By Damon Hewitt

“I’m a long way from home.
And all my memories.
I’ve gotta find my way back somehow,
Back down to New Orleans.
- from the song “Long Way From Home” by Roi Anthony

A year and a half after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, native son and R&B singer Roi Anthony released a song entitled “A Long Way From Home.”  Part mournful and part hopeful, the song captured the burdened yet resilient spirit of New Orleanians displaced by the storm.  Sadly, over three years after Katrina, his lyrics continue to ring true.

Most people know about how so many New Orleanians, mostly poor and black, were left to languish in the days after the storm.  And most people know that most of the catastrophic flooding in New Orleans and the surrounding parishes was attributable not only to a natural disaster, but also the man-made disaster of faultily-constructed levees.  Yet, many are still wondering why so many people have yet to return home.  Yesterday the Legal Defense Fund helped to explain one of the key reasons.

LDF filed a new housing discrimination lawsuit yesterday, alleging that the largest housing recovery program in history shortchanges African American homeowners by $1 billion dollars.  The lawsuit claims that the Road Home program, a post-Katrina housing program designed to restore devastated communities in the New Orleans area and throughout Louisiana, systematically discriminates against black families in New Orleans by giving them less money to rebuild their homes than similarly-situated white families.  The Road Home program is a massive, $11 billion program funded by the U.S. Congress after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf coast in 2005.

Under the Road Home program, homeowners receive grants based on the lower of two figures – the home’s pre-storm market value, or the cost of replacing the structure to a minimal standard.  Black residents in New Orleans are disproportionately harmed by this formula because appraised home values in predominately black neighborhoods tend to be lower than the values of similar houses in predominately white neighborhoods.  As a result, the grants for African-American homeowners are more likely to be based upon the pre-storm value of their homes, leaving them without enough money to rebuild.  In contrast, white homeowners are more likely to receive grants based on the actual cost of repairs. With this kind of formula, many black residents are not very far along on the proverbial “road home”.  Instead, they are still a long way from home, as Roi Anthony’s song lamented.

It’s easy to see why the recovery effort in New Orleans has stalled when the program designed to bring people back home has a formula though which owners of nearly identical homes with similar damage and repair estimates can get wildly different grant awards, based in large part, upon where they live.  As LDF President and Director-Counsel John Payton put it, “African American homeowners in New Orleans are being unfairly prevented from reclaiming their homes by the discriminatory design and implementation of the Road Home program. African Americans are facing huge gaps between the amount of their Road Home grant awards versus the cost to rebuild their homes when compared to their white counterparts.”

And according to Cohen Milstein’s Joseph M. Sellers, head of the firm’s Civil Rights and Employment Practice, “HUD and Louisiana have perpetrated a cruel hoax on African-American victims of the Katrina and Rita hurricanes by offering assistance that Congress intended would permit them to rebuild their destroyed homes but which falls far short of its noble promise by linking it to the depressed values of their pre-storm segregated housing rather than to the cost of reconstruction.”

The lawsuit filed by LDF and its co-counsel seeks to eliminate this disparity.  Not only is this situation wrong, it also violates the law.  The lawsuit contends that the Road Home program violates the Fair Housing Act of 1968 and Title I of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974.  Both of these federal laws require government programs to lead to equitable results, regardless of their intent.  The defendants in the lawsuit are the Executive Director of the Louisiana Recovery Authority (the state agency that administers the Road Home program) and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (the federal agency that approved the Road Home program’s flawed design).

For more information and a copy of the Complaint, please visit LDF’s website:  www.naacpldf.org or our new blog, The Defenders Online, www.defendersonline.com

Links to press coverage:

• Press Conference Audio
• LDF’s Press Release
• Associated Press
  Lawsuit claims discrimination in Katrina recovery
• New Orleans Times-Picayune
  Housing advocates, black New Orleanians file class-action discrimination lawsuit against Road Home
• USA Today
  Katrina victims: Discrimination alleged in suit
  

Websites of partners law firms and organizations in this litigation:

• Cohen Milstein
• Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center
• National Fair Housing Alliance
  

STATEMENTS FROM LDF CLIENTS:

Almarie Ford

My name is Almarie Ford. I bought my house in the Kingswood subdivision in New Orleans East twenty years ago. I just moved back into my shell of a house, after having to rent an apartment in Baton Rouge, bouncing from place to place, and relying on the kindness of friends for over two years. All I have in my house now is a bed, a bathroom and a microwave in the kitchen, because I haven’t been able to finish the repairs. The Road Home program told me that it would cost over $150,000 to repair the damage to my house.  But I received less than $3,500 from the Road Home program, just because the Road Home said that my house is not worth as much as the same house in a different neighborhood. There’s a house on the West Bank nearly identical to mine and made by the same company.  But that house is worth much more than my house, just because of where it is located.  It’s not fair that I and other people in my community are being shortchanged just because of where we live.

Edward Randolph

My name is Edward Randolph. I’m a Vietnam veteran who served my country proudly and am now disabled. I’ve lived in New Orleans for my entire life.  Like so many people in the East, I’m still not back in my house.  My wife and I have to rent an apartment outside of the city because we don’t have enough money to rebuild. We’ve saved and scrimped everything we can to put towards fixing the house, but it’s an uphill battle. According to the Road Home, I’m short over $170,000 from fixing my house, but they only gave me $16,000. And it’s mostly because of the way they value houses in my neighborhood. If my house was in a different neighborhood then I would have received more help. This is about fairness and equality, and that’s why I’m here today, because the Road Home hasn’t been fair to us and a lot of other people.

Daphne Jones

My name is Daphne Jones. I’ve lived in New Orleans my whole life and was able to buy my first house here in the Lower Ninth Ward in 1999. I worked hard and was able to realize the American Dream and become a homeowner, only to see my house washed away by the flood. The flooding was bad enough, but the Road Home has been almost as bad. I was determined to move back home, but if you look around my neighborhood there’s very few people coming back.  In other communities you see a lot more people coming back.  And it hurts to know that part of the reason is that the Road Home says that houses in our community are worth less money.  It’s almost as if people in my neighborhood are being punished for not being rich, even though we got the worst damage from the storm. All I want is to be treated fairly and it’s not fair for me to be put in a different class just because of where I live.

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