The Legal Aid Society filed this class action lawsuit on behalf of more than 100,000 Black and Hispanic families, in order to challenge the New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) deliberate and prolonged racial steering in public housing projects, in violation of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. NYCHA set racial quotas for certain public housing projects, and then selected tenants to meet those goals, including by using codes to designate projects to which only white families should be referred. Soon after, the Justice Department filed its own lawsuit to challenge NYCHA’s racial discrimination.

Legal Aid entered into a consent decree in 1992 which included a permanent injunction prohibiting the continuation of NYCHA’s segregation practices, mandating the adoption of a new Tenant Selection and Assignment Plan (TSAP), and providing for remedial relief for some victims, including apartments for 2,000 Black and Hispanic families. The decree also required NYCHA to provide Legal Aid with at least 60 days’ notice before seeking to modify any TSAP provision for the following five years, where Legal Aid was given “the right ... to move the court to enjoin the proposed modification as inconsistent with [its] terms.” In 1995, Legal Aid secured an injunction to stop NYCHA from implementing a preference for working-families in building-communities that were more than 30 percent white, a NYCHA proposed policy which have slowed de-segregation efforts. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld the injunction in 2002 and the Supreme Court denied the City’s request for review.