A Stitch in Haste

...as is bureaucratic incompetence:

A Manhattan judge has ordered a city housing agency to reconsider findings that would evict 31 tenants, most of them Jewish, from apartments in a Brooklyn development to make room for nonwhite families, primarily Hispanics.
...
"Such conduct cannot be condoned," the judge wrote in a harshly worded 13-page decision. "Violating one minority group's due process rights is not the way for a government agency to meet its commitment to another minority group."
...
Hispanic tenant activists contended for years that Jewish tenants illegally passed leases on to distant family members to keep Hispanics from getting the apartments.

The judge said [the housing authority] admitted that apartments for the Hispanic families in Clemente Plaza were to be found by passing over 16 white families on the development's waiting list.
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The tenants, "who relied on leases issued to them by [the managing agent], are now in the position of being ousted from homes they have settled in, at the height of New York's rental market, simply because [the managing agent] failed to comply with the regulations it was obligated to follow, and [the housing authority] allowed it to do so," the judge wrote.

Some hasty stitches:

--Are Jews a racial minority or a religious minority? Can they be either in Brooklyn? And isn't it sad that such questions still have major policy implications in the Twenty-First Century?

--Wouldn't it just be easier to switch from trying to prioritize "Hispanic rights" versus "Jewish rights" to just thinking in terms of individual rights (putting aside for the moment the overarching question of whether there is an "individual right" to public housing)?

--I don't know what the criteria are for getting on this housing waiting list, but regardless, why even have one if the whites on it can be summarily passed over to "make way" for Hispanics?

--While there is no such thing in America as "squatters' rights," there is such as thing as "estoppel." If the hack bureaucrats of the housing authority screwed up, and these Jewish families relied in good faith and to their detriment on that screw-up, then they are (or should be) allowed to enforce that contract. This is not a case of two bidders squabbling over a empty house; these families already live there — these are their homes, at least for the duration of these leases. Is there really a "net social gain" from disrupting as many as 31 families' lives to engage in brazen social engineering?

--Is it "judicial activism" to correct "bureaucratic activism"? How about bureaucratic incompetence?