Brandon Spratley moved into Tidewater Gardens, a public housing community in the St. Paul's quadrant of Norfolk, Virginia, in 2012. In his time in the community, he noticed the development's degradation.

He told Law360 in a January interview that the city's housing authority officials would often take weeks to address issues and make repairs.

When Spratley learned the city proposed the construction of 226 new public housing units on site and 309 new units overall — the number woefully short of the previous 618 units at Tidewater Gardens — he and the community knew more needed to be done to ensure their access to affordable housing.

The situation was "kind of like hell," when he first learned of the city's planned demolition of the community, Spratley said. Especially with housing prices skyrocketing, it was hard for community members to find places to relocate.

"They're not worried about anybody's feelings, or where people are going," he said. "They're just worrying about themselves."

In January 2020, two years after the project had gotten underway, Spratley and several community members, alongside the advocacy group New Virginia Majority and a community-organized group of public housing residents dubbed the St. Paul's Quadrant Tenant Group, sued to try to prevent the residents' displacement from the area.

After two years of litigation, the plaintiffs in December secured a deal that would allow a majority of residents to return to the area after construction, or seek other housing opportunities. A team from Hogan Lovells, working with the Legal Aid Society of Eastern Virginia, helped guide the deal.

"Our goal was to make sure that everybody who left Tidewater Gardens would have the opportunity to come back," Stan Brown, a senior counsel with Hogan Lovells and one of several attorneys who helped negotiate the settlement, said in a Dec. 23 interview.

The settlement sets out that instead of building only 226 replacement units in the Tidewater Gardens community, the city will build 260 units in the newly developed area. The city also has guaranteed that Tidewater Gardens residents will get first preference on tax-credit units built in the area and preference for placement in 41 units of a newly built development in Norfolk, Market Heights, Brown said.

"And we made sure that those were true guarantees, that they couldn't come up with any kind of excuses not to allow people to come back — for example, look at their credit history," Brown said.

Brown said he and Thomas Silverstein, associate director of the Fair Housing and Community Development Project at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, previously litigated a public housing dispute in Garden City, New York. The pair's relationship brought Hogan Lovells' presence to the St. Paul's dispute.

Brown's interest in fair housing issues was sparked when he returned to his hometown on Long Island, New York, after working in the D.C. area for nearly 48 years.

"When I moved back to New York … what I saw was that on Long Island nothing had changed in those 40 years," he said. "It was still highly segregated, and I was asked, 'Are you interested in working on this case?' and I said yes, and it went from there."

He added: "Segregation is such a chronic issue in this country and so much of it is the government, local government, redevelopment plans that just throw minorities out of communities, zoning that restricts minorities, so that has been the focus of the fair housing work that I've done."

Ron Jackson, executive director of the Norfolk Redevelopment and Housing Authority, told Law360 in an email Tuesday that the redevelopment plan for Tidewater Gardens — called the Choice Neighborhood Initiative — had been an ongoing city goal since 2005. For 13 years, the housing authority sought community input, which highlighted residents' desire for new units and housing choice vouchers. That input spurned the 2018 start to the redevelopment project.

The project is funded by a $30 million U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development grant, along with $200 million from low-income housing tax credits, private debt, community faith-based services, city and state sources, and additional federal funding.

Jackson said the program focuses on three core goals of providing for the community's residents, providing additional housing for those individuals, and forming neighborhoods through offering more social programs within Tidewater Gardens.

For example, the city hired Urban Strategies Inc., a human services nonprofit, to help Tidewater Gardens residents with job training, pursue opportunities to further their education and more.

An Illinois-based construction company, Brinshore Development, will take the reins on developing the new housing units and HUD's 2025 deadline for the project's completion is still expected to be met, Jackson said.

The litigation did not delay the project, but the COVID-19 pandemic "has certainly impacted the relocation process for residents, and contributed to increased construction costs that have resulted in some delay," he said.

Norfolk's original proposal would have given only a third of Tidewater Gardens' residents a chance to move back to the area after construction.

The city offered housing choice vouchers to residents who won't return to Tidewater Gardens, which Brown said was an inadequate solution. Families, including some of the 400 who have left so far, use those at highly segregated, often high-poverty areas of Norfolk.

"Basically, with a voucher, you can move into any unit that will accept them, but the problem is very few landlords, particularly in high-opportunity areas, will accept them," Brown said.

Brown described the case as "tough from the start," telling Law360 the team had to take around 30 depositions, with the city designating 15 separate experts, he said.

"We obviously had to hire experts as well, but it was a battle from the very start, is the bottom line," Brown said. "But from the very start we did also engage in very difficult settlement negotiations because we always thought this was a case that should be settled, that it was in everyone's interest to settle the case."

Silverstein noted that a challenging aspect of the case was that the redevelopment project had been ongoing alongside the litigation. That made the eventual resolution that much more challenging, he said.

"How the sort of facts change over the litigation is always a source of complexity and challenge, and having to adapt to just different circumstances," he said.

The NRHA seemed to drag its feet on finding adequate space for the off-site units as the issue was litigated, Silverstein said.

"What we saw over the course of the time that we were litigating the case, was that the city and the housing authority … had only come up with a concrete plan for a little bit over a quarter of those off-site units," he said. "So, although they theoretically could have been a good thing, we weren't seeing that in practice."

Brown said he knew the issue would be resolved out of court only "about 30 minutes before" the case was settled. "I guess I was disappointed that it took so long, but happy that in the end we were able to reach a resolution with the city and the NRHA," he said.
 
Jackson said the agreement "ratified the vision for redevelopment created together," by residents, the city, the NRHA and other stakeholders. He emphasized that the settlement reinforced two provisions originally included in the NRHA's plan, which was to ensure all eligible residents would be allowed to return and that housing choice vouchers would be provided to those who wanted to relocate.

"Every aspect of the original redevelopment plan, which was crafted to be the best feasible plan for Tidewater Gardens residents and for Norfolk, was examined for nearly two years in this litigation, and after that exhaustive examination, only very few changes were required by the settlement," he said.

The settlement also dictates that Norfolk must pass a law preventing discrimination based on income, and develop a fair housing plan "to persuade landlords in higher-opportunity areas to accept tenants who use housing choice vouchers as their source of funds for meeting some or all of their rental payments." 

The city also must develop a fair housing plan to enforce its new provisions and prevent that type of discrimination, Brown said.

"We're going to be looking at this issue closely," Brown said. "We're hopeful that the city and its housing authority will work to make sure that it works, but we'll be watching, so to speak."

--Editing by Robert Rudinger.