For black Road Homers, a hollow victory: Jarvis DeBerry
Published: Friday, August 20, 2010, 9:00 AM Updated: Friday, August 20, 2010, 9:06 AM
Moral victories stink.
That’s what five black New Orleans homeowners discovered this week when a federal judge in Washington ruled that Louisiana’s Road Home Program did indeed give them less money than they’d have received had their houses been destroyed in a white neighborhood — but that he couldn’t do anything about it.
The plaintiffs’ lawyers say they’ll appeal U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy’s position that he’s powerless to grant them relief, but as it stands now, Gloria Burns, Rhonda Dents, Almarie Ford, Daphne Jones and Edward Randolph derive no benefits at all from getting a judge to see it their way.
No matter. State officials are still planning to appeal Kennedy’s finding and his order that the state use a different formula to calculate grants for the 179 people who, almost five years after Hurricane Katrina, have yet to get rebuilding money from Road Home.
Road Home, a program administered by the Louisiana Recovery Authority with money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, took the determined value of the home and subtracted from it any insurance and FEMA money homeowners received. The difference, capped at a maximum $150,000, was then granted to eligible applicants.
Sounds simple. It might even sound fair. Until you consider that value isn’t the same as cost and that two houses identical in every way but location could get disparate grants — even if the money needed to repair them is exactly the same.
Generally speaking, homes in black neighborhoods aren’t valued as highly as homes in white neighborhoods — and not because the bricks, drywall, flooring and roofing materials used in their construction necessarily cost less. They are often considered of lower value simply because of what they are: homes in a black neighborhood.
If you base a rebuilding grant on a home’s value and not its cost, and thousands get less money than others to buy an identical amount of Sheetrock, then your goal of rebuilding storm-ravaged cities and parishes hasn’t been met. And according to Kennedy, it’s likely you’ve violated the law.
“The Court does not take lightly that some African-American homeowners received lower awards than they would have if their homes were in predominantly white neighborhoods,” Kennedy wrote in a July memorandum opinion. “And although the Court appreciates that all of the parties are committed to the rebuilding of a city that has suffered greatly, it is regrettable that this effort to do so appears to have proceeded in a manner that disadvantaged African-American homeowners who wish to repair their homes.” However, he said law prevents the federal government from telling a state how it should have handled money already spent. But he can order Louisiana to use a different calculation for the remaining 179 people in line.
Damon Hewitt, a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund & Educational Fund and a New Orleans native, said Thursday that plaintiffs were seeking relief for everybody who got shorted by the Road Home’s formula, not just the black applicants. Though the five plaintiffs are all black, a white or Vietnamese person living in one of their neighborhoods would be equally harmed by such a formula. The formula would likely give a white homeowner in St. Bernard Parish less money than the owner of an identical house in Lakeview. “It’s difficult when you have a claim that says race, race, race” to get people to see that it’s not an exclusively racial issue, he said, but that approach was necessary.
The plaintiffs’ original complaint estimates that 20,000 black New Orleans homeowners got less than they should have, but Hewitt said that number becomes larger if all races in all parishes are included.
“We have a race claim, but there really wasn’t another claim to bring,” Hewitt said. “The law doesn’t often give you a way to address complex problems.” Addressing black homeowners’ complaints, he said, would mean the state “would essentially have to fix this for everyone. We would love to see recalculation of grants for every homeowner in the state. We brought it on behalf of African-American homeowners,” but we were hoping for a “LRA/HUD settlement that would lift all boats.”
“There’s no one lawsuit that could have addressed all the problems” with the Road Home Program, Hewitt said.
Apparently not. This lawsuit was theoretically successful. And essentially it does nothing.
Jarvis DeBerry is an editorial writer. He can be reached at jdeberry@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3355. Follow him at http://connect.nola.com/user/jdeberry/index.html and at twitter.com/jarvisdeberrytp.
