Feb. 10, 2006 – Tearing open old scars of social inequity, the housing crisis confronting New Orleans hurricane survivors amplifies the city?s historical race and class divisions. Across the country and inside the city itself, the dislocation of the city?s residents exposes a continuing legacy of housing discrimination and segregation.
Activists say emerging patterns of post-disaster housing discrimination span many levels, from building owners who refuse to rent to certain groups, to government institutions that keep communities locked in poverty.
Federal law bars landlords from discriminating against individuals or communities based on race, religion, sex, national origin, disability and age, as well as familial status, or the number of children. The law also requires the government to promote fair-housing principles when administering grants and subsidies to communities.
But watchdog groups say the chaos following the storm has fostered rampant discrimination against Katrina?s disproportionately black and poor survivors.
In a complaint filed recently with the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center charges that websites offering housing help to hurricane survivors have undermined fair-housing principles by running advertisements that explicitly state racial and other preferences.
According to the Center, in the weeks following the disaster, as offers of charity flooded the Internet, people posted dozens of discriminatory ads on websites listing emergency housing resources. Many offered free or low-cost shelter, but set conditions such as no blacks, or Christians only.
Post-disaster housing discrimination spans from building owners who refuse to rent to certain groups, to government institutions that keep communities locked in poverty.
One woman in Angie, Louisiana placed an anonymous ad on HurricaneHousing.org, a website run by the web-activist project MoveOn.org, offering to share her home for a nominal fee, with a preference for a white occupant who could speak English. The listing remains accessible on the web, but the site closed down in October.
Preferring to remain unnamed, she told The NewStandard that she had listed such conditions out of practical and safety considerations.
"Regardless of what you want to say, there?s differences in the races," she said, remarking that she had heard that black people had to use a different kind of soap, so she "wouldn?t know what to buy for them." She added that the media portrayals of chaos and "looting all over the place" in New Orleans had alarmed members of her quiet rural community.
"I didn?t say, ?no blacks.? I didn?t say ?no Hispanics,?" she continued. "I said I prefer a white family, but that was only because of the fact that I was white myself. And I felt like they would feel more comfortable."
That kind of "comfort" is exactly what troubles fair-housing activists like James Perry, executive director of the Fair Housing Action Center. He argued that since "an individual places the advertisement, but the website runs it," the complaint targeted the sites themselves, which are responsible for screening out discriminatory content.
Fair-housing advocates say that as the government rolls out extensive plans to redevelop damaged or depopulated areas, officials must promote racial and economic integration.
He noted that one of the sites, Disaster Housing Resources Online, lists the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) as an official "partner" and therefore may be subject to even stricter mandates than a privately owned site.
Last month, following the Center?s complaint, HUD launched an information campaign to promote fair-housing rights through public service announcements and advertisements.
Still, some activists acknowledge that fair-housing issues have not broken through the post-disaster hierarchy of needs among survivors, as everyday economic hardships eclipse concerns about systemic discrimination.
John Brittain, chief counsel with the civil rights organization Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said that while evidence of discrimination persists, the hardest hit still prefer "unfair" housing to homelessness. "Quite frankly, I think most people are still acting under an emergency," he said, "and it?s better to get people some housing rather than to worry about whether it?s promoting segregation."
Skewed Markets
Fair-housing activists say discrimination dovetails with an intense scarcity of affordable homes, and in New Orleans as well as other cities, market barriers are compounded by social ones.
The National Fair Housing Alliance has filed a complaint with HUD based on its investigation of housing-market discrimination in Texas, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Florida, which have received large numbers of displaced hurricane victims. From September through December, the organization sent housing "testers" -- advocates who go undercover as prospective renters -- to check landlords suspected of discrimination.
"The people in that neighborhood feel that they have a bull?s-eye on them, and it?s because of race, and it?s because of class." -- Bill Quigley, Loyola University School of Law
Displaying comparable backgrounds that differed only by race, the testers received vastly different responses. In about two out of three phone inquiries carried out by black and white testers, and in three out of five follow-up in-person visits, whites received favorable or priority treatment. By contrast, a 2000 government study on nationwide housing discrimination in metropolitan rental markets indicated that whites were favored in about one in five instances.
Sometimes, the property owner told only white inquirers about available units, and some white testers received discounts and incentives that their black counterparts did not. In Birmingham, AL, for instance, an owner requested that a white tester front 2.5 times the normal rent, but required triple the rent from a black tester. The contrast was even sharper in Dallas, TX, where one housing provider required a $100 refundable deposit from white testers and a $500 non-refundable deposit from a black tester. The white tester even received a bonus offer of a 26-inch television set.
Shanna Smith, president of the Alliance, said that for evacuees living in unfamiliar places, the long-term danger of housing discrimination is the cyclical discouragement of already-downtrodden survivors. Displaced communities may begin to see patterns suggestive of racial profiling, she said, and eventually, when "you feel it?s just futile? to take a step, you go back to what?s familiar. And that fosters racial segregation."
A sense of futility has been gnawing away at displaced New Orleanian Shirley Jackson for months, as dozens of failed attempts to find decent affordable housing have kept her confined to a FEMA-sponsored motel room in Port Allen, Louisiana. While she views a tight housing market as the main problem, the criminal background checks that she said most landlords have required of her suggest other hurdles stacked against hurricane survivors.
"Is it just us?" she asked, noting that other evacuees she knows have routinely undergone such screenings. Speculating that "it must be fear," she said cynically, "I know how people judge."
Under the Bull?s-eye of Segregation
Aside from rooting out blatant discrimination in the everyday housing market, fair-housing advocates address overarching disparities that restrict housing and economic opportunity for certain groups. Under the federal Fair Housing Act, an institutional action or policy that has a disproportionately negative impact on a group could violate the government?s mandate of social equity in housing.
Bringing the subtext of fair housing to the fore of a legal battle, a group of low-income tenants has invoked the Fair Housing Act to challenge alleged mistreatment by their landlord. In the class-action lawsuit, former residents of the government-subsidized Tivoli Place housing project in the Warehouse District of New Orleans allege that the management illegally evicted them, shutting down the complex after the neighborhood was opened for reentry in October.
The plaintiffs also charge that the shutout violated fair-housing law because it "had a significantly disproportionate impact on African-Americans," who constitute the overwhelming majority of the more than 150 residents.
Tivoli?s legal counsel has stated that the building had to be shut down for renovations, which will continue indefinitely. But the plaintiffs counter that the building suffered no significant storm damage, and regardless, the tenants were not properly compensated for the displacement.
Wilma Heaton, whose bipolar and schizophrenic son was one of those forced out, said she suspects that the management is simply hoping to purge its low-income renters. "This is just a greedy landlord, you know, using this storm as a way to get rid of these people," she alleged.
In light of New Orleans?s history of de facto racial segregation, fair-housing advocates say that as the government rolls out extensive plans to redevelop damaged or depopulated areas, officials must promote racial and economic integration.
But activists spot hidden agendas embedded in the politics of recovery. Some believe city and state planning authorities are blockading redevelopment in the city?s heavily poor and black enclaves, particularly the Lower Ninth Ward and parts of New Orleans East.
Specifically, critics point to a January proposal from Mayor Ray Nagin?s Bring New Orleans Back commission that would allow the city to preclude the rebuilding of poor, depopulated neighborhoods by deeming them not "viable." Grassroots groups have also bitterly opposed the Mayor?s decision to target heavily damaged homes in the Lower Ninth Ward for bulldozing.
Bill Quigley, a public-interest lawyer who heads Loyola University?s Law Clinic, observed: "There are plenty of houses around the rest of the city that suffered tremendous damage as well. Why prioritize one neighborhood? The people in that neighborhood feel that they have a bull?s-eye on them, and it?s because of race, and it?s because of class."
In Quigley?s view, the "market forces" driving the city?s tight housing market and rush toward redevelopment lay bare the entanglement of racism and urban poverty. The marginalization of the city?s poorest and least politically powerful households, he explained, "translates as well into exclusion on the basis of race, and exclusion on the basis of family status, and exclusion on the basis of disability. Those wires run through every housing issue in New Orleans."
