Long Division

Whisked through Congress in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s murder, the Fair Housing Act of 1968 aims to overcome housing discrimination. Lax enforcement, however, denies many Americans a fair shake at buying or renting a home (and the act has never protected gay and lesbian couples). You don’t have to visit a sundown town, or even an impoverished ghetto, to find that unfair mortgage lending practices steer African Americans away from whiter pastures — even in the cradle of the Civil Rights Movement, Montgomery, Alabama.

In Montgomery’s current five-year plan to remodel downtown and promote new housing development — it expects to add 950 households, and 6,200 more in its quickly sprawling suburbs — the housing report acknowledges discriminatory “steering” and disparate lending as impediments to true integration. “Whites are typically ... more affluent ... and are less likely to live in poverty than African American households,” the report reads, “open[ing] the way for a variety of possible problems for minority populations in finding appropriate housing options.”

However, the Central Alabama Fair Housing Center (CAFHC), a Montgomery Law nonprofit that fields housing discrimination complaints, reports that at all income levels, more than twice as many black Montgomery mortgage seekers were denied loans as whites — for instance, 21 percent versus 9.5 percent in the middle class. Even issued loans suffer a black-skin tax: White applicants averaged $20,000 more. “When you say whites are statistically richer, then automatically that makes it an economic issue, and not an issue of discrimination,” says Faith Cooper, executive director of CAFHC. “Truth is, this affects black people at every income level.”

According to Susan Hill, grants coordinator for the planning and development department, the city helps offset disparities in homeownership through the down payment assistance program started in 2002. Using funds from HUD, the city provides money for closing costs to creditworthy, low-to moderate-income first-time buyers, about 95 percent of whom are African American, says Hill. Recruiting, however, has proved difficult. “At our first open house, not a whole lot of people showed up,” she says. Also, higher-income homebuyers are not eligible, even though disparities exist for affluent black residents.

The housing report additionally recommends instituting a fair housing media campaign and a task force of banks and lenders (ironically trusting the same people guilty of lending discrimination to enforce rules against the practice). The media campaign has started, sort of. The daily Montgomery Advertiser newspaper ran a front-page story on Sunday, Oct. 7, 2007, with the headline, “Few Complaints.” It reported only two housing grievances filed with HUD for 2006, including the battle of one tenant, Yolanda Boswell, against her landlord, Jamario GumBayTay.

CAFHC, however, currently holds eight complaints against this same landlord, says John Pollock, a lawyer for the center. They are investigating these racial discriminations just from the past year.

“It’s amazing to suggest either there is no problem or no one is doing anything,” says Pollock. “There is not a one-to-one correlation between complaints we get and HUD cases we’re able to file. The fact that people don’t know where to go if they have a problem isn’t even acknowledged.”