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3. At rents or prices within the financial means of the families and individuals displaced. 4. In areas not generally less desirable in regard to public utilities and public and com~ericial facilities. 5. Reasonably accessible to their places of employment. Although the FHWA regulations implementing the URA are extensive, none requires analysis of the market impact of highway displacement. Because of this omission, the states have submitted--and the FttWA has accepted--reloca- tion assurances which do not adequately protect low vacancy urban housing markets from the effects of highway displacement. Much of the relocation litigation discussed in-this Note can be attributed to inadequate supervision and control by the FHWA over state relocation practices. One result of inadequate FI{WA supervision is that the states have been allowed to use questionable statistical devices to expand the estimated supply of available relocation housing. Highway projects are thus brought into apparent conformity with the URA when, in fact, the necessary relocation units do not exist. One statistical practice, for example, has been to rely on housing "turn- over" as an indicator of available relocation dwellings. Turnover is the percentage of housing units which are sold or which change tenants during a particular year. It describes the rads at which units change occupancy, and could occur in the complete absence of vacancies. HUD has prohibited the use of turnover as an indicator of available relocation housing in administering its own programs. Nevertheless, state highway agencies continue to employ it and consequently their assurances are often unrealistic. As another method of temporarily disguising housing shortages, highway displacees are sometimes given priority for public housing and put into public housing ahead of those who have been on the waiting lists for many years. In effect, resources allocated to public housing are diverted to compensate for a highway's depletion of the housing supply. Also, many state highway agencies ignore the effects of racial segregation, which limit the relocation opportuni- ties of displaced minorities. In addition tO these practices which overstate the apparent supply of available relocation housing, many states have also minimized the demand for such housing by ignoring concurrent displacements from other highways or public projects. In a loose or high vacancy housing market, these failures to accurately estimate the supply and demand for relocation housing would not be alarming. In this situation, the market would be elastic enough to accept the loss of supply without serious consequences for the displacees or the low-income housing submarket. But in urban areas--where large numbers of individuals are displaced by highway construction, where many of the displacees are low- income and their supply of housing is already inadequate--the relocation pay- ment alone is an insufficient solution. "Satisfactory assurances" must in this instance include specific guarantees that highway displacement will not place uncompensated burdens on low-income displacees and on the low-income housing submarket. The substantive satisfactoriness of highway relocation assurances was at issue in K~i~h u. VoZp~ which concerned construction of the Century Freeway in Los Angeles, expected to displace over 21,000 individuals. Although the California Division of Highways had prepared relocation plans and assurances III-5