Legal effort to ensure that people displaced by urban renewal would be offered alternative housing
Fillette describes his first case after joining the Legal Aid Society of Mecklenburg County in 1973. The case, <cite>Margaret Green Harris v. HUD</cite>, involved victims displaced by the city's urban renewal efforts. It was the position of Legal Aid that if the city was going to displace people with urban renewal (which he argues was really an exercise in "demolishing dilapidated housing without necessarily any other plan to replace it"), it needed to provide them with alternative housing. He describes the outcome of the case under the ruling of Judge McMillan and notes that the next task of Legal Aid was to monitor the situation.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Ted Fillette, March 2, 2006. Interview U-0185. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
When you first came here, some of your early work was picking up on work
that had been done by your colleagues here, helping victims displaced by
urban renewal. Is that right?
- TED FILLETTE:
-
Yeah, that was the first big case that I was assigned, shortly after I
arrived.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
This was the Margaret Green Harris v. HUD case?
- TED FILLETTE:
-
That's right, in federal district court, one of Judge
McMillan's cases.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
Could you tell me a little bit about Margaret Green Harris?
- TED FILLETTE:
-
Well, this was a lady who had lived in the community of Greenville, which
was an African-American neighborhood just north of the downtown area,
who had lived in a house that the city considered dilapidated and wanted
to demolish it as part of the urban renewal program. The problem for her
was that the city did not offer her an adequate replacement house that
was affordable to her. The basis of the lawsuit was to challenge the
displacement of people in the urban renewal neighborhoods, who were not
offered a suitable alternative home that was affordable to them. That
was the fundamental legal principle involved.
The suit was negotiated to a settlement in 1972, the year before I
arrived, with fairly broad language about how the city would, from that
point forward, not displace people that were in the urban renewal
neighborhoods, without providing them the "suitable relocation
housing;" that's what the phrase was. By the time I
arrived, that lady had already gone somewhere else. But the lawsuit was
aimed at the whole class of people that were similarly situated in other
neighborhoods subject to urban renewal or what was then called community
development, which was the same thing. It was essentially demolishing
dilapidated housing without necessarily any other plan to replace it or
substitute it, either in that neighborhood or anywhere else. It was
essentially a demolition of poor people's housing is what
that was.
- SARAH THUESEN:
-
What was the eventual upshot of your work with that case?
- TED FILLETTE:
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Well, what happened was some of the other residents of neighborhoods that
were in the path of the community development work started to come to
our office and complain that they were getting notices to leave, but
weren't getting any offers of
alternative housing that was either in good shape or affordable to them.
What we determined was that the federal law that was tied to the
funding, that supported this program for the city, required that if they
were going to remove people from their home, they had to provide
suitable alternative housing that was affordable. So there was a formula
to determine what was affordable for a family. Essentially, it was they
would not have to pay more than twenty-five percent of their net family
income for rent and utilities. And as a practical matter, most of the
people that were in these neighborhoods lived on disability or welfare
or minimum-wage jobs and it was virtually impossible for most of them to
pay market-rate rent for houses that were decent, safe, and sanitary. So
at that time, in the early 70s, to be able to rent a house that had any
kind of good heating equipment, a furnace of any kind, would cost about
three hundred dollars a month. But most of these people could not afford
to pay that much rent plus utilities. The city was not finding places
for them and paying the difference.
What we did was bring another motion in that case in the federal court
before Judge McMillan and combined it with a new suit that my former
employer had at that time, George Daly. The caption of his case was
Kannon v. HUD and the City of Charlotte. That was a
commercial lease in the first ward neighborhood, but there were also
residential complainants in that suit too. So we combined those together
and had a trial in front of the judge and showed the judge that the city
was still not providing adequate relocation housing for residents or
adequate relocation assistance for businesses. The judge ordered the
city to stop displacing people. That then resulted in a new court order
that was enforceable by contempt of court. So we then spent the next two
years monitoring the performance of the city under that new order, to
see whether or not they were actually offering suitable housing and/or
financial assistance for people to find suitable housing.