What does law on housing require?

Galveston County Daily News
Heber Taylor // December 9, 2009

It doesn’t matter what public officials think of the Galveston Open Government Project. Members of the self-styled watchdog group have asked some good questions. People in government should be able to answer them.

The folks in this political group, who have described public housing as a failed social experiment, have asked whether a lawsuit in Baltimore has implications for public housing in Galveston County. Ironically, the lawsuit in Baltimore was championed by the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund. Politics can make for strange allies.

The lawsuit, Thompson v. the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, claimed that the plans to continue the decades-old pattern of public housing in Baltimore discriminated against African-Americans living in public housing.

In 2005, U.S. District Judge Marvin Garbis said: “Geographic considerations, economic limitations, population shifts, etc., have rendered it impossible to effect a meaningful degree of desegregation of public housing by redistributing the public housing population of Baltimore City within the city limits. Baltimore City should not be viewed as an island reservation for use as a container for all of the poor of a contiguous region.”

The judge said the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development would have to take a regional approach to promoting fair housing opportunities.

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