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Local Hero

Photo of Bonnie MilsteinBonnie Milstein

Ms. Milstein is an attorney and founding partner of Magar and Milstein, a civil rights advocacy, law, and consulting firm in San Francisco, California. The firm specializes in affordable housing and disability rights issues.

Ms. Milstein began her career as a legal services lawyer in 1969 where she practiced both civil and criminal defense law. She joined the ACLU’s National Prison Project in 1972 as one of its first lawyers. Four years later, she became a supervising attorney in the General Counsel’s Office of the U.S. Department of Health, Education & Welfare. Ms. Milstein’s civil rights work included school desegregation litigation, sex discrimination policy and litigation, adoption of the Age Discrimination regulations, and enforcement of the first Section 504 regulations.

Since 1982, Ms. Milstein has worked on fair housing and disability issues, first at the Center for Law and Social Policy and then at the Mental Health Law Project (now the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law) in Washington, D.C. Ms. Milstein represented more than 75 disability organizations through the Consortium of Citizens with Disabilities in amicus briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, administrative advocacy with the Departments of Justice, HUD, Labor and Education, and in the drafting and the passage of the Fair Housing Amendments Act of 1988, the ADA, and the Civil Rights Restoration Act.

From 1993 to 1994, Ms. Milstein chaired the Congressionally created Occupancy Task Force, which recommended effective ways to enforce civil rights laws in public and private housing. From 1994 to 2000, Ms. Milstein directed HUD’s enforcement of Section 504, Title VI, and other civil rights laws from Washington, D.C. and later, as the Fair Housing Co-Director and Community Builder for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in San Francisco, California.

Ms. Milstein has worked most recently with the Port of San Francisco, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, the City of Santa Rosa, California; Eden Housing, Inc. in Hayward, California, the Alaska Bar Association, Legal Services, and Protection and Advocacy organizations.