The Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard reshaped the constitutional landscape of higher education while leaving important questions of educational mission unanswered. By undermining diversity as a compelling interest under strict scrutiny judicial review, the Court dismantled the decades-long framework under which universities adopted admissions practices in pursuit of self-defined institutional goals. That model may fit elite private institutions like Harvard or UNC, but it fails to capture the full spectrum of American higher education.

This brief proposes that land-grant universities possess a distinct institutional interest in cultivating a diverse student body. This interest is grounded in their statutory mission, the historical purpose of the Morrill Acts, and the judicial deference traditionally afforded to congressional mandates that create and continue to govern land-grant institutions.

SFFA’s reasoning may be too rigid to accommodate the genuine diversity of institutional missions in American higher education. Recognizing this doctrinal blind spot is only the beginning of a broader scholarly conversation.

Metropolitan areas in New Jersey need to dramatically lower their building emissions to combat climate change and protect local health. However, metropolitan New Jersey faces several major challenges. First, federal and state law preempt New Jersey municipalities from adopting some stricter laws that could lower building emissions. Second, competition between municipalities creates a collective action problem that disincentivizes legal reform. Third, building emission reduction strategies can create unintended harm such as worsened indoor air quality and gentrification. To avoid these challenges, individual New Jersey municipalities can utilize metropolitan equity strategies to cooperate efficiently. However, the most impactful way New Jersey can decarbonize buildings may be for the state legislature to amend its building emissions benchmarking law to enable the state government to decarbonize buildings more effectively.

This report explores investor activity in Philadelphia, where corporate buyers are most active in parts of the city which are predominantly home to Black and Hispanic residents in West, North and Northeast Philadelphia. For this report, CLiME teamed up with the Reinvestment Fund and Housing Initiative at Penn, who are based in Philadelphia.

We identify the largest investors who are buying up the most single family homes, and who operate primarily as large-scale corporate landlords. The companies doing the purchasing changed during the pandemic, shifting from more local investors to those entering the market already active in other places.

We analyzed purchases of residential buildings before and during the pandemic, looking at sheriff sales, rental licensing, renovation permits, evictions, and code violations to determine the impact of these pur­chases on Philadelphia housing markets. We found that:

• Larger corporate landlords were much more likely to evict tenants than smaller investors.

• Larger in­vestors more often took out permits to alter or improve their properties than smaller inves­tors.

• Investors large and small were much more likely to amass code violations than individual homebuyers

• The largest corporate investors obtained rental licenses on 67% of the properties they acquired, compared to just 43% among smaller investors

• The character of the highest-volume investors changed with the pandemic. From 2017 through 2019, eight of the top ten largest investors by volume were locally based. From 2020 through 2022, the four highest volume investors were either new to Philadelphia or had scaled up dramatically from the earlier period.

Philadelphia is a city with a proud legacy of affordable homeownership opportunities and an expanding set of tenant protec­tions. In recent years, concerns about the impact of corporate investors purchasing single fam­ily homes in the city have grown, even as there is an evident need for capital investment in its aging housing stock. This report aims to inform policy interventions to promote stable neigh­borhoods, affordability, and high-quality housing options for all Philadelphians.

A few years ago, CLiME published Who Owns Newark? which showed that corporations were buying half of all 1-4 unit homes in the city. We continue to investigate and explore these issues throughout the region.

New Jersey homeowners are sinking in monthly bills. In this brief, we explore the sky-high and rapidly rising costs of being a homeowner in New Jersey. This includes both mortgage and non-mortgage housing costs. New Jersey has the property taxes, and among the most expensive housing prices in the country. In addition, New Jersey homeowners pay 20 percent more in utility costs than the national average, and are now facing soaring electricity bills related to supply challenges and the new demands of AI data centers. New Jersey’s homeowners’ insurance premiums are also going up much faster than other states, related to private companies’ responses to more extreme weather and construction and labor costs. As these various costs add up, more homeowners – especially those with lower incomes – are sinking into debt and many are deferring home repairs and maintenance.

In New Jersey, new construction is exempt from price controls for 30 years, even in municipalities with rent control ordinances. Given the other exemptions available to developers, it is questionable whether this exemption is necessary to spur new construction. This memo examines that question by laying out the history of rent control in New Jersey as well as the history of the new construction exemption, looking at case law involving the exemption as well as arguments for the exemption and critique of those arguments, and proposes alternatives to the exemption as either an abolishment or revision of the exemption. The history shows how the moderate nature of rent control in New Jersey suggests that its effect on new construction is overblown, the legislative intent was more about removing barriers to new construction without considering any balance with the prevention of rent gouging, rent control is relevant towards new construction, and significant revision, if not abolishment, of the exemption would have a beneficial effect for existing affordable housing.