[StBernard] Keeping St. Bernard Parish White

[Westley Annis]

Keeping St. Bernard Parish White
By: Brentin Mock
Posted: August 25, 2009 at 6:08 AM

How White Residents are Keeping Blacks Out of St. Bernard Parish 
Four years after Hurricane Katrina, affordable public housing still isn't
available for many New Orleans residents. How white residents in St. Bernard
Parish are keeping blacks out. 

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St. Bernard Parish, southeast of New Orleans, has the distinction in
Louisiana of taking the most direct hit from Hurricane Katrina four years
ago this week. 

In the slow, painful rebuilding that followed, the parish has gone out of
its way to keep low-income, working black families from living there. A
federal court ruled twice this year-once in March and again last week-that
St. Bernard's attempts at deciding who could move in and who had to stay out
were violations of the Fair Housing Act. According to the ruling, the
parish's ordinances were shown to have both a disparate racial impact and
discriminatory intent. They wanted to keep black people from living there. A
federal judge described the parish's efforts as "camouflaged racial
expressions."

The St. Bernard debate has resurrected housing segregation concerns and
highlighted the ongoing difficulty of trying to implement and prove the
benefits of integration in terms of race and class. One commenter on the New
Orleans Times-Picayune Web site recently wrote of the St. Bernard court
ruling: "Everybody knows that St. Bernard is a white community. I just don't
understand why African Americans would want to move there."

In the 2000 census, St. Bernard Parish was listed as being 88.29 percent
white and only 7.62 percent black. The direct hit from Hurricane Katrina
destroyed virtually all of the houses, buildings and other structures in the
parish. Among the destruction was Village Square, a cluster of over 100
buildings inhabited mostly by low-income, African-American renters. Parish
officials would like to keep Village Square, or anything that resembles it,
from ever being built again.

Since Katrina, many residents and the elected leadership of St. Bernard have
fought to exclude development of rental properties and multi-family housing
units in the parish. After the storm, Craig Taffaro Jr., president of the
St. Bernard Parish Council, introduced a "blood-relative ordinance," which
decreed that only immediate family members of local landowners could rent
property there-and only from their relatives. With an 88 percent white
population which owned 93 percent of the housing stock before the storm, it
was pretty clear at whom that ordinance targeted: black people, particularly
those dislocated from their homes, and especially those who lived in the
demolished public housing projects.

Add to that the moratorium on multi-family housing development that the
parish council imposed right after the storm, and you have a pretty clear
policy for racial segregation, affirmed by the recent federal court rulings.

The parish had already been under a consent order since February 2008, which
obligated them not to block the development of rental or affordable housing
units. But that did not stop the parish from thwarting a plan by Provident
Realty Advisors Inc. to build four apartment buildings, which were to
include affordable rates for 70 percent of its 288 units. The parish council
voted last September to impose a moratorium on all multi-family housing
construction for 12 months-a clear middle finger to the consent order. 


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With the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, Provident took the
parish to federal court to have the consent order enforced. The court found
that the moratorium was a violation of the Fair Housing Act. Since African
Americans in this metropolitan area are more likely than whites to be below
the average median index for renting properties, the parish's ordinance
proposals unfairly discriminate against African Americans. 

With that out of the way, Provident moved forward with its application for
the apartment buildings. At first, they enjoyed a "harmonious working
relationship" with St. Bernard's Department of Community Development,
according to court records. The department's officials had recommended final
approval for three of the apartment buildings with tentative approval of the
fourth, but when it came time for a public hearing, hundreds of residents
showed up jeering and heckling the Provident representatives-scenes much
like we've seen this summer at the health care reform town halls. 

When it came time for St. Bernard's residents to have their say, out came
the real reason for the blocking of the affordable housing development. One
resident complained that hypothetical new neighbors in low-income units "are
going to sit in the yard or on the balcony all day with the music up,
screaming at their neighbors, dealing drugs." Another, after invoking the
"polite" black family in their community, said they didn't want people who
are "going to be coming up the street, gang-banging somebody or . kicking
the door down every couple of days." And another resident recalled the days
of the Black Panthers, and how "militant" black men would take over
apartment buildings, and then firebomb them. 

Provident's applications for affordable housing developments were denied.
Meanwhile, members of the parish council were pressuring the Louisiana
Housing Finance Agency to reconsider Provident's low-income housing tax
credits that they needed to finance half of the costs of the $60 million
project. If Provident didn't get its buildings placed in service before
December 2010, they'd lose the tax credits. The stalling and application
denials were putting the project in jeopardy. Believing they were unfairly
tried by parish officials and residents who were hostile to the idea that
black people were moving in, Provident and the Greater New Orleans Fair
Housing Center went back to court. 

The federal court took the comments from the hearings into consideration, as
well as the actions of council president Taffaro and council members, and
ruled that "public statements are relevant both as expressing the general
sentiment during the general decision-making process and also insofar as
public opinion was specifically referenced by the decision-makers
themselves." The parish was found, yet again, in contempt of the consent
order and told to step aside while Provident's applications are reconsidered
at the next planning commission hearing. This hearing, to be held on Tuesday
night, will likely be even fierier than the last one, especially with three
court decisions already handed down against the parish. If the applications
are approved and the apartments are built, then the real tests will begin.

Residents have already expressed, implicitly and explicitly, that they won't
tolerate black people in their town. The Nation reported last April how
Kiana Alexander's house was burned down after she applied for rental
permits. The assumptions of what low-income (read: black) residents bring to
a community will be a tough challenge to overcome.

"What few people realize is that the same people we trust to perform our
banking, educate our kids, police our streets and even work for us are the
very people some would exclude from their neighborhoods," says Milton
Bailey, president of the Louisiana Housing Finance Agency, responsible for
all low-income housing in the state.

For much of the nation, Hurricane Katrina exposed a deep level of poverty in
the New Orleans area. But for people in Southern Louisiana and along the
Gulf Coast, this was not news. What was more revealing was how such poverty
was concentrated into specific areas such as the Lower Ninth Ward and other
public housing projects. Such concentration was made possible, it's now
clear, because of actions like those of St. Bernard's parish officials,
residents who have worked aggressively to keep blacks and the poor out of
their communities. 

Brentin Mock is a freelance reporter who worked most recently as a writing
fellow for The American Prospect focusing on environmental justice and
policy issues. He is a 2008-09 Metcalfe Institute Diversity in Environmental
Reporting Fellow, and a 2009 USC Annenberg Institute Justice and Journalism
Fellow for environmental justice reporting.