Frisco council votes to support reduced-rent apartments

Dallas Morning News

Valerie Wigglesworth // February 17, 2010

More than 100 people turned out Tuesday to voice opposition to two proposed apartment complexes in Frisco.

The planned complexes are dependent on acceptance into the state's Housing Tax Credit program, which provides federal tax incentives to developments with rents at below-market rates.

The complexes also would set aside a certain number of units for Section 8 voucher-holders from the Dallas Housing Authority.

Late into Tuesday night, the City Council discussed the projects and spent more than an hour in executive session consulting with the city’s attorney. Just before midnight, the council voted 4-to-1 to write letters supporting the projects to the state, which will decide in July which projects get funded. City support is key in the developers’ applications to the state for funding.

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Farm Worker Housing Settlement

From: Bangor Daily News

Sharon Kiley Mack / February 16, 2010

MILBRIDGE, Maine — A lawsuit involving the town of Milbridge and Mano en Mano, a local nonprofit, was settled in U.S. District Court last week, a move expected by all parties.

Magistrate Judge Margaret J. Kravchuk ordered that all details be completed within 30 days, at which time the suit filed by Mano en Mano will be dismissed.

The lawsuit, initiated last summer, was based on alleged violations of the federal Fair Housing Act. Mano en Mano, a nonprofit advocacy group, was using $1.6 million in federal grant funds to construct a housing unit for permanent agricultural workers.

When Milbridge voters in June 2009 approved a moratorium on such facilities, Mano en Mano sued the town.

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Social Justice Advocates Make Case For Annexation

California Planning & Development Report
Paul Shigley // November 9, 2009

The Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has given new life to a lawsuit alleging that the City of Modesto and Stanislaus County discriminated against four predominately Latino communities.

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Experts cast doubt on housing philosophy

Galveston County Daily News
Rhiannon Meyers // December 25, 2009

The new public housing philosophy of dispersing public housing residents across a region instead of segregating the poor in one city may not work in Galveston County, experts said.The federal government in recent years has pushed public housing agencies to spread housing over entire regions in an attempt to provide better opportunities for families lumped together in poor, crime-ridden cities with low-performing schools, John Powell, executive director of Ohio State University’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, said.

However, regional public housing isn’t successful without solid public transportation, an abundance of low-skilled, entry-level jobs and places where the uninsured can get health care, experts said.

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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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Bush administration blew off civil rights enforcement

Valley Morning Star
Mary Sanchez // December 17, 2009

This one is for those who naively believe that an entity called the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice should be in the business of enforcing the nation’s civil rights laws. Under the late Bush administration, one had reason to doubt. For years, critics blasted the Bush Justice Department for ideologically inspired hiring and firing decisions, unfair treatment of career (read: ideologically unreliable) staff members, and a selective approach to its enforcement responsibilities.

Now a 180-page report prepared for Congress by the Government Accountability Office bears out many of those contentions.

The report, which assessed civil rights enforcement between 2001 and 2007, found big declines from the Clinton years in cases having to do with housing and job discrimination, and with disability rights. Thomas Perez, the new Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, summarized the findings to Congress in testimony this month.

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Affordable housing laws aren't stopping segregation

From: washingtonexaminer.com
By: Rigel Oliveri // September 24, 2009

Affluent New York City suburb Westchester County recently agreed to spend more than $50 million to build or acquire 750 affordable housing units in order to help desegregate some of its almost entirely white towns and villages. It only did so because it had been sued.

In February, a federal court determined that Westchester had taken virtually no action to fulfill its promise to use millions of dollars in federal Community Development Block Grant money to further fair housing.

The level of residential racial segregation in the United States is pronounced. Of the 50 U.S. metropolitan areas with the largest black populations, all show a moderate to high level of segregation. Westchester is unusually high.

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