Reed Colfax

In December 2017, U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten Sr. threw out a fair-housing suit against the City of LaGrange, Georgia, the only supplier of electricity, gas and water to the people who lived there. The plaintiffs said the city was using its utility service to collect municipal-court fines from Black residents and to keep immigrants without Social Security numbers from opening accounts. Ruling on the pleadings, he held that what they described—disconnection of utilities, fear of disconnection, lost rental income, an account kept in another person’s name—was “post-acquisition conduct” that § 3604(b) of the Fair Housing Act did not reach. “As unfortunate as plaintiffs’ situations are, because they do not involve the inability to acquire housing, they do not present cognizable claims under the Fair Housing Act,” he wrote.

Reed Colfax argued the appeal. On December 14, 2018, he stood before a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit—Circuit Judges Charles Wilson and Elizabeth Branch and Senior U.S. District Judge Roger Vinson—and attacked the premise of the dismissal. “The district court found that the Fair Housing Act does not apply after housing has been acquired. That cannot be squared with the language of the statute,” he said. Section 3604(b) bars discrimination in the “privileges” of sale or rental, and Colfax argued that the privilege of sale or rental “must include the privilege of occupying the home.” He used the utilities as his example. “Services, including utilities, are provided after acquisition,” he told the judges. “A prospective homeowner can’t get utilities hooked up to a house.”

On October 10, 2019, the panel vacated the dismissal. Judge Branch, writing for a unanimous court, held that § 3604(b) “is unambiguous and reaches certain post-acquisition conduct, including post-acquisition conduct related to the provision of services, as long as those services are connected to the sale or rental of a dwelling.” Electricity, gas and water met that test “because they are fundamental to the ability to inhabit a dwelling.” A year later LaGrange agreed to repeal both policies. The decision, reported at 940 F.3d 627, lets residents in the Eleventh Circuit sue under § 3604(b) over discrimination in housing-related services directly connected to the sale or rental of a home they already occupy.

Court Fines on the LaGrange Utility Bill

LaGrange is a city of about 30,000 people. When the suit was filed in 2017, the plaintiffs alleged, its population was about 49 percent Black, 40 percent white and 7 percent Hispanic, and its utilities had produced over $17 million in profit in fiscal 2015. The city levied no property tax and relied on utility sales to pay for its government. A city ordinance required any applicant for utility service who owed the city an unpaid utility bill or any other debt to pay it before getting service. The plaintiffs alleged that the city treated municipal-court fines as that kind of debt—fines for driving without headlights or a seatbelt, for an expired tag or a suspended license, for possessing an ounce or less of marijuana—and that administrative fees of 30 to 60 percent, interest at the prime rate plus three points and $44 monthly probation-supervision charges swelled them. The city’s collection staff matched the debts to Social Security numbers, added them to utility accounts and threatened disconnection without advance notice. About 90 percent of the people threatened with disconnection over court debt were Black, the plaintiffs alleged.

Charles Brewer was 55, disabled and living on $1,100 a month in Supplemental Security Income. He had congestive heart failure and needed electricity to run his oxygen tank and CPAP machine. He had pleaded no contest in 2014 to driving without a license, and in October 2015 the $210.25 he still owed in fines went to a collection agency. When he applied for utility service in March 2016, he signed a statement warning that “Applicants with delinquent amounts owed to the City of any type shall be subject to having utility services terminated” if they did not pay. In August 2016 the city attached the debt to his utility account, and he received repeated threats of disconnection despite a medical exemption, a “medical no-cut” note the city said it had put on his file. April Walton, a single mother of three, had $907.79 in court debt added to her account that August. In February 2017 the city cut off her utilities for three days, and the family had to separate for a time. Calvin Moreland’s debt of $805.60 dated from 2006; the city added it to his utility bill in January 2017, nearly ten years later, and put him on payments of $100 a month. Pamela Williams, who owned ten rental homes, alleged that she lost at least $1,200 in rent over four months because tenants caught by the policy missed rent to keep their utilities on.

The second policy fell on immigrants. To open a new account, LaGrange required a Social Security number and an unexpired photo identification from a short list—a driver’s license, a Georgia voter card, a U.S. military ID, a U.S. passport or a permanent-resident card. The city would not accept an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number or a foreign government’s identification. Three Latino plaintiffs who had lived in LaGrange for over fifteen years sued under pseudonyms. Two rented homes with their children and could have utilities only in a landlord’s name. The third owned his house, but neither he nor his wife could open an account, so a friend held it, which the plaintiffs alleged left the family under a daily threat of prosecution under a city code provision against false information on utility applications. Georgia Power, which serves 155 of the state’s 159 counties, accepted ITINs and foreign identification, the plaintiffs alleged. The city had said that the USA PATRIOT Act and the Fair and Accurate Credit Transactions Act required its rule, and LaGrange’s mayor had publicly defended the court-debt policy as an alternative to putting people in jail.

Colfax and Alexa T. Milton of Relman Colfax brought the case with the Southern Center for Human Rights and the National Immigration Law Center, for the Georgia State Conference of the NAACP, the Troup County NAACP, Project South and the seven residents. The federal claim was disparate impact under § 3604(b): the court-debt policy fell disproportionately on Black residents, who were overrepresented among people owing court debt, and the identification policy on Latino residents, and the city had no adequate justification for either. The plaintiffs also pleaded Georgia common-law claims that a monopoly utility owed service on nondiscriminatory terms and that the court-debt condition was an unconscionable contract of adhesion.

The suit was filed on May 18, 2017. That January, LaGrange’s police chief, Louis Dekmar, had publicly apologized for the 1940 lynching of Austin Callaway, a 16-year-old whom white men dragged from the city jail; no one was arrested. Ernest Ward, who had led the Troup County NAACP, said of the apology: “An apology without some concrete actions to follow is like an engagement without a wedding.”

The Privilege of Occupying the Home

The residents filed their notice of appeal on January 4, 2018. Briefs supporting them came from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where Colfax had been a Skadden Fellow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights, the Atlanta Legal Aid Society, the Georgia Legal Services Program, the Atlanta Volunteer Lawyers Foundation and four former assistant secretaries of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Charles Brewer died in August 2018, at 57, before the appeal was argued.

LaGrange defended the dismissal on the text. Section 3604(b) bars discrimination in the terms, conditions or privileges of sale or rental of a dwelling and in the provision of services or facilities “in connection therewith.” The city read that phrase to confine the statute to conduct “prior to or at the moment of the sale or rental.” It also argued that it was a utility and neither landlord nor seller—“a stranger to each individual Plaintiff’s sale or rental transaction.” At oral argument its lawyer, Jeffrey Todd, pressed causation. “They say the court debt policy has disproportionately affected black people, but were these people prevented from occupying housing? No,” he told the panel. “The plaintiffs have not pleaded causality at all.”

The residents’ opening brief, filed in February 2018 over the signature of Jamie L. Crook of the firm, with Colfax among the lawyers on the cover, answered with the statute’s word “privileges,” which it read to carry continuing rights such as the quiet enjoyment of a home, and with the many services and facilities that come to a dwelling only once someone occupies it. At argument Colfax added the government’s reading: the Department of Housing and Urban Development, he told the judges, had stated that § 3604(b) applies to repairs and municipal services.

Judge Branch’s opinion framed the question as whether § 3604(b) “applies to any conduct that occurs after an individual has acquired housing.” The court held that it does, within a limit drawn from the same text: a covered service “must be a housing-related service that is directly connected to the sale or rental of a dwelling.” Utilities qualified on two grounds. They are “inextricably intertwined with the dwelling itself,” and they are “essential to the habitability of a dwelling.” The court also rejected the city’s claim to stand outside the statute as a third party, holding that the text does not confine the provision to housing providers. It vacated the judgment and directed the district court to decide anew whether the residents’ disparate-impact allegations stated a claim under § 3604(b).

On remand the residents filed an amended complaint with a jury demand in February 2020, and Judge Batten set discovery to close that August. Their lawyers moved to substitute a representative of Brewer’s estate for him. The parties negotiated, and in October 2020 they settled. LaGrange agreed to repeal the court-debt and identification policies, to give its residents public notice of the change, and to pay $450,000 in damages and attorneys’ fees.

In November the city posted the changes on its website and its Facebook page and changed its application forms. An immigrant advocate in LaGrange knew of at least one person who had since opened an account without a Social Security number. “After all this time in the dark, we finally see a light,” said one of the John Doe plaintiffs. Project South, one of the organizations that sued, took the result to other towns. It wrote to more than 300 Georgia municipal leaders about rules like LaGrange’s and said it had secured revisions of similar ordinances in 12 municipalities in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas.

From the Legal Defense Fund to Relman Colfax

Colfax graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1992 and took his law degree at Yale in 1996. He clerked for Judge Thelton E. Henderson of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, spent 1997 to 1999 as a Skadden Fellow at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and from 2000 to 2004 directed the Fair Housing Project of the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. He joined the firm in 2004. With John Relman and Jennifer Klar, he represented the sixty-seven Coal Run residents in Kennedy v. City of Zanesville, the Ohio water-service case in which a jury returned a $10.8 million verdict in 2008 against the city, Muskingum County and the East Muskingum Water Authority. He has argued in the Second, Fourth, Eleventh and D.C. Circuits. He is admitted in the District of Columbia and New Mexico, and since January 1, 2025, he has been one of the firm’s three co-managing partners, with Tara Ramchandani and Stephen Hayes, after Relman stepped down as managing partner following twenty-five years in the post.

Families With Children Ordered Out of Pelican Lake Village

Pelican Lake Village was a complex of just over 100 apartments in Pahokee, Florida, a rural town of about 6,000 people; for years it had housed migrant workers from the surrounding sugar-cane fields. Big Lake Villages owned it, and Alston Management, whose principal was Calvin Alston, managed it. On December 1, 2008, Big Lake Villages leased the units, subject to the existing tenants’ leases, to Matthew 25 Ministries, a nonprofit that meant to house former prisoners there, primarily sex offenders. Matthew 25 tried to persuade the school district to move the school-bus stop. When that failed, it decided it was “necessary for [it] to relocate the 25 families with children.”

On or about December 11, Mona Miller, Alston Management’s property manager, drafted a notice and signed Calvin Alston’s name to it without his permission. It read, in capitals: “IF YOU HAVE CHILDREN LIVING OR STAYING IN THE APARTMENT UNDER THE AGE OF 18 YEARS OLD, YOU WILL HAVE TO VACATE THE PROPERTY BEFORE JANUARY 1ST, 2009.” It warned: “IF YOU REFUSE TO MOVE OR COMPLY WITH THE NEW OWNERS WE WILL EVICT YOU IMMEDIATELY.” It declared the complex an adults-only community. Residents without children were not told to leave. Matthew 25 employees visited the households repeatedly to ask when the families with children would move, and some tenants were told they “would have to move because of their children.” The families with children moved out around Christmas.

Colfax and James P. Curry of Jupiter, Florida, filed suit in the Southern District of Florida in September 2010 for six of those households and the Fair Housing Center of the Greater Palm Beaches. The complaint set out what the notice had cost. Tara Whyte and Hattie Walker, raising three children, spent their holiday savings on a new deposit and a water bill and moved to Wellington, where their daughter changed schools. Charlise Mack had been born and raised at Pelican Lake; the apartment her family found in Belle Glade had no heat, no doorknob and no bathtub, and in the upheaval she failed an exam and was removed from a corrections-officer training program. The Rolle children, the family alleged, were asked to help tear down the complex’s playground. Shirley and Tyrone Campbell, with six children, moved on December 29 and left the family dog behind. The Fair Housing Center counseled the displaced tenants and ran an outreach campaign in Pahokee, work that delayed projects it had planned for the spring of 2009.

The Alston defendants argued that Miller was a leased employee of another company, that she had been told only to inform residents orally of the change in management, that the company’s duties had passed to Matthew 25 with the lease, and that no family had actually been evicted. On November 1, 2011, U.S. District Judge William Dimitrouleas found those disputes immaterial or unsupported. Miller had violated § 3604(a) and (b) by threatening eviction because of familial status, and the notice “explicitly indicates discrimination based on familial status,” which violated § 3604(c). Alston Management answered for her conduct because she acted within her employment, because she signed the company’s name, and because “Alston Management could not delegate its duty to avoid discriminating under the Fair Housing Act.” Big Lake Villages, as owner, had “a non-delegable duty to not discriminate under the Fair Housing Act.” Matthew 25 did not respond to the motion, and the court held that its employees’ threats and statements violated the same provisions. Dick Witherow, who founded Matthew 25, answered the ruling with a denial: “We didn’t discriminate against anybody.”

With liability decided for most of the families, Colfax and Tara Ramchandani took the case to a jury in February 2012. On February 7 the jury returned its verdict for thirteen people from seven families and the Fair Housing Center, against Matthew 25 Ministries, Calvin Alston, his companies and an employee. The jury awarded $1,049,450: $448,250 in compensatory damages, with individual awards reaching $141,000 and $46,250 for the Fair Housing Center, and $601,200 in punitive damages.

A 1969 Fire Truck for Hogg Hummock

Sapelo Island is a 16,500-acre barrier island in McIntosh County, Georgia, sixty miles south of Savannah and reachable only by boat. The State owns 97 percent of it. On the privately owned land in Hogg Hummock live the island’s Gullah Geechee residents, descendants of enslaved Africans. “Members of the Gullah-Geechee community have resided on Sapelo Island for centuries,” the federal court wrote in 2021; by then more than thirty people lived there permanently. McIntosh County as a whole is predominantly white. From 1990 to 2018 its five-member Board of Commissioners had one African American member, Charles Jordan, except for a four-year stretch when Nathaniel Grovner also served.

In 2012 the county’s tax assessors raised valuations on the island; on some Hogg Hummock properties, Colfax said, taxes rose more than 1,000 percent. Families challenged the increases, and a settlement rolled them back and froze rates until 2017. In December 2015 the residents filed a separate civil-rights suit against McIntosh County and the State of Georgia, represented by Colfax, Rebecca Livengood, Lila Miller and Zoila Hinson of Relman Colfax with Robert Jackson of Robert B. Jackson IV, LLC. They alleged that the county and State had denied the community the water, emergency medical, fire, road, trash and accessible ferry service that the mainland received, and they sued under the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, 42 U.S.C. §§ 1981 and 1982 and the Americans with Disabilities Act, among other statutes.

When he filed the complaint, Colfax said the county left the island’s roads unmaintained, ran no modern sewer system there and provided no emergency services, and that the State’s ferry did not run often enough. The county’s attorney, Adam Poppell III, pointed to the rollback of the 2012 increases. “We’re astounded they’re bringing actions, especially after we lowered the values across the board,” he said. “When I walk some of those roads, I can see and feel my grandparents because they walked those same roads,” said Sarah Frances Drayton, the first-named plaintiff.

While the case was pending, Colfax said the suit was about winning enough basic services for the island’s economy to grow, and a fallback for survival if taxes surged again. “We’re talking about a case that implicates many, many decades of history on that island,” he said. Of that history he said, “It’s a significant part of our history that very, very few people in our country have heard about.” He also said, “If it’s gone, if there’s not a place where this culture is preserved, the history is going to float away that much faster.” He said several plaintiffs had died since the first filings. Drayton was among those whose claims passed to an estate; Shirley Grant carried them forward on its behalf.

“Unless something changes, I give it 40 years,” said J.R. Grovner, a plaintiff who runs tours on the island. “After that, we’ll all just be visitors.” Reginald Hall, one of the landowners who sued, said in 2022 that the island’s population had fallen from nearly 1,000 at the turn of the twentieth century to 29 descendants. “Who in their right mind would purposely get up and leave that land?” he asked.

In its reply brief on summary judgment, McIntosh County wrote: “Property owners pay ad valorem taxes to the County, and in return they receive basic government services.” The court’s March 30, 2021 order on the county’s motion set out the evidence of what the island received. McIntosh County did not give Sapelo a fire truck until 2010, and the truck it sent “was built in 1969 and was 17 years older than the next-oldest fire truck used in McIntosh County.” The island’s fire station was a concrete pad under a metal roof held up by metal poles; the mainland stations were enclosed buildings. Commissioner Jordan said the commission “did not consider the fire station a priority,” even after it voted to fund the station with 2010 sales-tax money. The mainland carried an ISO Class 5 fire-protection rating, and Sapelo carried Class 10, “signifying that it ‘is basically unprotected.’”

Jane Garbisch, who lived on Sapelo from late 1998 or early 1999 until 2009, stated that in her first few years there county EMS “would not dispatch emergency medical technicians” to the island and “[a]nyone on the Island who was in need of emergency medical care had to find his or her own means of traveling to the mainland.” She organized first-responder training on the island in 1999 or 2000; she said the county “resist[ed] [her] effort” and at one point told her to “stop it.” An expert’s report put the time from a 911 call to the start of a paramedic’s care at forty-one to forty-five minutes when EMS had to travel to the island, and thirty to thirty-five when the patient was brought to the mainland dock. Jordan said the county considered carrying EMS patients to the mainland dock the State’s responsibility.

On the mainland the county maintained its dirt roads weekly and had mixed clay or rock into them to help manage their condition. Every road in Hogg Hummock was unpaved dirt; since 2017 the county had worked on them two or three times, at the State’s request, and it had not added clay or rock to them. Mainland households got weekly curbside garbage collection under the county’s contract with Waste Management. The contract did not extend that service to the county’s barrier islands. Sapelo got one 34-yard compactor and “one (1) pull per month,” and the compactor sometimes overflowed.

Islanders said that in 2011 a 15-year-old boy driving on the island lost control and was pinned between his vehicle and a tree; neighbors drove their trucks to the scene and lit it with their headlights so an emergency helicopter could land, and the boy was pronounced dead at the hospital. “They charge us a garbage pickup tax. We don’t get that service,” Grovner said in 2022. “They charge us a 911 tax, you can call it and no ambulance comes over there.” “We ain’t had a doctor’s office on the island since 1985,” he said. Hall named the goal: “We’re going to court to recover our roads, fire, trash and EMS abilities to have the correct representation through taxation,” he said. “We’ve got the will to survive on this island.”

McIntosh County defended on geography and on method. Without another barrier island that received better service, it argued, the residents had no comparator and could not prove disparate treatment under the McDonnell Douglas test; the differences flowed from the island’s isolation and the State’s ownership of nearly all of it. “Any differences in services between the mainland and Sapelo are due to geography, as it takes a 25-30 minute boat ride to get to Sapelo,” Richard Strickland, the county’s lead lawyer, said in a statement after the case ended. The court rejected the comparator requirement, quoting the Eleventh Circuit: “Establishing the elements of the McDonnell Douglas framework is not, and never was intended to be, the sine qua non for a plaintiff to survive a summary judgment motion.” It weighed the evidence of intent and effect under the Arlington Heights factors. The property owners’ claims under the Equal Protection Clause, § 1982 and Title VI went toward trial. The court later denied the county’s second summary-judgment motion, which rested on the statute of limitations.

What McIntosh County Signed Before the Savannah Trial

The State settled first, in 2020. It runs the ferry to Sapelo; the boat, the Katie Underwood, is named for a descendant who served for decades as the island’s midwife. The State paid $750,000 and agreed to improve the ferry so that people with disabilities could use it. The claims against the State, the governor, the Department of Natural Resources and its commissioner, and the Department of Community Affairs were then dismissed.

Over nearly seven years the case outlasted three motions to dismiss and two motions for summary judgment, and the claims against the county were set for a jury trial in federal court in Savannah beginning July 25, 2022. The parties went to mediation instead, in a session that ran fifteen hours. At 8 a.m. on July 19 the McIntosh County Commission met in special session and approved the terms, and on July 20 the judge closed the case.

The agreement, dated August 3, 2022, and signed by thirty-eight individual plaintiffs, two community organizations—Help Org, Inc. and Raccoon Hogg CDC—and the county, required McIntosh County to pay $2 million in damages and attorneys’ fees within fourteen days. It froze Sapelo property valuations at their 2022 fair market value for tax years 2023 through 2025. The county agreed to station on the island a light-duty truck stocked with emergency medical equipment to Georgia Department of Public Health standards, to ask the State for land for a lighted helipad, and to write emergency-response procedures. The Hogg Hummock fire truck could be no more than five years older than the average of the mainland fleet, and the county would pay for annual firefighting training for island residents. Hogg Hummock’s roads and ditches would be maintained every quarter, and the county would study permanent surfacing. Garbage fees for island property owners dropped 30 percent, and the compactor had to be emptied at least once a month. The agreement provided for the court to keep jurisdiction for three years to enforce its terms.

Hall was one of the property owners whose claims the court had sent toward trial. “We’ve stood up,” he said after the settlement. “And because we’ve been winning, we now have an opportunity for hope.”