In order for a local government entity to get its hands on federal housing money, it is required to formally certify every time it does so that it is doing something called "affirmatively furthering fair housing." The feds even have an abbreviation for it — AFFH. If you take the money, you have to certify you are using it to AFFH. You have to swear you are an AFFHer.
AFFH is all about desegregation. Westchester County tried to argue it had used the money to promote economic diversity and that should be enough. The judge said in an order, "an interpretation of 'affirmatively further fair housing' that excludes consideration of race would be an absurd result."
Jen Sorensen
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They didn't fight the Civil War to end poverty. They fought it to end slavery. All of the civil rights-oriented law since then has been about racism. In order to AFFH, you have to promote desegregation.
So let me give you one small example of how Dallas City Hall has used the federal government's money. In the late 1990s the city borrowed $25 million in Section 108 housing money from HUD at very low interest, then lent it out again to downtown developers. The city used other federal money, called community development block grant or "CDBG" money, to make the payments on its loan from HUD.
Borrow money from the feds. Use the feds' own money to pay the feds back. Sweet, eh?
Lorlee Bartos, who was on the CDBG board at the time, complained to the city that the loan payments were eating up a lot of the CDBG money, which was supposed to go to people in need.
"I said, 'You are developing downtown on the backs of the poor,'" she told me last week.
Not to worry, the city told her. The developers will have to pay back it back to the CDBG fund with interest, and meanwhile they are required to provide affordable housing in their projects.
But in fact, as the developments were completed, the city let them out of their loans for 60 cents on the dollar and then ruled that they were no longer required to provide affordable units.
The CDBG fund got stiffed. It never got its money back. All that federal money produced next-to-nothing in the way of rent-controlled units. And it turns out the city should have required the developers to provide affordable units anyway because the requirement was still in deed restrictions that ran for 15 years no matter what happened to the loans.
In other words, the city in effect leaned over backward to make sure the federal housing money it was taking would not produce affordable housing downtown. If we were to do an abbreviation for that, it would be AFSBGAFM — affirmatively furthering segregation by giving away federal money.
This is one relatively small example. The lawsuit goes into the whole Don Hill federal corruption trial saga, in which the city was cramming affordable housing into black neighborhoods while it built nothing in white areas. Please.
Someone is going to say, "But that's what former Dallas City Councilman Don Hill, an African-American elected leader, wanted the city to do. He wanted the new affordable units to be built in his district, which is black."
Yeah? I ask one question. Where does Hill live now? In the pen. The big house. Up the river for 18 years. And let's not forget the other African-American leaders who fought to shut down the white guy who wanted to bring 65,000 new jobs to their part of town. They haven't joined Mr. Hill yet, but they have FBI agents kicking their doors right and left.
Line down the middle. White. Black. Bad.
That's what this lawsuit says. It paints a big bull's-eye on City Hall. The top estimate I have heard for potential damages — usually figured at three times the actual amounts involved — is north of a billion dollars. Way north.
I asked City Hall to comment on all this. They did not grace me with a message one way or the other.
Federal Judge Reed O'Connor has had this thing on his desk for months. Selected for the federal bench in 2007 by Senators John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison and nominated by George W. Bush, O'Connor could have kicked the whole thing. Instead, last week he granted a motion for trial.
If it makes it to trial, this will be far more interesting, at least for me, than the federal City Hall corruption trial that sent Hill to prison.
Why? Because it will involve way more subpoenas going out to people on the north side of town. I call that "affirmatively furthering diversity of subpoenas" or AFDS.
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