[StBernard] Jarvis DeBerry: Housing bias in St. Bernard Parish is proving costly in the long run

[Westley Annis]

Jarvis DeBerry: Housing bias in St. Bernard Parish is proving costly in the
long run
Posted by Jarvis DeBerry, Columnist, The Times-Picayune September 13, 2009
7:00AM
Categories: Breaking News

Friday, Berrigan ordered St. Bernard Parish officials to stop blocking plans
to build affordable housing in the parish.Here's a synopsis of U.S. District
Judge Ginger Berrigan's Friday ruling against St. Bernard Parish: Keep
acting a fool if you want, but it's going to cost you. 

Parish officials have been brazenly defying the judge's orders that they
comply with the Fair Housing Act. But the parish will begin hemorrhaging
money if those officials don't immediately conform to federal law. 

The St. Bernard Parish Planning Commission has been arbitrarily denying a
routine resubdivision to a developer planning to build four apartment
buildings in the parish. 

No longer. In Friday's ruling, Berrigan said Provident Realty Advisors Inc.
has met all necessary requirements and ordered that "the applications be
deemed approved." 

The parish has to formalize that approval by 5 p.m. Monday. There are five
other deadlines related to the application that parish officials must meet,
and "if defendants fail to meet any of the various deadlines without advance
notice and good cause shown for their failure," Berrigan wrote, "a daily
sanction beginning at $5,000 for the first day, and increasing to $10,000
each day thereafter per each individual missed deadline will be imposed." 

Provident has already requested that the parish pay the company the $770,000
in legal fees they accrued through March. Expect any future fines to be
added to that amount and the money Provident's lawyers have charged during
the last six months. 

Are the residents who are cheering on the parish's bigotry aware of how much
their defiance is costing them? At what point will residents decide that
it's just too damned expensive to be racist?

In response to Berrigan's ruling, St. Bernard Parish President Craig Taffaro
said Friday the parish would appeal.

That's more good money after bad. 

Provident's managing director projects that 50 percent of the people who
live in the proposed apartments would be black, 25 percent would be white
and 25 percent would belong to other racial groups. 

At the last Census, St. Bernard Parish was 88 percent white. At the proposed
apartments, three of every four residents are expected to be something else.
Those numbers and the "camouflaged racial expressions" raised at public
meetings led Berrigan to her finding that the parish's rejection of the
resubdivision applications was racially motivated and therefore illegal. 

Last month, she said the Planning Commission broke with its own established
procedures when it denied Provident's applications and ordered the panel to
put the applications on the agenda for its next meeting. Given that she'd
already called the parish's actions illegal and discriminatory, one would
have expected the commissioners to be appropriately deferential. 

Instead, Planning Commission Chair Earl Dauterive declared to Provident's
attorney, "The judge doesn't say what's a major or minor subdivision in St.
Bernard Parish, unfortunately the Planning Commission does and that's who
you have to answer to." 

"What the Planning Commission ignores, however, " Berrigan wrote Friday, "is
that this Court is responsible for deciding what is and what is not a
violation of United States' laws and our Constitution." 

"Defendants may disagree with this Court's prior orders," she wrote, "but
under our system of laws, they must abide by those prior orders unless and
until the Court of Appeals takes a different view. Defendants are not free
to defy this Court simply because they think they know better." 

In other words: Obey, St. Bernard, or bankrupt yourself in the fight.