June 1, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
A U.S. district court has sided with homelessness charities in a case involving a federal law that gives such groups top priority in making use of buildings the federal government no longer needs.
At issue in the case was whether the General Services Administration circumvented a federal law — known as the Stewart B. McKinney Homeless Assistance Act — when it tried to sell a former courthouse in Lafayette, La., to the local city-parish. That law says homelessness groups must be given the opportunity to use “excess” or “surplus” government property at no cost to provide shelter, job training, or other services.
The General Services Administration had argued that it did not have to comply with the McKinney Act because the Louisiana courthouse was being replaced by a new building and was therefore subject to a different law.
But Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia disagreed, ruling that the federal agency should have first allowed groups that serve the homeless to evaluate whether they could use the building to provide social services, as dictated by the McKinney Act.
The case marks the fourth time the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty has asked the courts to step in to enforce a 1988 court order that spelled out what the federal government must do under the act.
A copy of the decision in the case, National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty v. United States Veterans Administration, is available on the court’s World-Wide Web site at http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/district-court.html.
