NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Two fair-housing organizations in New Orleans, along with five African-American homeowners, have lost a round in federal court in their lawsuit claiming discrimination in the Road Home hurricane relief program.
They had claimed that the Road Home program used a grant formula that violates the anti-discrimination provisions of the Fair Housing Act.
The lawsuit argued that it was unfair for the program to base grant amounts on pre-Katrina market value, as opposed to actual rebuilding costs.
An Appeals court in Washington on Friday vacated a preliminary injunction issued in the case after analyzing the arguments and saying the plaintiffs have failed to show that the likelihood that they can win the case on its merits. Federal and state officials are defendants in the lawsuit.
The Times-Picayune's David Hammer wrote about this suit back in October.
For years, fair housing advocates have complained that the Road Home’s use of home values to calculate grants amounts to racial discrimination because it means families in economically depressed neighborhoods, which are typically majority-black, get less money to repair their homes than someone with an identical house in an area where values have appreciated.
I don't know what grounds the court used to decide that this grant formula doesn't amount to racial discrimination as defined by the Fair Housing Act, but in any event it is clearly a poor method of meeting the applicants' actual needs and a central reason the Road Home has been such a failure.
Hammer's story ends with this quote.
For Johnson and others, responsibility for that lies at the feet of the original LRA.The people in charge now are not the ones we've been waiting for.
“It was incompetence on that LRA board,” she said. “You know, Andy Kopplin is now deputy mayor and he has to deal with the blight in this city. Well, when he sat up there in Baton Rouge, they created that blight because they didn’t give people enough money to rebuild.”
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