Posted on 03/21/2006 3:38:23 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Lawyers for Baltimore public housing residents are asking a federal judge to order the creation of 3,000 new low-income housing units and an additional 3,750 housing vouchers, mostly in well-off suburban neighborhoods with good schools and access to jobs.
The request comes 14 months after the judge found that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development violated fair housing laws by failing to take a regional approach to the desegregation of city public housing.
It asks the federal agency to provide tenants with 675 new "housing opportunities a year over the next decade to reduce the effects of decades of discriminatory actions."
Whether the judge accepts the proposal or crafts his own solution to the discrimination he has found, the case highlights one of the Baltimore region's most vexing and contentious issues - how to dilute the concentration of poverty in the city.
The proposed order is drawing opposition and skepticism from Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley and some suburban leaders, and it is being vigorously contested by lawyers for HUD, who say it is "entirely uncalled for" and "simply not practical."
............"Baltimore's African-American public housing residents have virtually no opportunity to live in white, suburban neighborhoods with better opportunities for themselves and their children for education, employment, safety and recreation," they wrote. "Only through such a remedy can African-American public housing residents in Baltimore overcome the harms suffered through decades of government-sanctioned discrimination."
But lawyers for HUD counter that the "prospect of implementing those recommendations and having them work is, at best, dubious."
"Testimony from HUD program officials will demonstrate how difficult, disruptive and counter-productive the sort of remedy that plaintiffs will likely seek would be," they wrote.
(Excerpt) Read more at baltimoresun.com ...
Can you say 'activist Judge'????
thats right make more middle class people move from the red states by your social engineering.
Socialist Judge D*uchebag alert.
error....that is move TO the Red states, not from them.
The song "There Goes The Neighborhood" by The BusBoys comes to mind...
Blame everybody, including Congress, Judges, and agencies, for creating these laws and interpreting them in such ways. It's not that giving some poor people housing is a bad thing. It's that having the federal government involved in this type of complex social engineering is meddlesome and crazily inefficient.
The welfare mentality is going to ruin this country.
What do they think will happen when a housing project is mandated to be placed in the "white, suburban neighborhoods"?
The way the person who said that paragraph thinks, you'd think there were "opportunity trees" growing in the white neighborhood that all you have to do is pick.
You will see flight from whatever suburb such a housing project is placed - count on it.
What do you mean "going to" ?
Read that a couple of times and try to digest the meaning of it. All I can get out of it is that they are claiming that poor black people live where poor black people live.
That's OK. You were color-coding them the way they SHOULD be color coded, rather than the way the MSM did it in order to obstruct the true nature of what are called the blue states.
Wow, so people are entitled to housing because of decades of discrimination. But why only 675. It seems we need several million new homes for all these people. I hope we can provide food and clothing and cars and big screen TVs to these poor people. And why not some extra spending money.
Baltimore trying to run them out, New Orleans trying to keep them in.
And I think the judge is saying that living around black people is undesirable.
1. Will government attempting to build "affordable housing" in areas where an average half acre lot may have a market value of $100,000+?
2. Will they attempt to purchase said property at fair market values or enact eminent domain?
3. Will private developers now be asked or regulated into providing a percentage of any proposed development to HUD to ensure a trouble free approval and development period?
This is just flat out wrong. If you don't think Kelo is going to start applying to public housing debates within the next 2 years? Well, your home could be next.
You cant dilute black neighborhoods by sending them out into white neighborhoods. What you do is create new black neighborhoods as whites move out. Its been going on for 50 years and they still cant see it. Tell you what--- Move Baltimore blacks to Montgomery County. Germanton and Gaithersburg and Potomac have lots of jobs growing on trees out there..
They'll be the first to criticise Bill Cosby or the many other voices telling the poor to raise themselves up through strong families and education.
Well, if it isn't anti-smoking, then it will be housing that will be pushed on us. Next, it will be an automobile, complete with DVD player (to calm the unruly children or satisfy the X-rated mind of some degenerates) in every driveway. Activist judges have got to be removed or at the very least, handcuffed.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.