How racist housing laws are keeping New Orleans white

Ten years ago, the wrath of Hurricane Katrina forever altered the urban landscape of New Orleans, leaving in its wake thousands of destroyed homes and more than 400,000 displaced residents. The storm’s power exposed more than just the failing infrastructure in one of America’s legendary cities – Katrina also revealed the ugly legacy of a discriminatory housing system.

An estimated 228,000 occupied housing units were flooded after Hurricane Katrina- accounting for more than 45% of all available housing. When President Bush came to New Orleans in September 2005 and addressed the nation, he claimed the goal and hope of rebuilding efforts was to rebuild New Orleans for all residents interested in returning. Contrary to this rhetoric, the rebuilding of the New Orleans area post-Katrina was a tool used to further entrench systematic segregation and discrimination. In 2007, nearly two years after the storm hit, the Census Bureau estimated the city’s population represented approximately 63% of the pre-hurricane total of 455,046, suggesting more than a third of the pre-hurricane residents of New Orleans had not returned to the city. Those who returned first were overwhelmingly white, wealthier and without children. But this was not an accident or coincidence.

In 2005, Republican Congressman Richard Baker from Baton Rouge captured the opinions of housing policy makers by jubilantly declaring, “We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn’t do it, but God did.” While Baker maintains his comments were misunderstood (he said the comments were about improving the conditions for residents), the opportunity to remake New Orleans in a whiter image proved to be irresistible. No one enacted a direct ban to keep poor, black residents from returning – instead, decision-makers stealthily leveraged zoning laws that excluded minority groups from desirable neighborhoods with better services and amenities. By restricting  pre-fabricated housing and multifamily dwellings – particularly public housing projects – and increasing the cost of single-family residences, housing discrimination diminishes the options of many minority households and contributes to continuing intergroup disparities in income, home ownership, wealth, education and employment.

On September 29, 2006,  just thirteen months after Katrina, St. Bernard Parish (county) passed the infamous “blood relative” ordinance. This novel discriminatory tool restricted home rentals to blood relatives of the owners defined as “within the first, second or third direct ascending or descending generations.” To rent to anyone else,  landlords would need to obtain a Permissive Use Permit from the St. Bernard Parish Council. Violators of the ordinance, including both lessors and lessees, were subject to criminal prosecution and civil penalties, including a misdemeanor charge, a fine of between $50 and $250 per day for each day they were in violation of the ordinance, and a civil penalty of $100 per day for each day of unpermitted rental, plus administrative costs, court costs and attorney fees for investigation and prosecution of the civil matter. Clearly, the Parish Council wanted this law to stick.

The council justified the ordinance citing the “need to maintain the integrity and stability of established neighborhoods.” Since roughly 93% of St. Bernard’s housing units were owned by Caucasians at the time, the practical effect of the blood-relative ordinance was to make single-family rentals unavailable to non-whites. This and the many other barriers to entry erected by St. Bernard Parish Council seem not merely designed to preserve the racial and socioeconomic homogeneity that pre-existed Katrina, but even to reduce the number of ethnic minorities in the Parish. The ordinance bears frightening resemblance to a historically racist Jim Crow law passed following the Great Flood of 1932 which stated “no person or corporation shall rent an apartment in an apartment house or other like structure to a person who is not of the same race as the other occupants.”

While the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center (GNOFHAC) filed a fair housing suit in 2008 which led to overturning the ordinance. While parish officials maintain they did not intend to be discriminatory, in 2014, St. Bernard Parish agreed to pay a $1.8 million dollar settlement for their actions in the wake of Katrina.

Zoning restrictions have been a tool of racism for centuries. In the US, enforcement efforts targeted Chinese immigrants in San Francisco in the 1880s and Eastern European immigrants in New York in the 1920s, while African Americans moving into white neighborhoods prompted many US cities to adopt explicitly segregationist zoning ordinances in the early 1900s that never really ended. Restrictive zoning laws are meant to ensure the prevailing perceptions of property value, even at the cost of equality, fairness and justice.

But even before Katrina, the Greater New Orleans area not only mimicked the national pattern of government assisted housing programs serving as engines of poverty concentration and segregation, but it also exceeded the national averages for such poverty concentration.

HUD defines their Low Income Housing Tax Credit Program as “the most important resource for creating affordable housing in the United States”. However, between 1995 and 2001, absolutely no tax credit units with at least two bedrooms were placed in the lowest poverty census tracts (0-10%) in New Orleans, compared with a rate of 41.3% nationally. Southern cities such as Charlotte (71.5%), Nashville (64.3%), Atlanta (32%), and Houston (26.2%) all managed to place tax credit units in their lowest poverty neighborhoods over the same time frame.