Fair Housing Act cannot be used to gag residents' displeasure

BLUMNER E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published January 19, 2003

Can the racism of public speakers at a city council meeting be imputed to the subsequent actions of the council? On Tuesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case asking that very question. The case has received little attention but it could have broad implications for the right of the public to speak freely at public meetings.

When the Buckeye Community Hope Foundation bought some property in 1995 in the city of Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, in order to put up low-income apartments, not every city resident was tickled with the idea. In the town of about 50,000 people near Cleveland, a handful of residents expressed their concerns at series of public meetings. They objected to the way the 6-acre, 72-unit apartment project would change the character of their neighborhood with comments like: "there will be a different class of people living there," as well as explicit statements about an increase in drugs, crime and unsupervised children. It was no secret that African-American families would disproportionately benefit from the planned housing.

Despite the criticism, city officials in Cuyahoga Falls approved the project. But a group of residents, consistent with the town's charter, obtained the signatures necessary to send the site plan before voters in a referendum. While this process was under way, the city denied the foundation a building permit to start work.

In Nov. 1996, the residents of Cuyahoga Falls defeated the housing project by a solid majority. Later, though, the results of the referendum were set aside by the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled that, under the Ohio Constitution, citizens could not use the referenda process in this way. With the court's green light, the low-income housing project was built, and it has been operating since 2000, apparently without many neighborhood complaints.

However, this is not the end of the story. While the foundation was challenging the referendum in state court, it also filed suit in federal court alleging discrimination. In its 1996 filing, the foundation said the city had violated the Fair Housing Act because the public's opposition to its housing project was tinged with racial and anti-family bias and the city breathed life into these views by allowing the referendum to occur.

A lower federal court threw out the suit, but it was resurrected by an unanimous panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The appellate court made much of the public comments against the housing project. "Many of the statements made by Cuyahoga residents evidence a racial bias toward the prospect of a significant number of blacks moving into their community which is 98 percent white," said the court.

Essentially, the court held city officials responsible for the comments of a select group of citizens. The danger of this position was well expressed by Virgil Arrington, the Cuyahoga Falls law director who filed a petition asking the U.S. Supreme Court to take the city's appeal. "Freedom of speech will no longer apply to criticism of low-income housing as any such criticism will be viewed as veiled bigotry," wrote Arrington.

If local governments suddenly have to fear that the words of their most indelicate citizens could be used against them, public meetings would be shut down for fear of liability. Public meetings should be a venue for the free exchange of ideas, not, as the court would like, an exercise in walking on eggshells.

This is not the first time free speech and federal fair housing laws have been nose-to-nose. In the early 1990s, three activists who opposed homeless housing in Berkeley were threatened by federal officials with jail and six-figure fines for continuing their vocal fight. According to regulators, the three were violating the Fair Housing Act by seeking to block the homeless housing project through protests and legal action. The nightmare finally ended in 2000 when a federal appeals court found the three activists had been victimized by overzealous Housing and Urban Development Department officials.

And just last year, a federal court threw out a fair housing lawsuit against a group of residents in Washington D.C. The suit, brought by the builders, claimed the residents were racially discriminatory by actively opposing the construction of group homes for troubled teens. (An appeal is pending.)

These cases make clear that the Fair Housing Act cannot be used as a gag. Residents have a right to express displeasure with group homes and low-income housing projects slated to be built in their neighborhood, and public officials should be able to vote against these projects without worrying that their constituents' angry public statements will be imputed to them. There is no evidence that the City Council of Cuyahoga Falls was itself racist, and the Supreme Court should say so.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • Tampa Bay Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright