[StBernard] St. Bernard Parish loses housing battle two different ways: Jarvis DeBerry

[Westley Annis]

St. Bernard Parish loses housing battle two different ways: Jarvis DeBerry
 By Jarvis DeBerry, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune 
on October 25, 2012 at 4:30 PM Email | Print

"When you get through staring that judge in the face / you gonna wanna cuss
the whole human race." - Johnnie Taylor

If more folks in St. Bernard Parish had listened to the soul singer quoted
above, the parish probably wouldn't have a $3 million bigotry bill on its
hands. Instead, residents largely supported parish officials in their
misguided attempts to keep St. Bernard free of affordable housing options.
Not only were those opponents unsuccessful in their attempts to keep
Provident Realty and their poor tenants out, but they are also going to
expend millions for their contemptuous stubbornness. Nothing hurts more than
losing - except, perhaps, losing two ways.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Ginger Berrigan ordered the parish to pay
$625,000 in fees, costs and damages related to its opposition to Provident
Realty's legitimate efforts to build apartments in the parish. That's in
addition to the $2 million the fight had already cost the parish.

Based in part on transcripts from public meetings, Berrigan determined that
racial animus was driving the parish government's opposition to the
construction of affordable housing. She ordered them to permit Provident to
follow through on its plans. Parish officials repeatedly defied her.
Berrigan repeatedly found them in contempt. That benighted resistance didn't
come cheap.

Johhnie Taylor's song is for the man imagining life without the wife he
loathes. The singer's not demanding that the husband love his wife, just
hipping him to the math of divorce. The bottom line prompts the song's
title: "It's Cheaper to Keep Her."

It would have been encouraging if in the midst of their opposition to the
affordable housing plans, folks in St. Bernard Parish had been persuaded to
see Provident's future tenants as neighbors and not as blight personified.
But it's a universally hard sell: getting people to love folks they think
beneath them, people whose presence they associate with pathology.

Those who can't muster up love for others, though, can sometimes be moved by
their love of money - more specifically, their outrage at seeing their money
thrown at hopeless causes. But not even that argument was persuasive in St.
Bernard.

There may be nobody in the parish who grips a buck as tightly as Lynn Dean.
When he was parish president almost 20 years ago, he prohibited the changing
of oil in parish vehicles because, to hear him tell it, that's how the oil
companies get you. After Hurricane Katrina, then-Councilman Dean told his
colleagues that racism was driving their support for an ordinance
restricting rental housing to blood relatives of the owners. But what seemed
to irk Dean most was the thought of losing money.

"Our parish is broke," Dean said. "We don't have the money to fix roads. We
are going to hire an attorney, and when it's all over with, we are going to
lose."

That despicable ordinance was drafted in 2006, well before Provident
announced its plans to build apartment buildings. But what Dean said in
opposition to that short-lived law applied just as much to the parish's
subsequent fight against the affordable housing developer.

St. Bernard Parish is still broke. So much so that parish officials recently
imposed a $32 monthly fee on its residents for fire service. This month, the
Parish Council introduced an ordinance that would allow the parish to take
out a $5 million bond because its members fear they might need it to plug
holes in the parish budget.

Parish President David Peralta took a refreshing new tone when he came into
office this year. "I have seen no problem with the apartments," he said. "I
don't see any now, nor do I anticipate any."

Even so, it's unlikely that the parish's bill has stopped accruing. The U.S.
Department of Justice, the New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center and
another party called the NOLA Capital Group all have pending cases against
the parish related to its attempts to restrict rentals after Katrina. Those
cases are likely to keep the parish's legal meter running.

Tuesday night, St. Bernard Sheriff's deputies executed a search warrant on a
storage facility being rented by Craig Taffaro, recently ousted as parish
president by the voters of St. Bernard. Last week a federal magistrate
ordered the parish to produce four boxes of documents related to the Justice
Department's action against St. Bernard, and St. Bernard officials went to
Taffaro's storage unit to get them.

Taffaro was the person who came up with that awful ordinance in 2006. Later
as parish president, he embodied the parish's opposition to the apartment
buildings. Voters ousted him during last year's election. And yet, his bad
leadership continues to cost them.