Background on Massachusetts Law Reform Institute
Founded in 1968, the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute (MLRI) is a statewide non-profit poverty law and policy center. Their mission is to advance economic, racial, and social justice through legal action, education, and advocacy, specializing in large-scale impact litigation and policy reforms. Their work encompasses a wide range of poverty law fields including housing, health care, family homelessness, public assistance, immigration, employment law, racial equity, child welfare, family law and domestic violence, and court reform.
The MLRI Housing Unit, primarily through the activity of lawyer Frank L. Smizik, was involved in several cases attempting to protect low-income and minority housing in urban settings in Massachusetts in the 1980s. In a 1982 case, Olga Ramos et al. v. Ernest Proulx et al., nine minority residents of Holyoke and two Hispanic non-profit service agencies, the Spanish American Union and the Brightwood Development Corporation, sued Mayor Proulx and the City of Holyoke for discriminatory practices related to disproportionately demolishing housing in low income and minority neighborhoods. They also sued the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for continuing to provide funds to Holyoke that were used in a discriminatory manner, and for failing to adequately monitor Holyoke’s activities, particularly in relation to their Community Development Block Grants (CDBG). Holyoke Gas and Electric were also named as defendants for cooperating with the city in these activities. After over ten years of litigation a settlement through consent decree was eventually reached, with greatly increased governmental and community responsibilities towards protecting and promoting equality, diversity, and opportunity in Holyoke housing.
In Boston, MLRI’s Smizik joined as council for the plaintiffs in a 1981 case, Viviana Munoz-Mendoza, et al. v. Samuel R. Pierce, Jr., et al., where South End residents sued HUD, claiming federal funds were being used to racially desegregate their neighborhood when a HUD grant for the Copley Place development did not make a thorough study of the impact on residential integration. For activists representing the interests of low-income and minority residents, the Copley Place project signified both the increasing threat of displacement and also a new political opportunity to push for long-sought housing on a site known as Tent City. In 1968, hundreds of demonstrators against displacement without relocation occupied a site where houses had been recently demolished for urban renewal projects. An impromptu sit-in began, and for three days between 100 and 400 people lived on the lot with many others joining the protest. The parking lot site became known as Tent City, and eventually the Tent City Task Force was established, becoming the Tent City Corporation, which worked to preserve affordable housing in the South End. However, no progress had been made on the site of the original protest, and the upscale Copley Place plans did not address the need for low-income housing in the neighborhood.
The Copley Place developers, Urban Investment and Development Co. (UIDC) claimed during negotiations that Copley Place would be completely privately financed, but in 1979, they announced that the project would not be financially feasible without public subsidy. Despite objections from South End residents, HUD awarded Copley Place an $18.8 million Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) in October 1980. With another opportunity to advocate for fair housing practice, the Munoz-Mendoza v. Pierce case was filed in federal court, seeking to block the new HUD funds on the grounds that it would accelerate displacement and impact racial integration. The court eventually found that the residents did have standing to argue injury over the building project’s cause of racial segregation of their neighborhood, a win for future housing policy and litigation, and a factor in the eventual raising of a new mixed-income community housing complex, Tent City, in 1988.
