We May Be Devastated, but at Least We’re Not Black…

Much to my disappointment, my organization, the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC), was back in court again last week with St. Bernard Parish over illegal housing discrimination that the Parish government has engaged in after Hurricane Katrina.

In fall 2006, St. Bernard passed the “blood relative ordinance,” which mandated that owners of single family homes that had not been rentals previous to Hurricane Katrina only rent to their blood relatives. Since 93% of single-family homeowners in St. Bernard were white, this ordinance was a violation of the Fair Housing Act. People of color would be largely excluded from renting single family homes in the Parish.

This ordinance concerning single-family housing followed another ordinance approved by the Parish Council on November 1, 2005 “establish[ing] a moratorium on the re-establishment and development of any multi-family dwellings in St. Bernard Parish” for 12 months. The Parish is overwhelmingly white and there is a vastly disproportionate need for rental housing among minority citizens residing in St. Bernard as well as minority citizens from nearby areas such as New Orleans. This ordinance, along with the single-family and blood-relative ordinances denied housing on the basis of race and national origin, and perpetuated segregation by preserving St. Bernard as an overwhelmingly white enclave.

GNOFHAC filed a lawsuit in federal court to force the Parish to repeal the ordinance and the moratorium on multi-family housing. The Parish repealed the blood-relative language of the single family ordinance in February of 2008. During the course of litigation, the multi-family moratorium lapsed. Problem solved?

Not so fast. Less than a year after settling the case, in September of 2008, the Parish passed another moratorium on building multi-family housing consisting of more than five units. The council proposed this moratorium days after an inflammatory editorial ran in the St. Bernard Voice that contained veiled references to race and compared the proposed housing to “ghettos” and “blighted inner city” housing. A common NIMBY (Not in My Backyard) tactic, the moratorium is a violation of the 2008 Consent Order which enjoined St. Bernard from violating the Fair Housing Act again. Once again, the moratorium has a discriminatory effect.

St. Bernard Parish was absolutely devastated by the failure of the federal levee system that followed Hurricane Katrina. Damage to St. Bernard was comparable to the damage that we saw in the Lower 9^th Ward. Many people don’t know that the two areas border each other with no geographic barrier separating them. Though there has long been a group of people descended from Canary Islandersliving in St. Bernard , the area experienced the biggest growth in population due to white flight from school integration in the Lower 9^th Ward. That’s right folks- many of the working class whites living in St. Bernard today once lived (or their families did) in the Lower 9^th Ward, the neighborhood which has (sometimes falsely) come to represent the epitome of African American poverty and suffering after Katrina. Levels of damage from the federal flood were similar in St. Bernard and the Lower 9^th Ward.

As a white anti-racist with a working class background, it is heartbreaking to see that the Parish has once again taken the bait of racial exclusion and protectionism (“I may be poor, but at least I’m not black”) in favor of uniting cross racially with groups that have similar interests. Race has consistently been used throughout U.S. history to water down the power of social movements when people unite based on other interests. Regardless of the Parish’s intentions, the impact of the blood-relative ordinance and the moratorium on multi-family housing is that the entire region will continue to suffer a dire shortage of affordable housing. As I drove through St. Bernard when this issue first came up during the fall of 2006, it was devastating to realize that Parish officials, backed by many residents, were willing to expend scarce resources on a court battle they would never win rather than on rebuilding or working in conjunction with other localities to ensure that our entire area has the levee protection we need should another Katrina come along.

Some residents and Parish officials in St. Bernard voice a great deal of anger and frustration over GNOFHAC’s lawsuits against the Parish. Many times, the position is that it is not their intent to be racially discriminatory, that they are seeking to “protect” the quality of life in St. Bernard as it existed pre-Katrina. Further, some claim, outsiders have no business interfering in the affairs of the Parish (see the comments section in the previous article).

Some are sympathetic to those arguments. I certainly understand that the prospect of post-Katrina change in deeply rooted communities is a scary thing. Because most of us live in segregated neighborhoods, it might get even scarier when we talk about changes in racial make up. But fear of change does not justify racist rental ordinances. Neither does it make them logical.

Ultimately, though I empathize with the struggles of the residents of St. Bernard Parish, I think there need to be real consequences for engaging in housing discrimination. Perhaps these consequences will encourage residents and government officials to one day engage in more productive actions that represent their true interests.