It's been a half-century since the passage of the Fair Housing Act, but there's general agreement that housing discrimination remains alive and well in many communities across the country.

A team of lawyers from Hogan Lovells, led since 2007 by senior counsel Stanley Brown, fought to turn around what it saw as inequity in Garden City, an affluent and predominately white Nassau County village less than 20 miles east of the heart of Manhattan.

And at the end of that long fight, Brown's team racked up victories that could have resonance in communities across the country that continue to struggle with fair housing. Last year, a federal judge found that a zoning decision by the village to limit apartment buildings was keeping minorities out.

“There's been a long history of housing segregation in the U.S. and it has been perpetrated by the federal government,” Brown said.

Brown went to work for the National Labor Relations Board just after obtaining his law degree from Georgetown University Law Center, arguing his first case before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit just six months after graduation.

Before joining Hogan Lovells in 1994, Brown worked for almost 20 years for Arent Fox. During his time with Hogan Lovells, his clients have included the Washington Nationals, the Ciena Corp., Duquense University, the Dana Corp. and Daimler Trucks.

The fight against housing discrimination in Garden City began in 2004 when the Nassau County government decided to sell off a large parcel of its land within the borders of Garden City.

At first, local leaders expressed a willingness to rezone the new parcel to allow for the construction of multifamily housing. Some villagers were aghast.

“People go nuts,” Brown said. “The community was up in arms over the possibility of affordable housing.”

In public hearings and in circulated materials, according to court papers, Garden City residents said allowing affordable housing on the site would negatively affect neighborhood “character” and “flavor,” depress property values, overburden sanitation services and, as one resident put it, allow for apartments that “could have four people or 10 people in an apartment and nobody is going to know that.”

The concerns they expressed, Brown said, were racially tinged dog whistles.

“These are code words,” Brown said. “They don't say, 'We don't want this because of black people.'”

Under pressure, village leaders altered the zoning plan for the site to allow less density.

But fair housing advocates fought back. With co-counsel from the Washington, D.C.-based Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and Frederick Brewington of the Law Offices of Frederick K. Brewington, Hogan Lovells attorneys filed suit against the village, alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act and the equal protection clause. They claimed that Nassau County failed to prevent the discrimination.

Brown, who joined the case after the defendants moved for summary judgment, had experience with fair housing but his main area of expertise lies in labor law.

Joe Rich, who recently retired from the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and who was on the case from the beginning, said Brown quickly got up to speed on the case and took charge of the plaintiffs' legal team. Rich said Brown wowed his colleagues not only with his skills as a leader but, after the case eventually went to trial, with his skills in the courtroom.

The case took some twists and turns on the way to trial; for example, after Edward Mangano was elected Nassau County executive in 2010, he announced plans to use the contested site for a family court complex and the county made the failing argument that the case was thus moot. But the plaintiffs were treated to a series of victories.

In 2013, following an 11-day bench trial, U.S. District Judge Arthur Spatt of the Eastern District of New York found that the village's acts perpetuated racial discrimination and ordered the local government to take remedial actions, such as adopting an inclusionary zoning ordinance.

“He was most impressive in putting together a very effective trial plan and running the team in a way that everyone had different jobs to do,” Rich said of Brown.

What kept Brown working on the Garden City case for about a decade, he said, was knowing that housing discrimination is at the root of so many social ills in certain areas, from segregation in schools to crime to lack of economic opportunities.

“I've learned a lot about this problem of housing segregation and how serious it is and how it impacts everything,” Brown said.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Spatt, finding that racial “code words” and euphemisms, rather than just outright racial animus, could serve as the basis for an intentional discrimination complaint.

The case went back to Spatt, who found in 2017 that Garden City's zoning decisions had a disparate impact on African-American and Latino residents.

The rulings by Spatt and the Second Circuit, Brown said, may have an impact across the country.

Brewington, Brown's co-counsel, said that in the years since the passage of the FHA, case law has made housing discrimination tougher to prove; in the Garden City case, it required a painstaking evaluation of documents, public actions and minutes from public meetings.

“Garden City got caught with its pants down,” Brewington said.

Brewington credited Brown's tactical style and his “clear and forceful” brand of leadership as factors that led the plaintiffs to win the case and lauded the lead counsel for having a “good moral compass” that helped plaintiffs' counsel win a case that may bring about positive social change.

Rich called it an “honor” and a “pleasure” to work alongside Brown.

“What he accomplished in this case was truly outstanding,” Rich said.

Stanley Brown, Senior Counsel at Hogan Lovells (Photo by David Handschuh/NYLJ)