Is the DC government violating the Fair Housing Act?

jonetta rose barras for The District Line, July 12, 2024

For a group of homeowners in Ward 8’s historic Anacostia neighborhood, the answer to that title question is a resounding “Yes.” They recently filed a housing discrimination complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), asserting that the District’s “[Low-Income Housing Tax Credit] program administration, policies, and practices violate the Fair Housing Act by concentrating [LIHTC] projects and units in majority Black neighborhoods and keeping those projects out of White neighborhoods.”

“The District also engages in discriminatory zoning policies and practices that disproportionately provide for apartment housing in Black neighborhoods and single-family housing in White neighborhoods,” according to the complaint written and filed by Texas-based attorneys Laura Beshara and Michael Daniel on behalf of DC residents Bruce Holmes, Nikki Waddell, Kristina Leszczak and Camille Bourguignon.

After examining federal and local government documents, Beshara and Daniel concluded that DC is also violating several other federal laws, including portions of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 and Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The complaint is “the first step” in pushing for changes, Beshara told me during a telephone interview with her and Daniel earlier this week.

“We can always go to court anytime,” she said. However, “HUD has accepted the case and assigned an investigator.”

Speaking with me via Zoom, the Ward 8 residents made clear that they don’t object to affordable or low-cost housing. “It is that when that housing comes, there’s not been community amenities, there’s not really any follow-up. So what oftentimes happens is you have buildings that are constructed, there is the housing that’s provided, and then the promised amenities — be they retail, or a grocer or something — just [don’t] happen,” explained Leszczak.

“And as we’ve dug into why that is the case, oftentimes retailers look at what are the salaries within the neighborhood, and what is your median income, and what can a particular neighborhood support,” continued Leszczak, noting that “most retailers cannot make the economic decision to come into our neighborhood because it does not have the economic prowess in terms of income to really support those retailers.”

Call it a modern-day version of redlining, where the growth and development of an entire community is suppressed by racial and economic segregation. In the early and mid-20th century, most discriminatory policies and practices were designed and implemented by whites. These days, in the District, a predominantly Black-led government is the culprit, hindering middle-class residents from expanding their hard-earned investments and preventing low-income residents from securing the types of opportunities that could eventually help some of them become members of the middle class.

The District government apparently has made the deliberate decision not to prioritize the construction of mixed-income rental housing or single-family homes for middle-class residents in Ward 8 and other communities east of the Anacostia River — instead focusing excessively on low-income rental housing in those neighborhoods. That fact is evidenced by projects selected to receive federal grants and public money from DC through such accounts as the Housing Production Trust Fund; in particular, it’s visible in how the District has implemented the federal LIHTC program, as laid out in the complaint filed with HUD.

LIHTC, according to the agency’s website, is “the most important resource for creating affordable housing in the United States today,” enabling state and local agencies to offer tax credits “for the acquisition, rehabilitation, or new construction of rental housing targeted to lower-income households.”

It’s an admirable program. But HUD regulations and federal laws make clear it cannot be used to discriminate against the very communities it is intended to assist, including the Black middle class.

According to the complaint, at least 85% of LIHTC units in DC are located in census tracts that are majority Black or majority Black and Hispanic. Current HUD data show that there are 27,345 rental units in 216 projects in these neighborhoods of color. “At least 90% of LIHTC tenants are Black. Only 15% of total LIHTC units are located in majority White non-Hispanic areas.”

“To rent an apartment in the new development in historic Anacostia, you must have limited income,” according to the complaint. “A renter who doesn’t meet the affordable or low-income criteria is locked out and not able to rent.”

“The District and [Department of Housing and Community Development’s] selection criteria has created and maintained a pattern of allocating housing credit dollars that perpetuates racial segregation not just in the location of LIHTC units but of the other HUD assisted low-income housing program units in the District,” Beshara and Daniel wrote.

Pouring salt into that wound, government agencies and government-subsidized nonprofit organizations have relocated to Anacostia in numbers that wouldn’t be found in any community west of the Anacostia River. “Our commercial corridor, for all intents and purposes, is just a corridor for social service providers,” said Leszczak. “Again, that’s not bad, but if we’re only providing for social services, there is no retail, there are no community-serving amenities beyond those social service providers.

“So [the question] is, ‘Why is our commercial corridor that way? What subsidies and what incentives are being provided for these service providers to be here as opposed to other parts of the city?’”

District officials have claimed that workers spend money during the day at neighborhood businesses. Except, “nobody’s coming to work,” said Ward 8 resident Greta Fuller, offering that employees weren’t coming to the office even before COVID-19 pandemic.

“It has not spurred any economic development,” added Fuller, who helped develop the HUD complaint as a member of the planning group.

Those projects that have come to fruition haven’t addressed the community’s true needs or delivered the type of neighborhood revitalization initiatives envisioned and required under the federal rules that govern the LIHTC program, the complaint suggests.

City officials have reneged repeatedly on their pledge to homeowners to ensure the provision of critical amenities to enhance the quality of life, said the Anacostia residents. Funding for schools has been insufficient, often resulting in mediocre academic programs and forcing many families to seek options in more racial and economically diverse communities.

The dense corralling of poor people combined with the absence of any significant commercial development has resulted in high unemployment. It also has aggravated the level of crime in the area.

When I asked whether they have had conversations with the mayor or the deputy mayor for economic development or councilmembers about their concerns, Waddell said, “This is an ongoing conversation for 20 years.”

Actually, I first heard a version of these concerns in the early 1990s. That was when David Rusk prepared a report for the Anacostia Coordinating Council that examined how Ward 8 could become a more thriving community. The upshot of his findings: Diversify the population, bring in more middle-income residents.

In 2015, I revisited Rusk’s work with him after Muriel Bowser, who had just become the mayor, hired Courtney Snowden as deputy mayor for greater economic opportunity; she was to focus on communities east of the river.

“Jim Crow by income is replacing Jim Crow by race. Poor Blacks are no better off,” Rusk told me back then.

“We’re having the same conversation over and over again without any change in the outcomes,” continued Waddell. “The reason why I joined the complaint was because I can’t put my kids in any of the schools in the neighborhood — because they’re all failing. And it’s all like a jail. You go into the schools and it’s sad. One time, we were driving four hours a day because we had my son in a private school in Northwest.

“The people in this neighborhood deserve better. We should not have to do that,” she said. “If you concentrate poverty, this is what happens. You have failing schools, you have increased crime, you have food deserts, you have no retail, and you have a bunch of desperate people who don’t have a way to improve their circumstances because there is no economic development, there are no jobs.”

In 2018, three years after Snowden’s appointment, she stepped down following a string of ethics allegations. A year later, in 2019, the DC Department of Housing and Community Development, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council produced a report — “Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice” — that stated, “African Americans are concentrated largely in the city’s southeast quadrant where apartheid levels of segregation continue to exist.”

Despite that admission, Bowser administration officials seem to pat themselves on the back for what they have been doing in Ward 8. Responding via email to my request for reaction to the complaint, Bianca Lugo Lewis — a spokesperson for City Administrator Kevin Donahue, who is named in the complaint to HUD — declined to speak specifically to the “ongoing legal proceedings.”

She touted Bowser’s efforts to locate “affordable housing in all eight wards” and said the mayor “continues to deliver historic infrastructure and service investments east of the river, to expand the quality of life for all of DC’s residents.”

Lugo Lewis cited as examples the upcoming state-of-the-art hospital on the St. Elizabeths East campus near Ward 8’s Congress Heights neighborhood as well as new restaurants, grocery stores and other retail at Skyland Town Center in Ward 7. She also highlighted the relocation of District government agencies to downtown Anacostia.

That last comment suggests that perhaps the mayor and her minions don’t really get it. There may be positives to having agency headquarters as part of mixed-use development projects in wards 7 and 8, but — as with low-income rental housing — an overconcentration in one area has negative consequences.

At-large Councilmember Robert White, who chairs the Committee on Housing, wrote in an email that he has “not reviewed” the HUD complaint. “I have long supported distributing affordable housing equitably across the city. I have pushed for affordable housing downtown and put forward the Generating Affordability in Neighborhoods Act as a strategy to include affordability in wealthier neighborhoods as well.

“Our residents deserve housing they can afford, and the nearby amenities, like grocery stores, that they need to thrive. The District must continue to take a critical look at its planning processes to ensure we are meeting those goals,” wrote White.

Count Fuller as a skeptic. “He’s playing the political card. He’s running for office. We’re not going to waste our time with him,” she said during our virtual interview.

While the council recently approved millions of dollars to provide more housing vouchers and to help residents who need emergency rental assistance, the budget debate didn’t include any mention of the city’s practice of segregating the poor, stacking them on top of each other like cans in a warehouse.

“This is happening all over the country where urban areas are concentrating low-income, affordable housing in certain areas of the city because affluent high-income people don’t want that in their backyard. And so they fight against it. DC’s no different from any other place,” said Waddell.

Beshara and Daniel seem to be in the center of that movement. In March, with their help, residents and community leaders in Cincinnati registered their concerns about elected officials there using federal funds to steer low-income housing to Black neighborhoods. They said those actions stalled revitalization of their communities. A similar complaint has been filed in Dallas, where Beshara and Daniel are located. Back in 2015, another case in which they were involved — Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project — went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 5-4 ruling, the court found that Texas had violated the Fair Housing Act by siting most of its LIHTC properties in Black communities.

I know, I know, it’s not the same Supreme Court. Still, it’s a sign of what might happen if residents here decide to file a lawsuit. DC officials should move to change the city’s policies and practices quickly, or at the very least move more aggressively to provide the same amenities to Black residents in Anacostia that the mayor and the majority of councilmembers receive in their west of the river neighborhoods.

This post has been updated to correct the list of Ward 8 residents who filed the Fair Housing Act complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. A draft copy that was provided to The DC Line omitted Bruce Holmes as a complainant. It also incorrectly listed Greta Fuller as a complainant; Fuller is a member of the planning group but not an official complainant.