Race bias at issue in Baltimore public housing suit

Jet, Jan 5, 2004

A civil rights lawsuit filed by Baltimore public housing tenants nearly nine years ago went to trial recently, with their lawyers arguing that city and federal housing authorities deliberately segregated public housing by race since the 1930s.

Pointing to the concentration of what he called "Black ghettos," plaintiffs' attorney Christopher Brown said Blacks "took the brunt of the bulldozers' advance in urban renewal."

"If anything, we have regressed rather than progressed," Brown said in his opening statement.

City Solicitor Thurmon Zollicoffer, who is representing the city, acknowledged past racism, but insisted the city abandoned "sanctioned segregation" immediately after the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision.

HUD attorney Diane Kelleher said the federal agency is very different now from when the plaintiffs first filed their suit. She pointed to HUD's use of housing vouchers as a way of resolving many of the problems created by the large high-rise developments that were popular in the 1960s. Many of the those projects have since been torn down.

Housing advocates describe the trial in U.S. District Court as one of the most significant civil rights actions in Baltimore's history and one of the country's most important housing cases in the past 20 years.

At issue is whether the Housing Authority of Baltimore City and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development consigned the neediest residents to the most distressed neighborhoods.

Attorneys for the tenants contend overt racism led to an overwhelming majority of Black public housing residents to live in impoverished, segregated neighborhoods.

The city and HUD argue that concentrations of public housing residents in poor, Black neighborhoods are the result of demographics and broad policy decisions, not discrimination. They say that because the majority of city residents are Black, most available neighborhoods for public housing have Black residents.

They also contend that other factors, such as the availability of job opportunities, personal choice, and the ability of individuals to obtain mortgage financing also contributed to the racial makeup of the city's public housing.

U.S. District Judge Marvin Garbis is hearing the case without a jury. If he finds that the tenants' civil rights were violated, he could specify changes in housing policy. The result could be a judicial oversight of housing decisions that could last for years.