Housing discrimination continues in Orleans Parish, says report

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

Housing the best personal loan companies discrimination, suggests a new report, remains a flagrant issue in Orleans Parish even as federal officials attempt to beef up enforcement of the Fair Housing Act and inform renters of their housing rights.

According to the report, upwards of 40 percent of Black participants in the study experienced discrimination when attempting to secure rental property in various neighborhoods, including East Carrollton, Algiers Point, Audubon Park and Lake-view—actions that are punishable under local, state and federal housing statutes.

“While there is this public narrative about people having access to any area of the city, we see that’s just not the case,” says Kate Scott, of the Greater New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, which authored the study. “Most of the discrimination we witnessed using African-American testers was not blatant, but landlords would use subtle ways to discourage these consumers from pursuing rental applications.”

Scott says, in one case, a white landlord asked a would-be Black tenant “if he had a gun.” In another instance, a landlord repeatedly asked a prospective renter if he could truly afford to rent the oregon small energy loan program property.” Other forms of discrimination included offering reduced rent or utility costs to white renters over Blacks. “We also saw what we call ‘linguistic profiling’ where landlords returned calls from renters thought to be white and fail to return calls from those believed to be Black,” something that mirrors job discrimination in cases where employers do not respond to resumes from applicants believed to have Black names.

The study, funded by the Depart­ment of Housing and Urban Development, tested discrimination in areas with low crime levels, high levels of educational attainment, and high household income levels, Scott says. Each of the communities in the study were also at least 70 percent white, a departure from the overall percentage of white residents in New Orleans as a whole, which hovers just above 30 percent.

Research also reveals a variety of discriminatory efforts on the part of white landlords, including telling participants in person that an apartment is suddenly unavailable upon realizing that the applicant is Black. “We conduct these studies as part of our systematic audits of housing discrimination issues in New Orleans,” florida lender says Scott, adding, “We do so in what we call ‘neighborhoods of opportunity’ where this is likely to occur.”

Efforts to end housing discrimination have resulted in print, radio and television campaigns by the housing department telling consumers that fair housing “is your right.” But a federal judge this month struck a provision of the Fair Housing Act that bars discrimination resulting from business policies that negatively impact minority renters and homebuyers. The ruling by Judge Richard Leon, of the appellate court for the District of Columbia, could be a major setback. “Housing discrimination is incredibly hard to prove,” Scott says. “Sometimes all people have is an inkling that something’s not right.”

Landlords found to be engaging in housing discrimination are likely to face complaints from the fair housing center, Scott says. “We are currently collecting more data before ultimately deciding what to do and that could result in filing a complaint with the federal housing department or lead to filing a lawsuit.”

This article originally published in the November 10, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.