DHA official testifies about dual policy bias Hearing continues on N. Dallas housing plan

Craig Flournoy
10/31/1996
The Dallas Morning News
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(Copyright 1996)

A top Dallas Housing Authority official testified Wednesday that some landlords in the city use a "dual policy" of renting apartments that prevents black families from moving into predominantly white neighborhoods.

Ann Lott, who heads the DHA program that helps families find apartments, said these property management companies consistently accept government certificates and vouchers that allow black families to move into apartments in minority neighborhoods.

But she said these companies - which she did not identify - refuse to accept subsidies when such families try to rent apartments in white neighborhoods. That practice shows that discrimination is not as overt as it once was but can be just as invidious, she said.

"It is more sophisticated than signs that say, `We don't take blacks,' " she testified. Ms. Lott's testimony took place on the third day of a hearing in which more than 1,000 homeowners in Far North Dallas are attempting to persuade a federal judge to kill the DHA's plans to build two 40-unit public housing projects in their predominantly white neighborhoods. The homeowners want U.S. District Judge Jerry Buchmeyer to replace those 80 apartments and almost 400 others with vouchers and certificates that families could use to rent apartments of their choosing.

Attorneys for the homeowners pointed out that the housing authority has made enormous progress in using these subsidies to promote desegregation: Over the past decade, more than 1,300 poor black Dallas families have used certificates and vouchers to move into largely white areas.

Still, housing authority officials testified that racial discrimination and other obstacles continue to prevent thousands of low-income black families from using the subsidies to rent apartments in predominantly white neighborhoods.

In an interview, Ms. Lott said there are "at least four big companies" that enforce the dual policy she described.

She testified that 80 percent of black families who look in white neighborhoods give up in frustration and end up renting in minority neighborhoods.

In some cases, Ms. Lott said, landlords refuse to accept certificates and vouchers. In other cases, apartment owners and managers who do accept the subsidies use other tactics to keep out black families, according to Ms. Lott and Lori Moon, the DHA's president and chief executive officer. Those tactics, they said, include requiring a security deposit of several hundred dollars, stringent income and credit requirements, an application fee and proof that the applicant has had a job for a year.

In an interview, Ms. Moon and Ms. Lott compared these requirements to the poll taxes, literacy tests and other tactics used in the Jim Crow South to keep African-Americans from voting. Ms. Moon said most of the financial requirements make little sense considering that the government promises to pay the rent for a year.

"Why would they do that when they know we are guaranteeing the rent?" she asked. "That just screens out our families."

Several efforts to obtain comment from the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas were unsuccessful on Wednesday.

Attorneys for the homeowners said discrimination can be overcome by tough enforcement of federal fair housing laws.

Yet the head of a Dallas fair-housing group testified that local and federal officials have done nothing with dozens of discrimination complaints he filed four years ago.

Craig Gardner, the executive director of the city-financed Walker Project, said his private, nonprofit group filed 80 discrimination complaints against Dallas-area property owners and managers in 1992. The complaints were filed with the city of Dallas, the state of Texas and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, he said.

The landlords said then that there was no substance to the allegations. They said they had never engaged in racial discrimination.

The city and the state eventually referred the complaints to HUD, which then referred them to the U.S. Justice Department, he said.

"The Department of Justice took the complaints in 1993 and promised to investigate," Mr. Gardner testified. "I talked to them yesterday and they said they had done something, but they wouldn't tell me what."

Michael Sitcov, a Justice Department attorney at the hearing, declined to comment. The 80 apartments being contested are part of the DHA's response to Judge Buchmeyer's landmark order last year requiring that the agency provide housing for more than 3,000 families in predominantly white neighborhoods. The judge issued the order after finding that government officials had forced thousands of poor black families to live in taxpayer-supported slums for decades.

In his closing statement, Mike Lynn , one of the homeowners' attorneys, implored the judge not to repeat the mistakes of the past in a different neighborhood. "It is absolutely wrong to create another pocket ghetto in North Dallas," he said.

Mr. Lynn also stressed that race plays no role in the homeowners' opposition. "From the outset," he said, "we have tried to keep this on the highest moral ground."

Mike Daniel, an attorney representing the seven poor black women who filed the desegregation lawsuit in 1985, expressed skepticism. Based on what he has seen in this 11-year-old desegregation case, Mr. Daniel said, "White people don't segregate black people to give black people more."

Joe Werner, the attorney representing the housing authority, asked, in his closing statement: "How many times must this court listen to the sanctimonious pleadings of people who are all in favor of desegregation but 'not in my backyard?' "

Mr. Werner said the judge should approve the two Far North Dallas projects because it gives low-income black families a choice beyond certificates and vouchers to get out of the ghetto. The judge is expected to rule on the homeowners' lawsuit in December.