A Tale of two Hoods, separate and unequal.
Whats that you say? The city of Huntsville is facing a full scale fair housing investigation and it wasn't chosen at random? I'm shocked! Shocked I tell you!
Not.
Huntsville has stumbled into the cross hairs of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Mayor Tommy Battle said HUD's Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Program Center in Atlanta recently notified the city that it will conduct an exhaustive civil rights compliance review of local affordable housing programs.
The probe will look for any evidence of discrimination in the city community development office's use of HUD dollars from 2008 to 2010.
The spin is in!
Battle said he strongly believes that office, led by Michelle Jordan, follows civil rights guidelines in administering HOME, Community Development Block Grant and Neighborhood Stabilization Program money.
The city gets about $1.8 million a year from HUD for affordable housing activities.
For those who don't know Michelle Jordan just happens to be an African American, so they are already playing blame it on the black woman game because in addition to claims of racial discrimination the Feds are focusing on the actions of the previous director of Community Development.
Michelle Jordan, the city's community development director, said two auditors from HUD's Atlanta regional office were in Huntsville from Feb. 7 until late May looking into Mirabeau's finances.
Jordan's predecessor, Jerry Galloway, began lending large chunks of the city's HOME dollars to Reynolds in March 2002 to stabilize what had become a crime-ridden apartment complex.
While the money was primarily used for construction work, part of it went to pay Reynolds' developer fees and to hire lawyers and marketing experts.
Reynolds used the largest of the low-interest loans, $932,831 in November 2004, to refinance old debt at Mirabeau, according to a timeline provided by the city.
Now the righty's, bless their hearts, just can't understand why Huntsville is being reviewed because of negative public comments about fair housing in The Times and local blogs.
Psst! Here's a clue.
Battle said HUD officials have been watching closely since the housing authority’s 2009 purchase of Stone Manor Luxury Apartments ignited a public outcry.
On April 6, 2009, about 1,000 south Huntsville residents jammed into the Chaffee Elementary School lunchroom to protest the relocation of public housing residents from downtown to Stone Manor.
From the stage, Mo Brooks, now in Congress, advocated ending public housing and giving tax credits to low-income families instead.In the weeks that followed, two civic groups sprang up to monitor housing authority activities. Republican state lawmakers floated bills to strip the authority’s eminent domain power and require it to notify adjacent homeowners before buying property.
Oh, and this might have helped put Huntsville in the *ahem* cross hairs.
the Senate haWhile no one should minimize the many positive things accomplished during the just-concluded state legislative session, it is nevertheless bitterly disappointing to many in this area to learn that, despite having overwhelming Republican majorities in both houses, the legislature could not manage to pass the public housing reform bills.
There were two bills under consideration, both introduced by Rep. Mike Ball. The first would have required public notification before a public housing authority could purchase property. That bill was later amended so that it only applied to Huntsville. The second bill would have stripped the state’s public housing authorities of the power of eminent domain.
Rep. Ball did yeoman’s work shepherding these bills through the committee votes and getting them passed in mid-April by the full House. The bills then went to the Senate, where they were approved at the committee level during the first week in May. At that point, d a full month to bring the bills up for a vote, but it never happened.
But then again, it was probably blog post like this
Dear SHCA Members,.
The included link will take you to a story on flashpoint blog. With the exception of Dr. Moores involvement, SHCA leadership has worked with the author in confirming the details reported. The initial incident reports provided to the media by the Huntsville Police Department were so highly sanitized, that they gave no details which cought the attention of the media. We have been told that this sanitation is due to laws which protect minors. Unfortunately, these laws encouraged the continued endangerment of the child who was assulted (sic) in the second attack.
SHCA will continue looking into this matter. We would like to know whether the perpetrator was transferred to another south Huntsville school. If you have any first hand knowledge of this situation which has not been reported, please reply to this message. The identity of members who wish to help will be kept confidential
But then again, it might have been comments like this
"Poor kids deserve exposure to a more normalized atomosphere(sic) if they are ever going to have a chance to integrate."
I agree! My kids (and, of course, myself and my wife) deserve to be relocated to The Ledges immediately! How are we supposed to integrate socially if we are forced to live in the area that we can actually afford? It's discriminatory and outrageous that we should be turned away and forced to live in a "bad" area.
Oh, wait. I don't live in a bad area. I live in an area consistent with my economic means, but instead of whining about it I keep going to work and paying my bills. I don't sit at home smoking crack and complaining about how I'm being kept down by The Man. I don't break into my neighbor's house when he's at work. I make sure my kids are in school and not running around with gang-bangers. I mow my yard and keep the house up so as not to bring down the value of my property or the properties around me. I don't pick-up truck with no wheels sitting on cinder blocks in my front yard.
In other words, I behave and live in a manner consistent with the neighborhood I wish to live in.
What revbob said!
I just love the reaction of white conservatives in the comments. "We aren't racists. It's all you damn Americans who are racists!"
If you want to learn exerything that's important about white conservative power in Alabama, just read those comments.
The feds read about it in blogs (let's all take a bow). They didn't read about it in the papers.
The South Huntsville White People's Times completely dropped the ball on the story on Huntsville's continued segregation and their Massive Resistance to integration.
Segregation: it's as conservative as Ku Klux Pie.
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