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Tycko & Zavareei LLP Awarded Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs Outstanding Achievement Award
In June 2004, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs awarded Tycko & Zavareei LLP their Outstanding Achievement Award for their work on landmark fair housing litigation. Bruce V. Spiva and Hassan A. Zavareei, together with lawyers from the Washington Lawyers’ Committee, successfully tried a case against the District of Columbia for discriminatory housing code enforcement against Latino and other residents of the Columbia Heights and Mount Pleasant neighborhoods. The jury returned a verdict of nearly $200,000 for the tenants of one of the impacted buildings. This case is currently on appeal to the United States Circuit Court for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil
Rights and Urban Affairs recently recognized
Tycko & Zavareei LLP for its exceptional
pro bono advocacy on behalf of Latino immigrants
living in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of
Washington, D.C. The Committee honored the firm
with an Outstanding Achievement Award in Fair
Housing at its 2004 Wiley A. Branton Awards
Luncheon, which was attended by thousands of the
city's attorneys and business leaders who
support the Committee's efforts.
From Left: Bruce
Spiva, Jim Trilling
of Jenner & Block, and Hassan Zavareei
In a lawsuit brought in federal district
court, the firm successfully challenged a
District of Columbia housing code enforcement
initiative that threatened to displace a large
number of Latino immigrants living in Columbia
Heights, an area of the city that has undergone
rapid gentrification in recent years. Attorneys
from Tycko & Zavareei LLP, together with
co-counsel from the Fair Housing and Immigrant
and Refugee Rights Project of the Washington
Lawyers’ Committee and the law firm of Jenner &
Block LLP, with whom the award was shared,
succeeded in establishing that the District’s
enforcement initiative had a disproportionately
discriminatory impact on D.C.’s Latino
population and violated the Fair Housing Act. A
twelve-member jury awarded seven affected tenant
households approximately $200,000 in damages. In
addition, as a result of this successful lawsuit,
the District of Columbia ceased its
discriminatory enforcement of the housing code.
The Wiley A. Branton Awards luncheon has been
held annually since 1989 by the Washington
Lawyers’ Committee, an organization that
provides pro bono services on a broad range of
civil rights and poverty issues in the
community. In addition to the Fair Housing
award, the Committee handed out eight other
Outstanding Achievement Awards in areas such as
Equal Employment and Disability Rights.
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