Legal Case Summary

We'll hear argument first this morning in case 15-11-11, Bank of America Corporation versus the City of Miami and the Consolidated Case. Mr. Cotiel? Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court. The question in this case is whether cities can sue under one of our nation's most important laws the Fair Housing Act. Our answer to that question is yes, sometimes, and I mean three things by that. First, the answer can't be yes always, because that would eviscerate two key doctrines of this Court, Proximate Cause and Zone of Interests. Second, the answer can't be no-never, because cities can identify concrete harms that fall within the zone of interest, such as discrete expenditures to combat a particular defendant's racial misconduct. And third, this lawsuit fails both zone of interest and proximate cause, because the injury it seeks to remedy is unrelated to the acts purposes, and because that injury is several steps removed from any alleged acts of petitions. If I could start with zone of interest, this Court in Lexmark. Before you do that, Mr. Cotiel, could you please tell us you said yes, cities can sue under the FHA, but not in this scenario. Can you tell us what, under what circumstances could it be sued? Absolutely, Justice Ginsburg. So we want, our position is to preserve existing laws exactly where it is, and existing law identifies two places where cities can sue. One is a havens-like situation in which a city like the NGO in Havens is combating discrete instances of discrimination by defendant and outlaying things, so testers or something. So if you took the allegations in this complaint and made them out to be the banks were engaged in some sort of discriminatory loans, and the city had to basically expend funds to test that out, to enforce the housing statutes, that looks very much like the one-to-one relationship that was it issue in Havens, both for zone of interest and for proximate cause. But- I'm sorry, in Havens, the testers were not city employees. In Havens, they were private organization employees whose job it was to do this. So why are you attributing the testers' work to the city directly? Because, Justice Sotomayor, in that case, and this is paragraph F of the complaint, it's appendix page 20 in Havens, the complaint asks for the city's expenditures to combat, to identify specific things, including testers and other, you know, other questions. Why is this different than the other allegations in Havens that had to do, like here, with lost revenues, with lost tax base, which the Court cited as well, here there are direct expenditures and turns of increased monitoring of the area by police and other services. Are those city expenditures? So those, that's on Havens, Justice Sotomayor with respect, I think that's Gladstone. But- But our position is that to the extent the city can I plead a complaint that looks like Gladstone and this gets back to Justice Ginsburg's question, the second bucket in which the city can assert an injury is just like Gladstone in which there's a segregation claim that is being advanced. There was that racial steers, the realtors were literally steering African Americans out of the village. That is an anti-discrimination harm to the village itself. And so for zone of interest purposes, Gladstone doesn't talk about proximate cause at all, but for zone of interest purposes, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that

. That is the city as I don't talk about. You're thinking that if banks are forcing people out of a neighborhood that that's not discrimination? Oh, no, I'm saying you're on, or I'm saying that to the extent that that segregation interests absolutely it is, and that's what Gladstone recognizes. Here's what it doesn't recognize, though. It doesn't recognize something like this complaint, which is not that the city is pleading an anti-discrimination interest, rather they are borrowing someone else's anti-discrimination interest, namely the discriminatory loans that happen. So look, our position is the direct victims can obviously sue for that, but so too can the Justice Department and HUD, because that's what Congress empowered them to do to have a version of Perenn's patri-eye standing. But what they're saying is, well, we're herm downstream by our tax revenues and things like that. That looks very much like the shareholder in Thompson that's so concerned this Court, that is, the shareholder there was not identifying an anti-discrimination injury, they were identifying an economic injury, and cutting and pasting the anti-discrimination So, in Gladstone, which is the case of a village, they were a swing for diminished property values, which resulted in loss of revenue. So, to that extent, these two cases seem the same to me. The bottom line, the municipality said, our tax base has been depleted from the properties have gone way down in value. So, Justice Ginsburg, I think that that's not totally correct for two reasons. Number one, in Gladstone, the injury itself to the village was an anti-discrimination injury. That's the first part of Gladstone, this is found at page 110 of the opinion. Here they haven't identified an anti-discrimination harm to the city of Miami. They have identified an economic harm. So, that's why this case is not within the zone of interest, but the one there is. It looks much, you can think of it this way. There are kind of two loadstars in this Court's cases. One is the Thompson Shareholder, the Shareholder who has an economic injury. No doubt they're hurt by an underlying act of discrimination at the front end against someone who is fired, like the CEO who is fired for race discrimination or something like that. But this Court said, aw, that opens the door towards way too many losses. That was a hypothetical that Court brought up on its own. I'm surprised you put so much weight on Thompson, because that was the case that upheld standing. Oh, absolutely. Again, our position, I think, is fully consistent with Thompson that is the language in the opinion itself

. It certainly was something, Justice Kennedy raised it or a argument and then picked up by Justice Breyer in Thompson, but the actual language of the opinion does talk about shareholders, and it's not just Thompson. This Court's unanimous decision in Lex Marks says something much the same about landlords and utility companies, and if you accept their interpretation, you are opening the door, not just to the city, but to anyone else who can borrow someone else's anti-discrimination interest, cut and paste it and- As your concession, I call it a concession, your formulation that the city can sue sometimes, are you thinking that the city might be in the same position as home was in, was it the havens case? Yes. So there's two different buckets. In the first bucket, those are my first answer to Justice Ginsburg, yes. The city is like home, the NGO there, they're identifying specific concrete interests, the expenditures that they have to outlay to combat a defendant's, you know, racial misconduct. And so to the extent that a city wants to do that, that's absolutely fine. There's a second category of things to say. And I don't want to foreclose the prevention from finishing your answer. Are you saying that the city is limited as to the damages that it can recover? On that theory, in that bucket, yes, they'd be limited to the damages there. Now, on the second bucket, the segregation was- The damages are just the cost that they incur and trying to eliminate discrimination. Just as it is in-is the NGO in Havens. Now, Justice Kennedy, I see you're troubled by that, but I would point out the second thing is the Gladstone segregation category. And in that circumstance, the city can recover for, you know, it will put proximate cause to aside for a second, but just in terms of zone of interest, they can recover for the harms by making a integrated neighborhood become segregated. However, marginally, that may be. That is something they can recover for, as well as, of course, injunctive damages. What would that be added, police force or something like that? No, I don't think it would be, you know, again, that would, I think, run into proximate cause problems down the road because there are many steps of causality as a brief explain. What could the city recover for the general damages of having a more segregated community as a result of the defendant's actions? Well, I think that anything that they can directly outlay, and that may be very hard to identify, and that's why, normally, this is done more on the injunctive side. And I think the scheme Congress had in mind was to give Perens patri-standing to the Justice Department and to HUD to bring these cases here. Your concession runs into the same problem as your main argument. I mean, if the city can recover for having a more segregated environment, that seemed to be measured by all sorts of things, including tourists aren't going to want to visit it as much. How would you measure the damages if the harm is simply having a more segregated city? I don't know that it runs into the same thing. I'm making an argument about what this Court's precedence on standing require, starting with the 1990 decision in Luhon, which says a city has to identify, hit the words of the opinions, his injury. So here, the city has to identify an anti-discrimination interest that they have suffered. They can't cut and paste and borrow someone else's

. So to the extent we're talking about, as this complaint does, kind of diminution and tax spaces and so on, and that's their injury, that is not an anti-discrimination injury. And so the way to reconcile all of that? That suggests that when Congress passed the FHA, it was looking only at individual acts of discrimination to particular persons. But the FHA is a very peculiar and distinctive kind of administrative anti-discrimination statute, which really is focusing on community harms. And we talked about this a lot in the Texas housing case of a couple of years ago. So it's not just individuals who are harmed, its communities who are harmed, and that's the basic idea of the entire statute, why Congress passed it. And here, the cities are standing up and saying, every time you do this redlining and this reverse redlining, essentially a community is becoming lighted. And who better than the city to recognize that interest and to assert it? Well, we certainly recognize that that is something that is an issue in one of the goals of the Fair Housing Act. But I think the way Congress dealt with that is not by saying cities are empowered to have some sort of Perenz-Patriot standing. That's what they gave the Justice Department in HUD, and as well, by the way, Justice Kagan and 3610F, Congress empowered State and local enforcement over housing discrimination to deal with those types of community-centered problems that you're talking about. But here, they're not using any of that. They're coming in and saying, we are a, quote, person aggrieved. And a person aggrieved in a statute whose chapter is entitled, quote, enforcement by private persons, and our position is- Well, they are a person aggrieved under the given Congress's purposes in the act, because they're saying, as you did this redlining, as you did this reverse redlining, our community is the thing that makes us a city, which is becoming more and more blighted. And that's what we're trying to recover for. The costs of responding to that, the costs of not having revenues in order to carry out our services for that community and for others. So Justice Kagan? Not個人's Patria. This is their own interest in maintaining their communities free of the kind of racial discrimination that the act says causes neighborhood blight. But Justice Kagan, if the, if the complaint were written to say that it was about segregation causing blight, we would have no problem with it, which is what I was saying to Justice Ginsburg with respect to zone of interest. The city would fall within that zone of interest. That's Gladstone. And that's what the Kerner Commission report, which you're referring to, says, which is, blight is caused not just on its own, but it was a result of segregation. The references to blight in the Kerner Commission report follow from segregation. So there? How far out would damages extend in the hypothesis you just gave to Justice? So for zone of interest, I think, you know, you're able to get, you know, I don't think it matters. That is to the extent that the city can, excuse me, the complaint to the by the city pleads a segregation harm, even if it's downstream, they're within the zone of interest. Now to turn to proximate calls, though

. Sorry, I guess I don't understand why this isn't the segregation harm. Here, the city is saying you've done this red line and you've done this reverse red line and it does, it's not that it just causes various foreclosures all over the city. It's causing foreclosures in particular concentrated areas. And it's doing that because of racial segregation. And at the same time, it's preventing that racial segregation from ever being lifted because those communities are becoming more and more blighted and less and less capable of becoming integrated communities. So everything about this complaint is about racial segregation, it seems to me. Justice Kagan, I'd encourage you to just look back at what you just said and then read it against their complaint because none of that's in the complaint. So do you think everything I just said, if their complaint was written like that, that they could maintain this suit? They could maintain a suit for segregation in the measure of damages. Wouldn't be the measure of damages which they're seeking, which is recovery for the 2008 foreclosure crisis in Miami and to the tune of billions of dollars nationwide. It would be again, at most, and I want to get to Proximate Cause, but it'd be at most the delta between a segregated community that had now exist as a result of the defendant's particular conduct and an integrated community that would have existed otherwise. That would be the only measure of damages. How do you measure that? I'm not sure, and that's why I do think ultimately it may fail on Proximate Cause, but at least we've been talking so far about zone of interest. And that's, of course, all Gladstone dealt with was zone of interest. And with respect to zone of interest, I think that that complaint, the one that Justice Kagan, you read, would satisfy zone of interest. It would allow, at least, a city to come in and get injunctive relief to try and preserve the kind of community-centered concepts that you're talking about. Now, the question is, would they be able to recover damages for that, including damages to the diminution of the tax base? It's certainly true, Justice Ginsburg, that Gladstone has that line at the end of page 110, which talks about diminution and tax revenues. The next line is, of course, that's enough for Article III standing. So I don't think this Court has ever decided the question of whether or not Proximate Cause principles allow a segregation lawsuit to extend so far. So Gladstone would be, I take it from everything he said, that Gladstone would shrunk act of toxic core states. So I do think that that's right. That is, there would be so many steps involved, and you could just take a look at this complaint, and if you look at the solicitor General's beef for page 3, for page 30, you see all the steps that are required before the city is injured. You have to have discriminatory loans. Those discriminatory loans have to lead to defaults. The defaults have to lead to foreclosures

. The foreclosures need to lead to increase in vacancies. The increase in vacancies needs to lead to reduction in property values, and then that is the question. I usually think of Proximate Cause, correct me if I'm wrong, as a question of liability, not damages, pal's graph, no liability. Correct. So it is a- I do think that this Court has kind of thought about it that way. You could look for example at Lexmark, and as said, you know, I think what this Court has said is you look to the underlying damages that are being sought to understand is the complaint within the kind of standard Proximate Cause Principles. And here, if you accept their theory, that chain, you'll be doing something I don't know that this Court has ever done before, which is to allow such a long chain of causation, a non-direct cause of chain of causation to the tune of, again, billions of dollars to recover from the analysis. I'm sorry. Can I ask a separate question? We've been talking a lot about zone of interest, and a question about whether the zone of interest has supplies at all. Because you have these three cases prior to this 1988 reenactment of the old 1968 language. And in each of these three cases, in Traffocante, in Gladstone, in Havens, the Court very specifically says that this language stretches to the limits of Article III. So Congress is amending this statute in 1988 against that backdrop. Why shouldn't we understand that to me in that the language means it stretches to the limits of Article III? So for three reasons, Justice Kagan, the first is that it mows the Congressional Court. And I know you weren't on the Court for Thompson, but all of the rest of us were here. And in Thompson, the Court unanimously said- Sable from having thoughts on this. No, no, absolutely not. I was actually anticipating the reverse. And so, but I think the Court went through this. They heard the Solicitor General's argument at the time, which was that this was all to the limits and binding holdings and what this Court said. I guess I don't understand that. I mean, we can argue about whether these were holdings or whether these were dicta and there are arguments on both sides of that. But here I am, I'm Congress. I mean, suppose you were an advisor to a congressman. And the congressman said, okay, I don't really like this idea of going to the limits of Article III

. I think we should limit it. You say, no worries. Just use the same language. And he says, use the same language. That language has been consistently understood to go to the limits of Article III. And you say, oh, no, don't worry, it's dicta. And he says, okay, I feel relieved. We can now use this language. I mean, wouldn't you be fired? Well, your honor. I think I'd be fired if I did what you said, which is not actually follow what this Court's case is required, which is, quote, an express negation of the zone of interest test, not borrowing from some, you know, implicit doctrine. Because at its high watermark, this Court is set in JAMA. The Congressional ratification doctrine is only a guide toward what Congress implicitly thought. And is at least starting in 1983 in the block case, and I think going even before that, and the AGC case, perhaps going even before that, this Court has said you need an express negation by Congress in order to abrogate the zone of interest test. And that is just not what happened here at most of the borrowing. Slaughter. The strange development, because the sort of interest test, at least as it was announced in Zada processing, was understood to expand standing over what it had been before. So the zone of interest test was not having any standing. It was facilitating the ability to bring lawsuits. Well, certainly, but by the time of block, which was a case about limiting standing, and that was before 1988. So I think you've got that problem. You'd also be fired, Justice Kagan, for another reason in your hypothetical, which is the congressional report that you wrote, the House report, as a staffer, says, you know, there's only two things that you were trying to codify. One was that testers have standing under Havens, and the other is that administrative and judicial standing applies the same standard. Those are the only two things in the House report. I don't read the House report that way

. The House report does refer to a couple of particular aspects of those cases, but the House report seems to me to cut against you because it makes clear that Congress knew about those cases, and those cases are, of course, the cases, which said that standing stretches to the limits of Article 3. And if you really look at the legislative history of this act, it's pretty clear that when Congress is acting in 1988, it took off the shelf, a bill that was discussed in 1980. And in that bill, there was a lot of discussion about whether standing should go to the limits of Article 3. And Congress was thinking of changing that language, and Drew Day is the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, and the HUD Secretary. They both come in, and they tell Congress, if you change that language, it's a problem because then you're cutting back on standing, and Congress decided not to change that language, because it wanted, as Drew Day said, and as the HUD Secretary said, to go to the limits of Article 3. Kagan, I'll answer that, and then I'd like to turn to Proximate Paws. So, Justice Kagan, even if all of that is true, I think this Court has insisted on an express negation for precisely this reason, so that you don't go to Drew Day is what happened on this meeting. This is not an express limitation that means we're not, we're doing away, or we're keeping the zone of interest, because Lex Mark itself was just establishes that rule. There was no explicit statement what the Court did was look at the statute, the endangered species statute, look at its words, and decide that any person meant any person, and decided it did away with the zone of interest. Here we have a Congress in 1988 taking the word agreed, which was in the Title VII and many other statutes, but undefined, and what it did was take the definition, looked at by prior regulations, examined by this Court in its three cases establishing Article III standing, and put in a definition of a grieve that is very different from the normal definition. Why is that? It is not very different. It is a plain, disinter-definition of person-agreved. It doesn't look like what you're talking about the Endangered Species Act, which allows any person to sue. And if their interpretation, if it's accepted, you'd be doing something I think for the first time in the Federal Code. There is no all-comers damages statute that allows anyone to sue the way their interpretation would. Now, on approximate cause, our main point to you is this. This Court in Lexmark said there's a general rule, and there's an independent argument from zone of interest. There's a general rule that says that liability is cut off after the first step. If you adopt this theory of the complaint, you're accepting sixth-step liability in a way that this Court has never done before. It most, this Court in Lexmark unanimously said, you can expand it a little bit beyond the first step for a kind of one-to-one relationship. But here, this Court, this complaint is seeking damages for the foreclosure crisis of 2008, something that is way, way beyond anything this Court has insisted on. When you say that, when you said to me that the complaints that I wrote would have been covered by the Act, do you think it also would fall within approximate cause principles? I think that the complaint would have to satisfy a directness requirement. So to the extent that the city could identify segregation harms directly in the way that maybe a university could when they become, you know, when they lose diversity or something like that. To the extent there's some kind of direct cause to one-to-one relationship, absolutely 100% every day of the week

. And of course, Congress could write a statute that enables something and abrogate the traditional approximate cause doctrine. But here they haven't done any of that. Here they have applied again a kind of plain, jane version of damages. And what they're seeking here with this creative complaint, which, you know, the Fair Housing Act has been around since before I was born, and only until a couple of years ago, have we ever seen a complaint that looks anything like this. Here they're seeking to recover for the foreclosure crisis of 2008. That can't possibly satisfy approximate cause principles, starting with Justice Holmes' opinion in Southern Pacific in 1918, going all the way to the Holmes' opinion of this Court just more recently. So you've got kind of Holmes and Holmes. But there's one understanding. I guess when I started reading the briefs, I was confused about this because there's one understanding of approximate cause, which is that usually approximate cause is about foreseeability and only foreseeability. Now, there are definitely places where we've said there's a seditional directness requirement, but only in pretty discreet areas. I mean, because I sort of come back to this notion that I think what our precedence of Justice is, it's a little bit statute by statute as to whether approximate cause is a foreseeability inquiry and only that, or whether it has additional components. I'll answer that in an effective reserve, the balance of my time. I think this Court in paralleling said, quote, that proximate cause generally first to the basic requirement, there must be a direct relationship between the injury asserted in the injurious conduct. I can Carolina and Lexmark both do that. That is the general rule not the outlier. So what do we do with all of the statements in Havens? I'm quoting. There is little significance in the difference between directed indirect injuries for purposes of filing suit under the FHA. In Treficante, while members of minority groups were damaged the most from discrimination, the proponents of the legislation emphasize that those who were not the direct objects of discrimination had an interest in ensuring fair housing. Just to my right, absolutely agree with all of them. Those are standing cases. I mean, repeatedly said that the difference between direct and indirect, it has no meaning in this statute, but foreseeability always has meaning. Justice, to my right, you've never said anything about proximate cause. That all goes to standing. That's a completely different inquiry, if I'm your reserve

. Thank you, counsel. Mr. Pack. Mr. Chief Justice, please the Court. The City of Miami brought this, these cases, seeking injunctive relief and monetary damages because the bank's practice of providing minority borrowers with more expensive and riskier loans than they qualified for or that non-minority borrowers received. Actually frustrated and counteracted the city's efforts on fair housing and intended to cause the city to lose the benefits of social, professional, and business opportunities that come with an integrated community free from housing discrimination. Now, you heard my friend describe these as two buckets that if the complaint makes that out clearly, then we do have standing that we fit within the zone of interests. We thought that the original complaint that we filed made this apparent, the 11th Circuit agreed with us. But when the District Court dismissed us with prejudice on the original complaint, we made a motion for reconsideration to try to make more explicit what we thought was implicit in this complaint. As a result, the Court did deny us the opportunity to do that, but if you look at that amended complaint, it does talk about the fact that the city operates a department of community and economic development which takes complaints about fair housing that tries to mediate it, that the counsels that educates citizens about it and is in charge of all these kinds of efforts that we thought were part of our original complaint. At the same time, we recognized that the injury to the city is one that comes from the failure to fall and the non-discrimination principles embodied in the Fair Housing Act. And so those two buckets do exist in this complaint, and if they don't, then they do exist if we have the opportunity to amend the complaint and make it even more explicit. And I'm looking at the Joint Dependix page 186. You're opening paragraph where you say, be always conduct has harmed the residents of Miami and impaired the city's strong, longstanding and active commitment to open, integrated residential housing patterns and its attendant benefits of creating a stable community, community. And then you go on to the specific damages, the loss of tax revenues and increased expenses. It's those types of allegations in your amended complaint that you're pointing to? I would point to those. I'd point to those on 232 and 233, which describe the operation of the art department of community and economic development. And so as a result, this pretty much tracks Havens and Gladstone. It does indeed, Justice Sotomayor. And so as a result, we think that regardless of whether you take the article three approach to standing in this case or take a more narrow formulation that depends on the fact that our agreement is tied to violations of the act, the city of Miami has standing. And the, I don't understand either bank in their briefs, she disagree with us on that. As long as we make those pleadings. And so it seems odd that we would be prevented from making those pleadings as explicit as possible, certainly under rule 15

. So do you think you are a direct victim of discrimination because it seems to me that the damages you seek are not going to be paid to those who were the direct victims of the discrimination? We are seeking, we are a direct, a direct victim. This Court has repeatedly in all three cases dealing with standing under the Fair Housing Act recognized that it's direct and indirect damages that are at issue. The plaintiffs who are indirectly harmed are also harmed. And we are seeking for our own injuries. We do not have parents' potriotic status to sue for our residents. Q. Sir, injuries are derivative of the injury to the homeowners who had the subprime mortgages who suffered before closure and so on. You don't start with you. I understand your argument that you are down the line, but I don't see how you can say that your loss of property taxes is a direct injury. It is a direct, what we are saying is the injury here is the injury to our interest in an integrated community that has those business and social opportunities that this Court found cognizable in glass. Where is the limit to that? I mean, you asked for property taxes, but presumably you suffer loss of sales taxes because of the blight on the community. It's less attractive to tourists, so you lose tourist revenues. Why would you be able to recover loss in tourist revenues? We do not think we can. Why is that? Because you certainly can see the logic. It's not as attractive as City. People are going to go somewhere else and so on. But cities are in a unique position. This is their neighborhoods. These are their residents. They are zoning laws. The issues of property values and even property taxes are baked into the home loans that are made by the banks. They are a part and parcel of the issue here. And the fact is that the cities have an affirmative obligation that require them to look out for fair housing. Miami among other cities gets block grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development that require them to take a firm of. I'm not going to articulate in a sentence what the difference is. You don't get taxes that you would get from tourists come visiting. You do get property taxes. So what is it that cuts off the chain? Well, we believe that because it has to be tied specifically to the property. So we could get property taxes. How do we, how do our in cost of increased services, whether it's police or whatever, how is that? We're not claiming for the increased services of police, but our department that has to look for unsafe structures and find those structures because they've been abandoned after foreclosure. That our department that has to remediate neighborhoods. So this is the other end of having fought against affliction to fair housing. This is the other end when you try to remediate the neighborhoods and make it whole again. So those efforts are the ones that we seek damages for and those flow directly from it. Well, let's note that in Gladstone, this Court recognized that a city, the municipality is directly injured in its property values and the taxes that are foregone that go to services. And so that's where we see the direct connection. Kassel said that Gladstone never got to proximate cause. It just decided whether there was a standard. Justice Ginsburg, the Court did not describe proximate cause here, but it's hard to read that sentence as anything but referring to proximate cause. It is a direct injury that flows from the discriminatory conduct. Now, one thing that my friend also said was that we're seeking billions. Now, in our complaint, we mentioned the fact that we have lost millions, not hundreds of millions, not billions in property taxes. We know that before the City of Miami brought its case, the cities of Memphis and Baltimore, both brought cases. And they ended up settling cases with identical types of allegations for less than 10 million each. So we're not talking about huge sums of money that- Well, presumably one of the issues factored into the settlement was the question that's presented today. In other words, if you'd have prevailed, they wouldn't have to give up a percentage on the possibility that they might not be stating a claim. You know, it's possible at that point I don't believe anyone had raised proximate cause as a separate issue, but the cities had survived multiple motions to dismiss that went to the zone of interest. So that is what caused to other cities to see the survival of that and the settlement of those cases as a possibility to bring these cases

. I'm not going to articulate in a sentence what the difference is. You don't get taxes that you would get from tourists come visiting. You do get property taxes. So what is it that cuts off the chain? Well, we believe that because it has to be tied specifically to the property. So we could get property taxes. How do we, how do our in cost of increased services, whether it's police or whatever, how is that? We're not claiming for the increased services of police, but our department that has to look for unsafe structures and find those structures because they've been abandoned after foreclosure. That our department that has to remediate neighborhoods. So this is the other end of having fought against affliction to fair housing. This is the other end when you try to remediate the neighborhoods and make it whole again. So those efforts are the ones that we seek damages for and those flow directly from it. Well, let's note that in Gladstone, this Court recognized that a city, the municipality is directly injured in its property values and the taxes that are foregone that go to services. And so that's where we see the direct connection. Kassel said that Gladstone never got to proximate cause. It just decided whether there was a standard. Justice Ginsburg, the Court did not describe proximate cause here, but it's hard to read that sentence as anything but referring to proximate cause. It is a direct injury that flows from the discriminatory conduct. Now, one thing that my friend also said was that we're seeking billions. Now, in our complaint, we mentioned the fact that we have lost millions, not hundreds of millions, not billions in property taxes. We know that before the City of Miami brought its case, the cities of Memphis and Baltimore, both brought cases. And they ended up settling cases with identical types of allegations for less than 10 million each. So we're not talking about huge sums of money that- Well, presumably one of the issues factored into the settlement was the question that's presented today. In other words, if you'd have prevailed, they wouldn't have to give up a percentage on the possibility that they might not be stating a claim. You know, it's possible at that point I don't believe anyone had raised proximate cause as a separate issue, but the cities had survived multiple motions to dismiss that went to the zone of interest. So that is what caused to other cities to see the survival of that and the settlement of those cases as a possibility to bring these cases. Mr. Pack, would you go back to the question that Chief started with, which is how do you define the limits of your foreseigh-ability tests? Clearly less tourism, less sales tax, less of a lot of other things can be potentially foreseeable, but you're suggesting they're not recoverable. So is it because they're not foreseeable, or is it because they're not measurable? I think they're difficult to measure. And they may be foreseeable, but I think that also there's the potential for superseating events that cut off the causal chain there. But here, when you want us to use the word, the phrase, the concept proximate cause in determining how far damages extend? You know, I think it provides some help, but not a great deal of help. In Lexmark, for example, so where do I turn next? Well, you know, in Lexmark, the guidance that this Court gave was that damages occurred for the very conduct of statute prohibits. We think that what we've done is propose a approach that you're not prohibit decreasing property tax value. But it does prohibit prohibits discrimination in housing, and this is one of the damages that we suffer that is directly the result of these kinds of home loans. So therefore, we've tried to cabin our damages with respect to the specific properties and the damages they generate directly to the city. You know, all proximate cause requires us a sufficient connection between the alleged misconduct and the result, and it includes any injury the statute seeks to protect against. So here we have injuries that the statute seeks to protect against. My friend doesn't disagree that those injuries are protected by the statute, and certainly I'm glad, Stonehen, and Havens, those injuries are the injuries that this Court recognized. So the question then becomes what's appropriate damages. We think we have proposed damages that are tightly connected to the actual injury that the city has suffered. We have to go into that. We're not. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't, but I mean, do we have to decide this case, decide the damages, what damages are appropriate? You do not need to decide that. In fact, one of the things that the 11th Circuit noted is that in the time between when the briefs were written and when we argued the case, this Court came down with the decision in inclusive communities. And in that decision, the Court mentioned that there is a proximate cause pleading standard that needs to be incorporated. And the 11th Circuit said we're not going to delve into what that exactly is and remand it to the district court for that decision. And we think that that can play out in the further litigation of this lawsuit. So we include language along the lines that don't worry it's not going to be very much based on the experience in Baltimore and Memphis. Well, I just think that the fact that our opponents have indicated that we're talking about billions and billions of dollars and that this is about the 2008 financial crisis which I also wanted to deny needed a response. And with respect to the financial crisis, if the 2008 financial crisis was indeed the purpose of this lawsuit, then the statute of limitations, which is two years, would have ended this lawsuit long time ago

. Mr. Pack, would you go back to the question that Chief started with, which is how do you define the limits of your foreseigh-ability tests? Clearly less tourism, less sales tax, less of a lot of other things can be potentially foreseeable, but you're suggesting they're not recoverable. So is it because they're not foreseeable, or is it because they're not measurable? I think they're difficult to measure. And they may be foreseeable, but I think that also there's the potential for superseating events that cut off the causal chain there. But here, when you want us to use the word, the phrase, the concept proximate cause in determining how far damages extend? You know, I think it provides some help, but not a great deal of help. In Lexmark, for example, so where do I turn next? Well, you know, in Lexmark, the guidance that this Court gave was that damages occurred for the very conduct of statute prohibits. We think that what we've done is propose a approach that you're not prohibit decreasing property tax value. But it does prohibit prohibits discrimination in housing, and this is one of the damages that we suffer that is directly the result of these kinds of home loans. So therefore, we've tried to cabin our damages with respect to the specific properties and the damages they generate directly to the city. You know, all proximate cause requires us a sufficient connection between the alleged misconduct and the result, and it includes any injury the statute seeks to protect against. So here we have injuries that the statute seeks to protect against. My friend doesn't disagree that those injuries are protected by the statute, and certainly I'm glad, Stonehen, and Havens, those injuries are the injuries that this Court recognized. So the question then becomes what's appropriate damages. We think we have proposed damages that are tightly connected to the actual injury that the city has suffered. We have to go into that. We're not. I'm not saying we should or shouldn't, but I mean, do we have to decide this case, decide the damages, what damages are appropriate? You do not need to decide that. In fact, one of the things that the 11th Circuit noted is that in the time between when the briefs were written and when we argued the case, this Court came down with the decision in inclusive communities. And in that decision, the Court mentioned that there is a proximate cause pleading standard that needs to be incorporated. And the 11th Circuit said we're not going to delve into what that exactly is and remand it to the district court for that decision. And we think that that can play out in the further litigation of this lawsuit. So we include language along the lines that don't worry it's not going to be very much based on the experience in Baltimore and Memphis. Well, I just think that the fact that our opponents have indicated that we're talking about billions and billions of dollars and that this is about the 2008 financial crisis which I also wanted to deny needed a response. And with respect to the financial crisis, if the 2008 financial crisis was indeed the purpose of this lawsuit, then the statute of limitations, which is two years, would have ended this lawsuit long time ago. But instead what we found and what the 11th Circuit acknowledged is that while the kinds of loans, this financial crisis was set off by subprime lending. But the kinds of loans that are being offered here have taken different forms, but the underlying practice remains the same. That minority borrowers are getting more expensive and risk your loans that are quicker to foreclosure and that foreclosure maybe is many for some minorities seven times as frequently as non-minority borrowers. Is there a difference I couldn't, the complaint was not clear to me anyway between subprime loans and predatory loans? Predatory loans are used as sort of a generic term to talk about taking advantage of a borrower. Subprime loans are simply those loans that have interest rates that are so low that it looks like it's a wonderful deal until of course you look at some of the balloon payments that are labor. So are all subprime loans properly categorized as predatory? I believe that the subprime loans that fuel the financial crisis are all considered predatory. Suppose you have a business that is losing money, losing employees because the neighborhood is deteriorating. Do they have a stronger or a weaker claim than you do? They have lost profits from their business because the neighborhood has been debilitated? I think they have a weaker claim. We have a claim that's tied to the fact that they are property owners. They are property owners but they are also commercial property owners. And there's no damage to their personal property. But here what we're saying is if I can step back for a moment, the Endangered Species Act, this Court in Benefit versus Spears, recognized that Article 3 standing applies to the Endangered Species Act. But you still have to make a claim that's based on an interest in the preservation of animals. You can't make a claim based on discrimination that applies to housing discrimination or something like that. There is some generalized zone of interest that ties the statute to the cause of action. Here I say that the city has a special interest in fair housing and in integrated community that the FHA is designed to vindicate. The employer does not. The local dry cleaner does not. Now, they have this unique relationship to the fact that this is their community, their neighborhoods, their residents, which they zone and they decide how the property is supposed to be used and they provide services to every one of these residents. And so therefore- I think that this is a very difficult case to claim the kinds of damages that you've claimed. Remember, one difference between the FHA and Title VII, for example, is that we recognize indirect harms. We allow neighbors, testers, and the rest of the people who are in the city to claim non-profit organizations and cities and developers and real estate brokers all to sue to vindicate that interest. We don't allow the equivalent of a neighbor, a co-worker, to bring an action for discrimination that's been visited upon one of their colleagues. We don't allow others within that kind of realm to bring these actions

. But instead what we found and what the 11th Circuit acknowledged is that while the kinds of loans, this financial crisis was set off by subprime lending. But the kinds of loans that are being offered here have taken different forms, but the underlying practice remains the same. That minority borrowers are getting more expensive and risk your loans that are quicker to foreclosure and that foreclosure maybe is many for some minorities seven times as frequently as non-minority borrowers. Is there a difference I couldn't, the complaint was not clear to me anyway between subprime loans and predatory loans? Predatory loans are used as sort of a generic term to talk about taking advantage of a borrower. Subprime loans are simply those loans that have interest rates that are so low that it looks like it's a wonderful deal until of course you look at some of the balloon payments that are labor. So are all subprime loans properly categorized as predatory? I believe that the subprime loans that fuel the financial crisis are all considered predatory. Suppose you have a business that is losing money, losing employees because the neighborhood is deteriorating. Do they have a stronger or a weaker claim than you do? They have lost profits from their business because the neighborhood has been debilitated? I think they have a weaker claim. We have a claim that's tied to the fact that they are property owners. They are property owners but they are also commercial property owners. And there's no damage to their personal property. But here what we're saying is if I can step back for a moment, the Endangered Species Act, this Court in Benefit versus Spears, recognized that Article 3 standing applies to the Endangered Species Act. But you still have to make a claim that's based on an interest in the preservation of animals. You can't make a claim based on discrimination that applies to housing discrimination or something like that. There is some generalized zone of interest that ties the statute to the cause of action. Here I say that the city has a special interest in fair housing and in integrated community that the FHA is designed to vindicate. The employer does not. The local dry cleaner does not. Now, they have this unique relationship to the fact that this is their community, their neighborhoods, their residents, which they zone and they decide how the property is supposed to be used and they provide services to every one of these residents. And so therefore- I think that this is a very difficult case to claim the kinds of damages that you've claimed. Remember, one difference between the FHA and Title VII, for example, is that we recognize indirect harms. We allow neighbors, testers, and the rest of the people who are in the city to claim non-profit organizations and cities and developers and real estate brokers all to sue to vindicate that interest. We don't allow the equivalent of a neighbor, a co-worker, to bring an action for discrimination that's been visited upon one of their colleagues. We don't allow others within that kind of realm to bring these actions. And I think that's part of the problem that a business that makes this claim might have. So in the end, what I'm suggesting is that there are direct injuries by virtue of these two, what my friend describes as buckets, a direct injury to the city in its efforts to secure fair housing by draining those resources and those resources are recoverable and that, that indeed satisfies any kind of proximate cause, as well as an injury to that interest in an integrated community that allows the business opportunities, the social opportunities, the professional opportunities to flow, that this Court recognized in the Gladstone case and suggested that the appropriate, and even my friend, in his brief, suggest the appropriate damages in such an instance is the loss of property values and property taxes, which, frankly, are part and parcel of this whole mortgage loan industry. So we're not asking for something that's different, that's out of the realm that's away from what this process is, but something that's integral to that process. So in the end, what we suggest as the city of Miami is not so marginally involved in fair housing, is not working inconsistently and its injuries are so far field from it that we are outside the zone of interest, whatever zone of interest applies, because after all, it's not a very demanding test, and there's a reason for that, and that's because we are grieved in every sense of the word by the discrimination that was propounded here. And at the same time, we think that that statement from Lexmark that I quoted earlier, that it has to essentially flow from the fact that there was some violation of the act, is it sufficient, too? In each instance, we think our injury is direct, but even if it were to be examined more minutely as my friend suggests, those minutely steps are all true of the individual borrower who has to take out a discriminatory loan, who has to then default, who has to then arrive in foreclosure, who then has to find that he has to abandon that house, and then he can bring his lawsuit still, because all those different steps are, you know, the financial state of the economy, the nature of his job situation, his family situation, all have effects on that, but we recognize that this is approximately caused, his damages are approximately caused from the injury that the Fair Housing Act recognizes. So for those reasons, I suggest that this Court ought to firm the 11th Circuit. Thank you, Council. Mr. Ganon? Mr. Chief Justice, and may I please the Court. In Gladstone, this Court concluded that a municipality was injured if discriminatory housing practices caused a reduction in property values and therefore diminished its tax revenues. Congress recodified that result with its 1988 amendments to the Fair Housing Act, and the Court should hold that the same injury is still cognizable today, whether under an Article III rationale or a broad zone of interest rationale. If I could turn to some of the points that have already come up today, my friend on the other side says that you can't cut and paste injury from one plaintiff to one victim of discrimination to another. That's an argument that Gladstone specifically rejected. In footnote 9, the Court said that what matters here, and this is what was, this is what was the breadth of the trilogy of Fair Housing Act cases that the Court decided between 1972 and 1982, is that somebody has had their legal rights violated by discriminatory housing practices. It doesn't necessarily have to be the plaintiffs' legal rights. The plaintiff has to be injured by that violation, but it doesn't have to be their rights that are violated, and that's what we think is the work that's being done by the atypical definition of a grieved person that Congress put back into the statute. Well, that's a very broad statement, Mr. Ganon. What do you do then with the restaurant or the dry cleaner or the laundry or whatever that wants to sue for somebody else's discrimination? Well, I agree with my friends on both sides that that limit is going to come from the proximate cause analysis. We don't disagree that there is still a proximate cause limitation implicit in the statute. And here we think that although Gladstone didn't address proximate cause in those terms, it is important and significant that the Court there said that the city is directly injured by the decrease in property values. And we think that the test, the ultimate test that this Court stated in Lexmark, of course the Court has repeatedly recognized that proximate cause is a statute by statute situational inquiry that depends upon the nature of the individual statutes. But the ultimate test is whether there is a sufficiently close connection to the conduct that the statute prohibits

. And I think that's part of the problem that a business that makes this claim might have. So in the end, what I'm suggesting is that there are direct injuries by virtue of these two, what my friend describes as buckets, a direct injury to the city in its efforts to secure fair housing by draining those resources and those resources are recoverable and that, that indeed satisfies any kind of proximate cause, as well as an injury to that interest in an integrated community that allows the business opportunities, the social opportunities, the professional opportunities to flow, that this Court recognized in the Gladstone case and suggested that the appropriate, and even my friend, in his brief, suggest the appropriate damages in such an instance is the loss of property values and property taxes, which, frankly, are part and parcel of this whole mortgage loan industry. So we're not asking for something that's different, that's out of the realm that's away from what this process is, but something that's integral to that process. So in the end, what we suggest as the city of Miami is not so marginally involved in fair housing, is not working inconsistently and its injuries are so far field from it that we are outside the zone of interest, whatever zone of interest applies, because after all, it's not a very demanding test, and there's a reason for that, and that's because we are grieved in every sense of the word by the discrimination that was propounded here. And at the same time, we think that that statement from Lexmark that I quoted earlier, that it has to essentially flow from the fact that there was some violation of the act, is it sufficient, too? In each instance, we think our injury is direct, but even if it were to be examined more minutely as my friend suggests, those minutely steps are all true of the individual borrower who has to take out a discriminatory loan, who has to then default, who has to then arrive in foreclosure, who then has to find that he has to abandon that house, and then he can bring his lawsuit still, because all those different steps are, you know, the financial state of the economy, the nature of his job situation, his family situation, all have effects on that, but we recognize that this is approximately caused, his damages are approximately caused from the injury that the Fair Housing Act recognizes. So for those reasons, I suggest that this Court ought to firm the 11th Circuit. Thank you, Council. Mr. Ganon? Mr. Chief Justice, and may I please the Court. In Gladstone, this Court concluded that a municipality was injured if discriminatory housing practices caused a reduction in property values and therefore diminished its tax revenues. Congress recodified that result with its 1988 amendments to the Fair Housing Act, and the Court should hold that the same injury is still cognizable today, whether under an Article III rationale or a broad zone of interest rationale. If I could turn to some of the points that have already come up today, my friend on the other side says that you can't cut and paste injury from one plaintiff to one victim of discrimination to another. That's an argument that Gladstone specifically rejected. In footnote 9, the Court said that what matters here, and this is what was, this is what was the breadth of the trilogy of Fair Housing Act cases that the Court decided between 1972 and 1982, is that somebody has had their legal rights violated by discriminatory housing practices. It doesn't necessarily have to be the plaintiffs' legal rights. The plaintiff has to be injured by that violation, but it doesn't have to be their rights that are violated, and that's what we think is the work that's being done by the atypical definition of a grieved person that Congress put back into the statute. Well, that's a very broad statement, Mr. Ganon. What do you do then with the restaurant or the dry cleaner or the laundry or whatever that wants to sue for somebody else's discrimination? Well, I agree with my friends on both sides that that limit is going to come from the proximate cause analysis. We don't disagree that there is still a proximate cause limitation implicit in the statute. And here we think that although Gladstone didn't address proximate cause in those terms, it is important and significant that the Court there said that the city is directly injured by the decrease in property values. And we think that the test, the ultimate test that this Court stated in Lexmark, of course the Court has repeatedly recognized that proximate cause is a statute by statute situational inquiry that depends upon the nature of the individual statutes. But the ultimate test is whether there is a sufficiently close connection to the conduct that the statute prohibits. And what this statute prohibits is discriminatory housing practice. I may not need to go into it, but I mean, how does proximate cause help? You could have a dry cleaner or you could have a magazine that writes about successes in integration. It wants to write about this community before I got wrecked or whatever. Clothes could be absolutely clear. Absolutely clear. 15 bishops testifies. Totally causal-related. Well, I mean, do they all have suits? Well, I think that what we are saying is that they haven't even argued that. I mean, I think that to the extent that they can get themselves into the home framework from Havens, then maybe they could say that they have specific costs that are associated with fighting discrimination. But I wanted to say that what they have. You heard what the question was, the question before, and it still is if we get into it, we may not need to. But if we did, it would be somebody in Alaska who writes magazine articles about successes in integration is going to be wrecked because they don't have the integration in his prime example. Absolutely clear of the causal connection. And he'd bring this lawsuit, I mean, surprised. We think that that is further afield. And we think that, you think it's further afield. Yes, and that they put that in. No, not because of causation, though, because it's caused. I made hypothetical where we proved that it's caused. Yes, it is caused, but proximate cause is always about determining that something that is caused is still too far away, either in terms of foreseeability or distance or intervening cause or something else. And so proximate cause, by definition, is carving out something that otherwise would be caused by. Otherwise, it wouldn't be doing anything different from traceability analysis under Article 3. And here we think that the reason why this is sufficiently closely connected to the conduct of the statute prohibits is that this statute prohibits discriminatory housing practices. And those practices include things like the terms and conditions of the sale of rental of property, things about the real estate related transactions, things like blockbusting, which was specifically prohibited by 3604E

. And what this statute prohibits is discriminatory housing practice. I may not need to go into it, but I mean, how does proximate cause help? You could have a dry cleaner or you could have a magazine that writes about successes in integration. It wants to write about this community before I got wrecked or whatever. Clothes could be absolutely clear. Absolutely clear. 15 bishops testifies. Totally causal-related. Well, I mean, do they all have suits? Well, I think that what we are saying is that they haven't even argued that. I mean, I think that to the extent that they can get themselves into the home framework from Havens, then maybe they could say that they have specific costs that are associated with fighting discrimination. But I wanted to say that what they have. You heard what the question was, the question before, and it still is if we get into it, we may not need to. But if we did, it would be somebody in Alaska who writes magazine articles about successes in integration is going to be wrecked because they don't have the integration in his prime example. Absolutely clear of the causal connection. And he'd bring this lawsuit, I mean, surprised. We think that that is further afield. And we think that, you think it's further afield. Yes, and that they put that in. No, not because of causation, though, because it's caused. I made hypothetical where we proved that it's caused. Yes, it is caused, but proximate cause is always about determining that something that is caused is still too far away, either in terms of foreseeability or distance or intervening cause or something else. And so proximate cause, by definition, is carving out something that otherwise would be caused by. Otherwise, it wouldn't be doing anything different from traceability analysis under Article 3. And here we think that the reason why this is sufficiently closely connected to the conduct of the statute prohibits is that this statute prohibits discriminatory housing practices. And those practices include things like the terms and conditions of the sale of rental of property, things about the real estate related transactions, things like blockbusting, which was specifically prohibited by 3604E. Blockbusting was a practice in which somebody would go into a neighborhood and induce artificially low-price panic selling by saying there are minorities coming into this neighborhood. That conduct had an effect on property prices. How do we write it? Let's take the corner grocer who had an running account with that home for the gardener who every week cleaned the property. I doubt someone who's in foreclosure can afford a gardener. But let's assume that possibility. Why, how do we write that the city has standing and its injuries are approximately caused, but those people don't? I think the company shareholder, what's the, how do we say it? The length that we see is, is two property values. And that's the, that's the injury that the Court already recognized in Gladstone. This is a question of congressional intent. When you're construing proximate cause, you're trying to figure out what Congress intended. This Court had already recognized that a city was directly injured by decreased property values. The same thing it said was true of the neighbors in Gladstone. The neighbors who have the property values diminished were able to recover. I would say that the corner store, to the extent that it has its property values diminished, is situated just like one of those neighbors. To the extent that it's talking about something else like loss profits or the utility company is complaining, they lost a, a, a customer, those things we think are further afield and not so closely connected and proximate cause is traditionally done. That's the type of- That's the more concrete answers that the utility company, you say it's further afield, is it covered or not? We think it's not covered. We think that's, that, that what this Court recognized in Gladstone is something that Congress was taking account of. And the property value, the effect on property values, is closely tied to discriminatory housing practices. Congress was entitled to think that that relationship would endure. And as in Lexmark, there's a one-to-one relationship. How about real estate brokers whose commission is based on the value of the property? Yes. A real estate broker who were involved in the transaction, we discuss in our brief that those are the type of people who have an interest in the transaction. Even if it's just an economic interest, they're able to recover. I don't understand my friends on the other side to be disputing that, that, that if they have a transaction that fails to go through because of this, because of racial discrimination, then they consume. And we think it is important for the Court to remember that you don't just have to have the defense sector

. Blockbusting was a practice in which somebody would go into a neighborhood and induce artificially low-price panic selling by saying there are minorities coming into this neighborhood. That conduct had an effect on property prices. How do we write it? Let's take the corner grocer who had an running account with that home for the gardener who every week cleaned the property. I doubt someone who's in foreclosure can afford a gardener. But let's assume that possibility. Why, how do we write that the city has standing and its injuries are approximately caused, but those people don't? I think the company shareholder, what's the, how do we say it? The length that we see is, is two property values. And that's the, that's the injury that the Court already recognized in Gladstone. This is a question of congressional intent. When you're construing proximate cause, you're trying to figure out what Congress intended. This Court had already recognized that a city was directly injured by decreased property values. The same thing it said was true of the neighbors in Gladstone. The neighbors who have the property values diminished were able to recover. I would say that the corner store, to the extent that it has its property values diminished, is situated just like one of those neighbors. To the extent that it's talking about something else like loss profits or the utility company is complaining, they lost a, a, a customer, those things we think are further afield and not so closely connected and proximate cause is traditionally done. That's the type of- That's the more concrete answers that the utility company, you say it's further afield, is it covered or not? We think it's not covered. We think that's, that, that what this Court recognized in Gladstone is something that Congress was taking account of. And the property value, the effect on property values, is closely tied to discriminatory housing practices. Congress was entitled to think that that relationship would endure. And as in Lexmark, there's a one-to-one relationship. How about real estate brokers whose commission is based on the value of the property? Yes. A real estate broker who were involved in the transaction, we discuss in our brief that those are the type of people who have an interest in the transaction. Even if it's just an economic interest, they're able to recover. I don't understand my friends on the other side to be disputing that, that, that if they have a transaction that fails to go through because of this, because of racial discrimination, then they consume. And we think it is important for the Court to remember that you don't just have to have the defense sector. How do I have the state broker generally? They said this is now a poor community. Our commissions are going to be lower across the board. I think that they're, they're somehow different than the corner grocery store. I don't get it. No, I think if they were just generically saying business is down, that's my type of thing. That might be harder for them to establish the types of cases that we've previously seen are where developers, brokers, real estate, real estate agents have, have talked about specific transactions that they can say that were caused by, by discriminatory housing practices. And we do think it is important for the Court to recall that those cases involve plaintiffs who don't necessarily have a quote unquote desegregation interest, as my, as my friend on the other side puts it. It is enough that they are injured in their economic interests. And as the Court pointed out, it inclusive communities are real estate developers who are often a good plaintiff to challenge a local discriminatory housing practice. We don't require that they add on, that they're, they're something like the nonprofit in Havens, where in addition to wanting to make money off of developing their property, they also have an interest in desegregation. And similarly. So, the answer, please. Your answer, I think to the question, Mike, is that it's limited to those cognizable suits contemplated by the statute, and you see contemplated by the statute as having to do with the possession or value of the property? We think that the, the, the, the farms that flow directly from changes in property value were ones that Congress contemplated both in 1968, and certainly in 1988, after this Court had already, had already enumerated that as a particular type of harm that was at issue here. And we don't think that the city should have to establish that there's been a change in racial composition of the neighborhood in order to bring a suit, because the Fairhousing Act is intended to cover, is intended to prohibit discriminatory housing practices throughout the United States, and that includes segregated communities that aren't changing. So, if there's discrimination. The city can sue based on isolated instances of discrimination to the extent that the basic pitch of the, of your position is that it affects the community as a whole, and the city has an interest in ensuring the, the stability of the communities, not that the city could enforce particular instances of housing discrimination. I, I think it's both. I think that they do have the community representing interest, and, but I also think that to the extent that they can say, we suffer a harm from this particular transaction. Let's assume it's just one particular apartment complex or something. It does. It does. One particular home. Yeah, I suspect that that's one where there wouldn't be that much in it to have the city bring that suit instead of the individual loan owner. But, I don't know if there's that much in it

. How do I have the state broker generally? They said this is now a poor community. Our commissions are going to be lower across the board. I think that they're, they're somehow different than the corner grocery store. I don't get it. No, I think if they were just generically saying business is down, that's my type of thing. That might be harder for them to establish the types of cases that we've previously seen are where developers, brokers, real estate, real estate agents have, have talked about specific transactions that they can say that were caused by, by discriminatory housing practices. And we do think it is important for the Court to recall that those cases involve plaintiffs who don't necessarily have a quote unquote desegregation interest, as my, as my friend on the other side puts it. It is enough that they are injured in their economic interests. And as the Court pointed out, it inclusive communities are real estate developers who are often a good plaintiff to challenge a local discriminatory housing practice. We don't require that they add on, that they're, they're something like the nonprofit in Havens, where in addition to wanting to make money off of developing their property, they also have an interest in desegregation. And similarly. So, the answer, please. Your answer, I think to the question, Mike, is that it's limited to those cognizable suits contemplated by the statute, and you see contemplated by the statute as having to do with the possession or value of the property? We think that the, the, the, the farms that flow directly from changes in property value were ones that Congress contemplated both in 1968, and certainly in 1988, after this Court had already, had already enumerated that as a particular type of harm that was at issue here. And we don't think that the city should have to establish that there's been a change in racial composition of the neighborhood in order to bring a suit, because the Fairhousing Act is intended to cover, is intended to prohibit discriminatory housing practices throughout the United States, and that includes segregated communities that aren't changing. So, if there's discrimination. The city can sue based on isolated instances of discrimination to the extent that the basic pitch of the, of your position is that it affects the community as a whole, and the city has an interest in ensuring the, the stability of the communities, not that the city could enforce particular instances of housing discrimination. I, I think it's both. I think that they do have the community representing interest, and, but I also think that to the extent that they can say, we suffer a harm from this particular transaction. Let's assume it's just one particular apartment complex or something. It does. It does. One particular home. Yeah, I suspect that that's one where there wouldn't be that much in it to have the city bring that suit instead of the individual loan owner. But, I don't know if there's that much in it. Can the city bring that aspect up? Yes. To the extent that they can say that there's a one-to-one relationship, they are just like the micrature manufacturer in Lexmark. Whenever there's a decline in property value on the part of the primary victim or the homeowner here, they suffer a corresponding decline in their tax revenue. So the city can bring an action of the sort we're talking about here in the case of one subprime mortgage that results in a foreclosure. If they can say that that, that, that that was caused by discriminatory housing practices and that it injured them, yes. That's just like the, the residents in Traficante or the city in Gladstone, they're able to say we are injured by this. Thank you, counsel. Mr. Contille, you have four minutes. Four points, Your Honor. First, with respect to this complaint, paragraph 186 and so on, we agree our Blue Reef page 33 says that they do identify an interest, but they have to plausibly allege some impact on segregation in order to survive. They haven't done that. They haven't told you whether segregation is increasing or decreasing as a result of the bank's conduct. Second, the damages here they seek are way, way broader than what they've painted out to be. Just the taxes and the complaint are bad enough. Indeed, the Bank of America petition, Sir Petition at page 34, sites one of the complaints by the file by the same counsel against Cobb County seeking, quote, hundreds of millions of dollars. There are 19,000, 300 cities in America. If you adopt their theory, you'd be allowing all of them to bring complaints just like this. Now, we've said that if you accept their interpretation, you'd be opening the door. The solicitor general says, ah, proximate cause is somehow a limitation on that. Their own proximate cause test, as a brief explains, eliminates the directness requirement. So I think it will be hard, and that's why I don't think he had an answer, Justice Breyer, on the magazine, or things like that. And when Justice O. Tamayor, you asked him how to write the opinion to avoid the gardener

. Can the city bring that aspect up? Yes. To the extent that they can say that there's a one-to-one relationship, they are just like the micrature manufacturer in Lexmark. Whenever there's a decline in property value on the part of the primary victim or the homeowner here, they suffer a corresponding decline in their tax revenue. So the city can bring an action of the sort we're talking about here in the case of one subprime mortgage that results in a foreclosure. If they can say that that, that, that that was caused by discriminatory housing practices and that it injured them, yes. That's just like the, the residents in Traficante or the city in Gladstone, they're able to say we are injured by this. Thank you, counsel. Mr. Contille, you have four minutes. Four points, Your Honor. First, with respect to this complaint, paragraph 186 and so on, we agree our Blue Reef page 33 says that they do identify an interest, but they have to plausibly allege some impact on segregation in order to survive. They haven't done that. They haven't told you whether segregation is increasing or decreasing as a result of the bank's conduct. Second, the damages here they seek are way, way broader than what they've painted out to be. Just the taxes and the complaint are bad enough. Indeed, the Bank of America petition, Sir Petition at page 34, sites one of the complaints by the file by the same counsel against Cobb County seeking, quote, hundreds of millions of dollars. There are 19,000, 300 cities in America. If you adopt their theory, you'd be allowing all of them to bring complaints just like this. Now, we've said that if you accept their interpretation, you'd be opening the door. The solicitor general says, ah, proximate cause is somehow a limitation on that. Their own proximate cause test, as a brief explains, eliminates the directness requirement. So I think it will be hard, and that's why I don't think he had an answer, Justice Breyer, on the magazine, or things like that. And when Justice O. Tamayor, you asked him how to write the opinion to avoid the gardener. His answer was, look at Gladstone, because Gladstone has a direct reduction in property values. That cannot be a consistent theory for this Court on proximate cause principles. For many reasons, one of which is Gladstone's not a proximate cause case at all. It's not brief to argue. But second, even that language he's reading to you is only at the very end of Gladstone saying that if you have a reduction in property values, then it will directly reduce the tax base. This complaints totally different. You've got five steps as the solicitor general's own brief explains before you even get to the reduction in property values. Each of those are opportunities for intervening causes, and all the kinds of things that this Court in Lexmark said are the reasons why we cut off liability at the first step. Now, his other answer was to say, well, look at the Congressional Report. The Congressional Report identifies that Congress was concerned with property values, and therefore concerned with cities. That Congressional Report also says Congress is equally concerned with employers who suffered from segregated neighborhoods, employees who were fired because the neighborhoods suffered from blight and shops and other things. So if you take their standard, which is, look at the Congressional Report, figure out who's harmed by housing discrimination, even downstream, you would come to the same conclusion. We do, which is this is an unlimited theory of liability. It would allow landlords to sue, utilities companies to sue, and just as so to my or gardeners to sue. We've also said one other thing, and Justice Kagan, this gets to your point earlier about the Congressional scheme. If you adopt on zone of interest their interpretation of agreed persons, 3612, allows agreed persons to intervene as a matter of right in federal litigation. Our view is what Congress did was to empower direct victims to sue, as well as some indirect victims in that Justice Department. Their interpretation says any city, including one that's not even motivated by the same type of, you know, presumably wonderful motivations as a city of Miami can come in and intervene in a direct victims lawsuit and possibly muck it up in any number of directions. That can't possibly be what Congress thought about when they used the words person aggrieved in the statute to allow cities to come in and interfere with, with kind of lawsuits filed by direct victims. But it's hard to think that Congress didn't know that in 1988 when we've already let a village come in and a municipality. But Justice Kamehra, our position on this and this is very important. We're not quibbling with that. Gladstone is absolutely 100 percent good law. We're not seeking to change it

. They're the ones who are seeking to expand it in two directions, both by taking it out of segregation and by expanding proximate cause to the sky. Thank you, counsel. The case is submitted