Act</a> for specific classes of persons harmed by government in connection with atmospheric A-bomb tests and uranium mining – it does not compensate <em>all</em> individuals who were harmed by government action. The question of which victims are compensated (by act of Congress) is not justiciable, it is a political question.</p>

<p>Regardless of anything else, it is certainly possible for a city who feels a particular party might have the basis for a lawsuit against them, to reach out to that party <em>prior to lawsuit</em> and &quot;settle&quot; the matter.</p>
<p>While this might seem like a giveaway, it's not quite.  It is a fair exchange of a <em>known, fixed, small</em> amount of money, <strong>plus certainty</strong>, in exchange for <strong>uncertainty</strong> and a costly litigation involving a much larger amount of money.</p>
<p>The <strong>plaintiff is now barred from suing on that matter</strong>, so the city enjoys the certainty that no million dollar judgment is hanging over their head. That reduces their insurance premiums.</p>
<p>I cannot speculate about which developments in facts or law would lead Evanston to think they might have such legal exposure.</p>

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