This interview has not been separated into segments.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with James Perry, May 25, 2006. Interview U-0251. 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
[TAPE 1, SIDE A]
[START OF TAPE 1, SIDE A]
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Well, I guess we should start at the very beginning. If you would say
your name for the recording, and then tell me about—I know
you're from New Orleans—tell me about what
neighborhood you're from?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
James Perry, and New Orleans East is where I grew up. I actually
wasn't born in New Orleans, I was actually born in
Greensboro, North Carolina, and I moved to New Orleans at about three or
four years old. And that whole time, [I] lived in New Orleans East, all
the way till I was about seventeen or eighteen, when I started kind of
moving into other parts of the city, but I pretty much been in the city
since three or four years old.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
I guess your parents got a job in New Orleans, or how did you end up
here?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
My mother is from New Orleans, and my father was teaching at the
University of New Orleans, and they met there. He got a job outside of
New Orleans, so they moved to Carolina, but then he got a job, or
decided to come back to the University of New Orleans, around the time
that I was three or four years old.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
What did she teach, your mom?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
She was a public school teacher, maybe fourth grade then, and now
she's a public school librarian and my father is an English
professor.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
What do you remember about New Orleans East? What kind of neighborhood
was it?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
I was born in '75, so we're talking like
'79 to '91 or '92 that I lived in New
Orleans East, and I guess during the first part of the time when I lived
in the East it was really this upcoming area, it was really this
vibrant, middle-class area, and it did really well. I think a lot of
that was because we had the NASA Space Center in the East, where they
manufactured parts for space shuttles, and so we had a lot of people who
made a lot of money, and so the area did really well.
In my teens, that Space Shuttle Center got shut down, and so that began
the decline of the area. They had all these big apartment complexes and
not enough middle-class people to live in them. And so it started to sag
a bit, the economy in the area did, and it still has never really
regained its former glory. I think one of the real tests, or one of the
things you can look to is the Plaza in New Orleans East, the big mall in
the East, and it had been the go-to place. Everybody in the city would
go there to go shopping, and there was this really obvious decline just
as I graduated from high school, that you could really see very clearly.
And it's the same age as the Lakeside mall, which is in
Metairie, which still does really well, still has lots of people, but
the New Orleans East mall, you couldn't pay people to go shop
there.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Were those patterns that you were noticing then when you were in high
school or is this stuff looking back that—.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
No, I did notice, you know, probably not for the right
reasons—it was because I couldn't buy the tennis
shoes that I wanted to buy at the mall that was only a few blocks from
my house. Instead I had to find a way to get all the way out to Metairie
in order to buy whatever new jeans I wanted to buy. So I noticed then,
yeah.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
So would you say that that's the sort of thing that got you
thinking about the work you do today?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
You know, actually not at all. I think it's important to
point out, because with the New Orleans Fair Housing Action Center, I
think people a lot of times—. Well, first of all,
it's almost a bad name, this whole term "fair
housing," because people ask me all the time, "Well,
what do you do? You know, fair housing, do you renovate houses, do you
buy/sell houses, do you teach people how to buy houses?" And
what we actually do is we investigate housing
discrimination. So it's really civil rights work, and
it's just the field of housing in civil rights.
It's important to point that out, because the way I got into
the work is really through my interest in civil rights. And I think that
largely has to do with my parents. It was just a general function of
being in the household, you know, from the art in the house to my
father's book collection. It was always this issue of the
civil rights movement and the role that it played and how important it
was, and why we were able to live the lives that we were able to live.
So he played organ for Martin Luther King, you know, and if you talk to
him he's gonna tell you that story. Any time you get a chance
to talk to him. The same way he'll tell it to every single
person, obviously, I've heard it a bunch of times. But
it's loads of stories like that that have helped me become
committed to civil rights.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
What is the story?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
It's not even a story, it's just that once he
played—. My grandmother required that everyone learn to play
an instrument, and primarily the piano, and so he of course played piano
and organ as a result, and one day King came to preach at his church,
and he played for King as King preached. He grew up in Birmingham,
Alabama, you know, so King wasn't far away from him.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
The Civil Rights Movement means a lot of things to different people, so
I'm curious, you know, just talking about the legacy of your
parents, what was it about the movement that they really wanted you to
know?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
I don't know that it's so much about the movement,
as it is about why the movement happened. My mom told me once
about—. I remember as a kid, asking her about segregation,
and how it worked and what it was, and she said, "You know, I
really only have one main memory of segregation, and
it was going to—." I think it was going to,
what's the name of this ice-cream place, Dairy Queen! And not
being able to order ice cream, because she and her sisters were ready to
go in, and her mother was bringing them in, and they said, "We
don't serve colored people," you know. And she
couldn't buy the ice cream, and she always remembered not
being able to get that ice cream. And even now, when we pass Dairy
Queens, if we're on a road trip or something, cause we
don't have them in the city, she'll bring it up.
And that's one of those examples. And so it's not
so much the work I guess that the folks did, but it was really the tough
experiences that they had because of it. Now on the flip side, talking
about the work, one thing that my pops did point out to me when I was
young, that I didn't get really until I started working at
the Fair Housing Center, was how multi-faceted the Civil Rights Movement
was. So for instance, people really focus a lot on King, you know,
because he did the "I Have a Dream" speech that was
the face for the movement. But at the same time that King was kind of on
television changing people's hearts, you had people in the
courts litigating and changing the law. And it was this two-pronged
approach that really made it successful, that you had to go in and
litigate on one hand, and really try to change the actual law, change
the mechanism, and at the same time change how people thought about this
whole issue of race. Which really I got when I started working here, or
when I started working at a fair housing center in Mississippi, because
I realized we're that law side, you know. We're
the ones who will go in and litigate the civil rights issues surrounding
housing. And we'll do some of the heart-changing work that
King did too, but our real focus is changing the mechanism so that it
works well.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Why were you drawn to the housing part of civil rights work?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
You know, I wasn't. All through high school and through
college I was always involved in all kinds of Civil Rights related
organizations. In high school, [I was] president of the Black Student
Union and the same thing in college. In college, at the University of
New Orleans, we had a professor who wrote in to a local paper and
said—I'm not even sure why he wrote in, nowadays I
have go back and look at my paperwork—but he wrote in and
said that African-Americans were less intelligent than Caucasians
because they have smaller heads and therefore smaller brains. And so,
[Laughter] he was an Economics
professor, and so it was just crazy, and he wrote in as though he were
an authority and he had this authority because he was a college
professor. We ended up having to make this huge stink over it, because
it was completely inappropriate. But I guess my point in telling the
story is that the interest was really whatever civil rights issue
arises. When I got out of school, out of college, I did a lot of job
searching and couldn't really find a good job. Our economy
was really struggling - this was in '99, 2000.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Right. You wanted to stay in New Orleans.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Trying to stay in New Orleans, and it really seemed like the only way to
stay was to work in the restaurant or tourism industry. And I
wasn't interested. And I didn't want to leave. But
I got really lucky and found a job working at the Preservation Resource
Center, and they have a program called "Operation
Comeback." They help people buy and renovate vacant and
blighted historic houses. And so it was the best job experience ever. It
was incredible, and I worked for a woman named Stephanie Bruno, who
I'm still excellent friends with. She taught me an awful lot,
and she taught me and the program taught me every aspect of housing in
the city of New Orleans. And the general process for
buying and renovating and dealing with housing. And so I knew a lot
about the whole housing process. So when the guy who ran this center
before me called me in and said, "Hey, I want to put your name
in the hat to start a fair housing center in Gulfport,
Mississippi," I said, "Sure," because I know
the housing side, I just don't know the civil rights side. So
I took a stab at it, and it worked out. So I just kind of fell into the
housing side of things. The civil rights side was just something that
was and always will be there.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
One of the things that really interested me about the Preservation
Resource Center is that my preconceived notion about historic
preservation is that it's about getting the right filigree on
the buildings, or the right color, stuff like that. And the work there
seemed to be very much about civil rights and economic justice. At
least, that's in the mission statement.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
It's interesting you say that. You know, I had a great
experience working at the Preservation Resource Center, but
historically, civil rights advocates and preservationists in the city of
New Orleans butt heads constantly and never get along. Which makes it
also much more interesting that the head of a civil rights organization
gets his initial training at the Preservation Resource Center.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
So I got that wrong about the Preservation Resource Center.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Well, I don't know, I think on some issues they get a bum
rap, on others they don't, you know? I would say that the
focus of the Preservation Resource Center is the built environment. And
sometimes the focus on the built environment is to the benefit of
everybody and sometimes it's not, is a good way to put it. I
would say that they're pretty consistent about focusing on
saving the built environment in the city of New Orleans.
And so sometimes that puts them at odds with civil rights
advocates and sometimes it puts them on the same side. I think that in
recent history, it's put them at odds more often than not.
Since I've been director here, though, I think
we've been on the same side of issues more often than not.
But I think they stick to the mission.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Can you give me an example [of] one of those times they were at odds,
maybe something when you felt like if you were in charge there, you
would have pushed for a different position?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Let me see. Well, I don't know how specific this is, but one
big issue for reviving old historic neighborhoods that the civil rights
advocates fear is gentrification. And you hear it come up over and over
again and all the time. Just before I came to the Preservation Resource
Center, they bought and renovated eight vacant and blighted properties
in uptown New Orleans on General Taylor. It was an incredible project.
It was the first time that they really got in and got their hands dirty
and put their money where their mouth was, renovated these properties,
and they're beautiful, they're great. And it had
been at that time an African-American neighborhood. And they went out of
their way to market to African-Americans, to try to attract
African-Americans to the neighborhood, because I think that they knew
that if they sold the properties to all white folks then, frankly,
they'd get stigmatized, they'd get a bad rap. But
they marketed, and they couldn't sell them. They
couldn't sell them. And so they ended up selling them all to
first-time home buyers, all of whom were [unclear]
purchases, but none of them were African-American. Now, I think
I have to answer a question.
- UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:
-
Can I use the fax machine?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
You know it's not plugged in to fax. It's only the
one in that room.
- UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:
-
I can't use that one.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
What's it doing?
- UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:
-
It's just not sending. [Recorder is
turned off and then back on.]
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
That's okay. So you were saying they were able to sell it to
first-time home buyers but they were white.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Right. And so there was a good bit of backlash that they got because it
was perceived that they were coming in and buying up the neighborhood
and trying to essentially take over this African-American neighborhood.
The issue, though, was I think pretty interesting. You know, I talked to
folks to see why didn't African Americans want to buy? And I
think that the buying trends were really just very different in the
African-American culture in New Orleans at the time and in the white
culture in New Orleans at that time, because it was a low-income
neighborhood, and African-Americans had lived there for so long and had
lived in shotguns for so long, and African-Americans would say to me,
"Well, you know, what I really want now is I don't
want to live in a shotgun, I want to live in a house that has a two-car
garage, and has all these different amenities that you really find in
the suburbs." And so it was this suburban style of buying that
was deep in most of the African-Americans that I talked to at the time.
So it was kind of this thing where maybe there wasn't a good
communication about how great these particular properties could be to
anyone, African-American or white. And I don't know that I
fully blame the Preservation Resouce Center for it, but it was just an
example of how people told them, "We're upset
because you're taking over our neighborhood and changing our
neighborhood, and you're not letting African-Americans
in," and they actually went out of their way to.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
You know, it's interesting [in] a case like that, when people
talk about cities and people get nostalgic for the great neighborhoods,
it's always Storyville, Little Italy in New York,
it's some sort of ethnically homogenous neighborhood. And I
wonder, since a lot of your work is about housing integration, if you
think some of that nostalgia's misplaced?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
I don't know if it's misplaced. Yeah, I
don't think that it's misplaced.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Because I'm guessing some of those neighborhoods happened
because of discrimination somewhere else, cause people were forced to
live in one neighborhood.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Absolutely. I was talking to a civil rights advocate the other day,
actually a few weeks ago, about some aspects of the Louisiana plan, the
New Orleans plan, and one of his comments was, "Well, you know,
the whole deal with integration, you always fight for it, but you know
it's never really going to happen." You know, and we
were talking specifically about this idea of dismantling
African-American neighborhoods. Because there are loads of folks who
would say, "Yeah, we want integration, but don't
tear up these historic neighborhoods," and so I think
it's one of those things that's just going to
always be there, and I would submit that I don't know that
anyone really had an honest answer to the issue yet. Working on all the
rebuilding issues, the civil rights advocates who I've worked
with now nationally and locally, we've kind of been bumping
heads on that very issue consistently.
We had a meeting not too long ago with Secretary Jackson of HUD, and we
were trying to figure out how to approach him about what to do with
public housing. Because all the public housing in the city of New
Orleans is segregated. It's all ninety-nine percent
African-American, with the exception of one complex, which is about
ninety-five percent white, right? Well, I
shouldn't say that. It's ninety-five percent
market rate, it's not ninety-five percent white. But
it's the perfect example of segregation in the city of New
Orleans. So on one hand we wanted to endorse this idea of a new public
housing paradigm that Jackson is for, where you do mixed income housing,
where you don't put all the poor people in one area, one part
of the city, instead you put some mixed income in there. You put people
who are market rate and people who are low income in the similar
neighborhoods and you don't put people in housing
that's obviously low income housing. And the idea is that
low-income folks would get to take advantage of all the things that come
with living in a market-rate neighborhood.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Just like the Hope Six projects that I saw.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Absolutely. And that's on one side, endorsing the Hope Six
project idea, but on the other side is this issue that there are all
these folks who are calling us all the time from Houston and from
Atlanta and saying, "Look, I don't care about all
this high-falutin' market rate stuff. I need a place to live
today and I want to get back into my city. And X complex is in good
enough condition where we could move in today. And if you guys endorse
Jackson's idea, then that means that they're gonna
tear it down and take five years to build something new that I might not
even be able to get into, and it means that I probably won't
get back into the city of New Orleans." So it's this
really tough situation for us where we know if we argue for them to come
back right away, then we are arguing to keep the current segregated
system, but they get in to the city, you know? And the flip side is, we
argue to go ahead and make these Hope Six projects, then
we're arguing for them to stay out of the city. And do they
ever come back? And that's a question that we just were not
able to come to a perfect resolution about. What we did finally say is
well maybe we recommend—this is what we
ultimately did recommend—that complexes that are less
damaged, we get people in right away, complexes that are more damaged
you do the Hope Six project, and it ends up splitting about fifty-fifty.
Which is perhaps a good compromise, but you know it still
doesn't really fix that issue, and I think that
it's always going to be a pitting of those two issues against
one another.
Another place where it comes up is in education. In Baton Rouge, for
instance, [there's] Southern University which is in Baton
Rouge, a historically African-American University, and
there's Louisiana State University. And then here in the city
there's the University of New Orleans, and there's
Southern University in New Orleans. And the programs are completely
duplicative, well, not completely, they've made some changes
to make sure they're not completely duplicative, but pretty
duplicative. I mean, LSU has a great law school, and Southern University
in Baton Rouge has a great law school. And so, the issue is it costs
everyone so much more money and frankly, why have two separate
universities? It is segregation and it perpetuates segregation. But when
you talk to people from Southern University and particularly alumni from
the law school, they say, "Well look, this is our heritage,
every black judge in Louisiana went to Southern because that was the
only place that you could go to, and it's a sacred thing for
us. You know what happens if we say that we integrate these schools:
basically LSU gets bigger and you get rid of Southern. You lose this
piece of our heritage." And it's really tough to
convince folks that you should do anything other than let the system
exist as is. If I remember correctly, the direction that educators
thought was appropriate was to make the programs less duplicative, so
that you end up integrating, but not getting rid of either
university. I don't know. I don't have
a clear answer there and I think we're a good ways away from
having it.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
It's complicated.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Very. Yeah.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Talking about picking the housing projects that are most destroyed and
rebuilding those, do you think Katrina presents an opportunity or is it
just a huge problem?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Well, I do think it presents an opportunity. But the extent to which it
is [an] opportunity is really all about the effectiveness of our
leadership. If the leadership is ineffective, then the opportunity is
gone and it immediately is a problem and will continue to be a problem.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Leadership at what level?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Well, every level, but when it comes to public housing, I would say
unfortunately it's really all about HUD, you know. The
Housing Authority of New Orleans runs public housing in the city of New
Orleans, and it had problems in the late 90s, big problems, so HUD took
over the Housing Authority. It removed our local board of directors and
put in place a HUD employee who is a single person who is the board. And
so that one person makes all decisions. And so essentially the Housing
Authority is HUD, right? So what happens with housing really is
HUD's decision.
I think that before the storm there were about 7500 people in public
housing, there were about 15,000 units, but only about 7500 were
occupied, and now, nine months after the storm, there are about 1000
people in public housing in the city of New Orleans. Excuse me. And so I
don't know, I just think that in nine months, federal and
local agencies like Panel [??] and HUD, who have
the resources—. That's the issue for folks whose
houses got flooded, they don't have the money to get in and
do the work, but these are federal agencies, they have the resources,
and for them to only have made decisions about one or two complexes,
it's unfortunate. And so to the extent that they have been
ineffective in making decisions about public housing over the last nine
months, it makes me wonder about how much of an opportunity it is.
The other issue is about past Hope Six projects in New Orleans. There are
two main developments. One is the Saint Thomas development, which is now
called River Gardens, and in that Hope Six development they got the
Saint Thomas residents to sign off and agree that they would move out so
there could be this new mixed-income housing, and part of the selling
point was that about half of the residents would get to come back. About
half of the 1500 families in Saint Thomas would get to return and live
there, and so they knew that a lot of them wouldn't get to
come back, but you know, fifty-fifty chance, right? Might get to make it
back to the new development. So we're talking about 750
families would get to come back. So just before the storm, in the River
Gardens complex, we think that there were eighty, maybe seventy units or
so that were occupied by former Saint Thomas residents. So
we're talking seventy or eighty, out of 750 that were
supposed to come back. And that's a big deal. I mean, there
are a few different points of this Hope Six thing. One is to make cities
better. Two is to give these low income families a chance, a better
opportunity, a better life because they live in this mixed income
environment. And so when you leave out ninety percent of 'em,
you completely cheat them out of the opportunity, so what's
the point? The other thing is that the other folks who didn't
make it in to the new Saint Thomas, for the most part, were
relocated into the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans East,
which were already low-income, predominantly African-American
neighborhoods. So they were even further segregated, rather than better
integrated, into the Saint Thomas community.
And then there's a second complex, which is the Florida-Desire
Hope Six development. And at that development, almost all the residents
got to come back. So they didn't bring in hardly any
mixed-income people. So once again you miss out on this whole
mixed-income idea. So both developments, in my opinion, have failed. So
that's the other issue, in terms of whether or not
there's opportunity. If opportunity looks the way that Saint
Thomas and Florida ended up, then there is no opportunity.
It's only to the extent that the people who run those
developments and run those projects do it right. If the projects are
carried out properly and according the guidelines and they
don't deliver, then yeah, it's just more trouble.
And that's also one of the things that we took into
consideration when going to Jacksonville. Do we want to ask for more
Hope Six? I mean, look what it's done so far, it
hasn't helped. So the opportunity is there, it's
certainly there, but whether or not we take advantage of it plays a big
role, and when it comes to public housing, HUD really makes the
decisions. I think nowadays we may want to consider pushing HUD to let
us have our own local board back at the Housing Authority of New Orleans
rather than allowing HUD to continue as the decider.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Because the local boys will make a difference.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Right. I think so. I hope so. I can't be sure, of course, you
never know. Sometimes local can be just as bad, if not worse. But right
now we don't have any action, and right
now the two biggest developments that are the shining example of what
HUD wants don't offer the promise that we thought we would be
able to deliver to residents.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
So can you tell me about what the work of the Fair Housing Center is, in
the case of Saint Thomas? What were you doing?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Of course, we investigate housing discrimination, and Saint Thomas is
one of those interesting cases I guess because—. There are
two types of cases we'll take in. We'll take in
cases that are direct, that have direct evidence of discrimination. So
we do something called testing, and the way that testing works is, for
instance, say an African-American female calls us and she suspects that
someone wouldn't rent an apartment to her cause
she's African-American. Then we would send two people to that
same apartment on the same day within a few minutes of each other to try
to rent the same apartment. One would be white, one would be black.
They'd have similar income, they'd have similar
credit, and in all respects required to qualify for the apartment
they'd have the same qualifications. And so in theory they
should be told about the same information about the apartments. But if
one is told that the apartment is available at $400 a month
and the other is told that it's $700 a month, then
we probably have evidence of discrimination. So that's one of
those really direct cases.
The more indirect cases are what we call disparate impact or disparate
effect cases. And in those, there may or may not be intent to
discriminate, but there's a negative effect on one protected
class. So a good example is if a landlord creates a rule that says,
"No more than two people per unit in an apartment
complex." Well, on its face, that policy's probably
non-discriminatory, but for families that have children, if a husband
and wife have a child, then automatically they are excluded from that
apartment complex. And so the intent may not have
been to hurt or harm families that have children, but that's
the effect, and so it becomes a fair housing issue as a result.
That's the logic that brought us into the Saint Thomas
issues. Because when there're negative decisions made about
public housing, since about ninety percent of the residents are
African-American, then it has a negative impact mostly on
African-Americans. So when Saint Thomas, or when Hannah was negotiating
or going through the process for who to bring back, and we say the
numbers keep declining on how many residents they would allow to come
back, residents came to us and complained and said, "The whole
reason we signed off was to have this opportunity to live in
mixed-income housing, and we're not getting the opportunity
now because they keep lessening how many of [us] will get to come
back." And so the negative effect, the lack of opportunity to
live in a mixed-income environment, was harming mostly
African-Americans. So we were able to get in and file a complaint on
their behalf. We were able to negotiate to get more Saint Thomas
residents guaranteed housing in the complex. Not as many as we would
have liked, but we were able to get more.
We had a contract, we had an agreement with the Housing Authority that
they had to honor about how many folks would come back and about
reporting to us about getting folks in and so forth. So after the storm,
most of the units that had been reserved or were supposed to be reserved
for Saint Thomas residents were being occupied by their employees and by
New Orleans city officials. And while we recognize after the storm
everybody was hard up for housing, just a few months after the storm
people were ready to come back, and this really was the housing that was
set aside for these folks to come back. That's one. Two, is I
guess I would argue that because these folks were low-
income, the housing was even more necessary for them than
for a person who has a good job working at the Housing Authority or for
the city, because it's more likely that they could afford
something in the market, while these folks, it's more likely
that they cannot. And it was also pretty egregious because for so long,
the only job opportunities [had] really been only in tourism and in
restaurant work and hotel work; it was this first great opportunity
where people could work in construction and make a lot of money. I mean,
jobs are paying a lot more money now than they did before the storm, and
there're just loads of jobs. And so part of our logic is if
we can just get them in to the city, this might be one of those
opportunities where they can move out of the low-income status, just
because of the job opportunities.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Do you think it's going to happen?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Well, there's been an order that came all the way from
Secretary Jackson, as I understand it, to move all the employees out of
River Gardens. My general counsel has been watching the details more
closely than I have, but I think that his order wasn't
specific enough, and didn't say, "Here's
the deadline by which you must move out." And so a memo that
we've gotten from Anno [??], provides, I think, that
they're going to move folks out, or they said that people
have to be out by September. All their employees and so forth. Which is
not nearly soon enough. And so that's the issue that
we're ultimately looking at right now: we need that date
moved up. We need them out now.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
So the storm didn't necessarily change the bread and butter
of what you do here. Is that incorrect?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
No, well, it didn't change the bread and butter of what we
do. It did change the geographic area that we cover. We are the only
group like ours in the entire state of Louisiana,
the only full-service fair housing center that investigates housing
discrimination, files lawsuits, and then also does education and
outreach and marketing around civil rights fair housing issues. So we
had already been saying, well, we need to start doing some work in Baton
Rouge, in Shreveport, in other parts of the state of Louisiana. Once the
storm hit, people who were familiar with us were all over the state
looking for housing, and they knew to call us and say,
"We're having a problem in this city or that city.
Can you take a look?" And so we didn't turn folks
down. We of course looked into every issue that we could. We were of
course really short-staffed right after the storm, but we still did what
we could to assist folks. So that changed things a good bit in that we
really had to become state-wide, overnight, with less staff. And we
still have some cases that are from other parts of the state.
In addition, you know one of the big cases that we took on after the
storm was this internet advertising case where a bunch of websites set
up to assist evacuees had housing advertised, and it was housing all
over the nation, but they would have discriminatory advertisements. And
it's illegal under the Fair Housing Act to discriminate in
advertising. So for instance, one of my favorite advertisements from
this case is one that said, "Housing available for
evacuees"—you know, they give all the information
about it—and then they say, "Not to be racist, but
no blacks." Right. And it's just so great:
"Not to be racist, but no blacks!" And then
there's another one that says, "We want to make
things more understandable for our younger children, so no black
children." They're seeking to share a room, let
folks live in their house. But it goes on and on, and there were about
thirty pages worth of these discriminatory advertisements. The
advertisements are for housing all over the nation, you know,
it's in Alabama, in D.C., in California, in
Arkansas, and all over. But it's for people from
New Orleans, and so we thought it was appropriate to get into it and
investigate it, and so it ends up being a national case that affects New
Orleanians. So I guess we've had to take on a lot of local
stuff, or statewide stuff, and then take on some national cases.
And it has some big implications, because there hasn't really
been an appellates case yet that's tested whether or not the
Fair Housing laws apply to internet websites. And so there's
some argument among scholars about whether or not website providers have
to abide by the Fair Housing law. So for instance, if the
New York Times had allowed someone to run a classified
advertisement that said, "Not to be racist, but no
blacks," the case law very clearly provides that they would be
responsible. The person who placed the advertisement and the
New York Times would be responsible. But
there's a law called the Communications Decency Act that says
that website providers are not responsible when third parties post
defamatory or obscene statements on their websites. And so what internet
providers will argue is that discriminatory statements are either or
both defamatory or obscene, and therefore since a third party posted the
advertisement, they're not liable under the Communications
Decency Act. So the issue becomes, you know, at the same time, the Fair
Housing Act says that it's illegal for anyone to publish any
statement of discrimination, period. Right? And so the two seemed in
some ways to be at odds with one another. This is also this issue of
whether or not a discriminatory statement is an obscene statement and
whether or not a discriminatory statement is a defamatory statement. So
we're going to find out. And we think we're on
good ground there, but it'll be interesting to see. And so
the hurricane gets us into having to take on an issue like that.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Switching gears a little bit, you were saying before that if people
don't come back, by September, it's going to be
too late.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
No, I don't think it's too—.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Or, in the case of Saint Thomas, you were saying it's too
long, I guess.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Yeah. I think that every day that we don't find ways to get
people back in we lose another person, you know. They find some other
great opportunity or some job opportunity, or they get more frustrated
and they make the decision not to come back. And so it's that
each day we lose, it's an attrition, we lose folks, a few
more people every day, so by the time we get to September who knows how
many of our clients that wanted to come back we'll still be
able to find or locate.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
So do you have a mental image of New Orleans five years from now?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Hmm. Well I guess I have two images. I have the image of what
it'll look like if advocates like us have our way, and what
it'll look like if we don't. And then I guess
there are some things that I'm not necessarily aggressively
advocating for, but I'm curious about how they are going to
turn out, too. So, I think in the perfect world, New Orleans would
have—.
- UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER:
-
I'm sorry, excuse me. He said that he would have
[Recorder is turned off and then back on.]
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Sorry about that.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
No problem.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
I would say in New Orleans, in terms of who was here, comparable to who
was here before the storm, even in terms of the numbers of people,
it'd be about the same. The difference, hopefully, will be
that we'll have some new industry so that people can make
more money and we can grow our middle class. One of the biggest problems
facing us before was that the restaurant, tourism
and hotel industry just didn't pay well enough for us to have
a strong middle class. So I'm hopeful that in the course of
this process we're going to grow some new industry. The
moving industry had already been doing pretty well for us. The issue
there was that we weren't getting enough local hires. So
I'm just hoping that we can get more local hires and
therefore get a bigger, stronger, middle class, and I think that once
that happens we become a much stronger city. The key there is that I
want to see it happen with—you know I'm not
opposed to other people coming in—but I really want to see
opportunity for the people who really stuck it out in New Orleans for so
long, even though New Orleans struggled so much, and even though times
were hard economically in the city. So I really want to see opportunity
for New Orleanians.
So that's one. I guess the other, the one part that I struggle
with in the vision is what will the parts of the city that were most
affected by the storm look like? Because even though we're at
the point now where the Bring New Orleans Back commission has released
its plan, you know, the mayor endorsed some parts, didn't
endorse other parts, but it doesn't have any force of law.
And you know the governor's plan doesn't really
deal with land use, what's going to happen in different areas
of the city. I'm curious about what the Lower Ninth Ward and
New Orleans East are going to look like in five years. You know? We have
friends and family who live in both areas, and I talked to some people
who say there's no way I'm coming back, and
someone please take this house off my hands, tear it down, do whatever,
I don't want it, and there are other people like my two aunts
and my parents—we've gone in, we've
gutted their houses, they've already been rewired, and so
they're pretty far along in the process of getting renovated.
And so I just don't know what those neighborhoods are gonna
look like. I hear stories about developers who are
ready to come in and buy up the properties and renovate them.
I'm iffy about what's going to happen there.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Do you have hope about what will happen?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
You know, I don't have a good prescription yet,
I'm not sure what I think is the best route.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Can you tell me what factors—?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Yeah. I'm not so big on the whole idea of taking
folks' properties. I think that you get really, really messy
when you get into the whole issue of eminent domain, and expropriating
properties that people own. That's one. Two is that the city
of New Orleans has a really sophisticated process for acquiring vacant
and blighted properties through eminent domain, through expropriation
lawsuits, and the city has never really been able to deal with all the
properties that are blighted. There's never been the market
to sell those blighted properties, so the issue has never been the
acquisition—before the storm, it had never been acquisition
of the blighted properties, it was always that there weren't
enough people who wanted to buy them. And it's also that the
process is cumbersome, but they just weren't enough people
who wanted to buy the properties. And so the city wouldn't go
in and take them because they didn't want to just sit there
and be the entity that owns thirty thousand blighted units, you know. So
would a smart mayor want to go in and take all these properties that
have been or will be abandoned in New Orleans East or the Lower Nine,
you know? I don't know, I'm not sure. The
city's hurting for money, you have to actually pay the fair
market value of the properties to acquire them, and then once you get
them, what do you do with them? It's a really messy thing.
Both because of the issue of what the city does with the properties,
one, and two, taking properties from folks when
they don't want to give them up. It's one thing if
people say, "Hey, take the property, I'm done with
it," but when people want to keep their properties,
it's iffy. So that's one factor for me, but I
guess it kind of goes up against this idea of well, if you
don't have some organized effort to revitalize these
neighborhoods, rather than individual homeowners doing or not doing
whatever they feel is appropriate, then it's really hard for
these neighborhoods to come back. I think one of the best ways for it to
happen is for parcels to be sold to developers and for them to come in
and develop whole areas and whole neighborhoods. So those two things
really battle one another, and I'm not decided yet about what
the best method is. There are also all those kind of politics that get
involved about who gets the properties and how much they pay for them,
and then last but not least, there's the fundamental safety
issue about whether or not the areas are safe to rebuild in.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Is there a disparate impact case in who got
[unclear] ?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Well, I think not. I've given that a lot of thought, and
it's because of Lakeview. Because Lakeview is mostly
upper-income white folk, and they got flooded, and it's just
as bad. It's still more African-Americans than whites, but I
think it lessens the ability to bring the case. There may be a case, I
won't say that I don't think that there is.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
We've been interviewing some people in the Ninth Ward.
We've heard a few people say, you know, that they thought the
government blew up the levees. Like they did in '27.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Yeah. As have I. And there are some lawsuits, as I understand it, that
are going forward just about that whole issue. There's also
this barge in the Lower Nine that ran into the levees, and
there's this conspiracy theory that the barge was purposely
placed there, or purposely forced to go through the
levee. And, you know, I don't know. I'm completely
uncommitted there. Is it possible? Yeah, but I don't know. I
don't know yet. I won't say that
there's not a disparate impact case, but, you
know—.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
I was thinking about it more in terms of people's inherent
mistrust.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Well, right. The mistrust is there. The whole time I've grown
up in New Orleans I've heard—. Because you know
there's the story of what happened in '27, where
it's pretty definite that they were purposefully blown. But I
think, is it Betsy or Camille? The levees broke in the Lower Nine then,
and—this is all from newspaper stories that I've
read—there hasn't been direct evidence that they
were purposefully exploded, but you talk to Lower Nine residents who
went through those storms, they believe it. They absolutely believe that
that's what happened during those hurricanes as well. And
they believe that's what happened this time. And I
don't really discount it, but I also haven't
looked closely enough to say that the evidence is definitely there.
There may be a disparate impact argument, I think, [but] it's
going be a while before we know whether or not it is. And frankly,
it's going to depend on the numbers, you know.
One other issue is that the Army Corps of Engineers does the levees, and
because they are a federal agency, they are exonerated from a lot of
litigation. And so it's very, very difficult to go after them
on this kind of case. And that's another big factor in
whether or not there's a disparate impact case. We could find
that there is disparate, but because it's the federal
government, I think they're exonerated from the case.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
You were saying before, that was your hope in five years, advocates like
you—.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Right.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
—would get your way. What does it look like if—?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Well, I think that if we don't get our way, there are a few
things. The first is that the majority of the people in the city are not
people who lived in New Orleans before the storm. And so the landscape
completely changes, and it becomes a different city. And we lose a lot
of the cultural heritage that makes the city who it is, or what it is,
which would be really, really unfortunate. I think that New Orleans with
a strong middle class would be an incredibly wonderful city to have. You
could really have a great time. I mean, you're always going
to have a good time in New Orleans, no matter what the economic
situation is, but it would just be really great, I think, if we had this
great, strong, vibrant middle class. I think that the other New Orleans
ends up with a middle class too, but it's just not the same
people who were here initially. All that tourists come to see and enjoy,
all those things, right now and before the storm, what they were seeing
for the most part is real New Orleans. When you come in for Mardi Gras,
you're not coming in and seeing something that we put on, or
make up, you're really coming in and seeing what the locals
do, you know, you're coming in and for that day, you become a
local. But we don't want it to become like Disneyworld, where
it's a side that we show that isn't how the city
really is, and that's the potential if we don't do
a good job at making sure that our own citizens are able to return. So I
think that's probably my primary fear or concern.
Now, it's still one of those things that's kind of
balanced a bit with this issue of if you lived in the city and you were
low income, you had a job, you worked at a hotel or something, but
didn't make enough money to afford decent housing and were
living in public housing as a result, you get evacuated, and you get to
Atlanta or somewhere, and then you find a job that
pays you double with the same set of skills, and then you find a decent
apartment, and then—you know, our schools were in bad
shape—and then you get your kid into a good school in
Atlanta, and there's another part of me that says, well, to
the extent that I can't guarantee that I can give that person
the same opportunities here in the city of New Orleans, you know,
I'm happy for them. I'm happy for them where they
are. Do I want 'em back? Yeah. But I don't want
'em to come back to their detriment.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Are you here to stay?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
I'm here to stay, yeah. Done deal. You know, one of the funny
things after the storm was friends from all over the country called me
and offered me loads of jobs, jobs that paid better than I get paid
here, and without even thinking it through, in every instance I said no.
I'm not going anywhere, I gotta be here. And it's
interesting that our general counsel, Lucia Blacksher said the same
thing. And I think they were good intentions. The idea was, your city is
gone, you probably don't even have a job anymore, come up
here and let us help you out. And so both of us really felt this urge.
And after the storm, we were the only two employees left, and we both
felt this urge that we had to get back to the city, and we had to be
involved in the rebuilding process. So I'm here, not going
anywhere.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
That's about the list of questions that I have, but are there
any other things that—. I guess when people are looking back
and listening to this interview, they're gonna be in part
looking for the levers that made the change. Are there things we
haven't talked about that you'd want to point out
and say if you could really have your hand in another pot, or if
there's one particular housing thing that's not
being addressed—?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Yeah, you know, when you look at the governor's plan, the
governor has put forth a plan to deal with housing issues, and the
Congress has already appropriated several billions of dollars and is
looking to appropriate another set of money to the state. So the
governor has this plan for how to spend it. And it focuses almost
exclusively on homeownership, and on what's going to happen
with homeowners. But the issue is that about fifty-five percent of New
Orleanians before the storm were renters. And I think one of the keys to
a strong economy and to a strong city is to have a higher rate of home
ownership. So we have to get there, but I think the focus on home
ownership is going to leave out all those renters, all those people who
rented property in the city of New Orleans. That's gonna be a
tough issue, in terms of getting folks back. When they come back
initially, we have to have enough rental housing for them. So
that's one thing.
The other issue there is the rental money that is
available—there's more money that's
available for big multi-family housing, which is good, for instance, for
the areas of the state that Rita hit, that Hurricane Rita hit. They have
more multi-family housing, and the reason is that they have big swaths
of land where you can build a 400-unit apartment complex, but you know,
New Orleans is an urban area where most of the land is already taken.
There aren't big swaths of land where you can go and just
build a huge complex, except for New Orleans East. Which of course was
under water, you know. But particularly in the parts of New Orleans that
are still here, you know, we just don't have —
[Phone ringing] I wonder
if that does it—places for people to come and build huge
complexes. So a lot of the rental money that's available
won't even really benefit us.
Our rental housing is mostly what I call mom-and-pop rental housing,
because it's people who buy a double shotgun and they live in
one side and rent the other side out. Or they buy a
four-unit property, they live in one unit and rent the other three units
out. And so the rental assistance really has to get to them. And some of
these programs, particularly the four-unit properties, may be left out.
Anything more than two units may be left out. So that's a big
problem.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Left out of the plan, or they just won't be able to
access—.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
They won't be able to access the homeowner money. The home
ownership money.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Okay. Right.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
And then at the same time, there's not a lot of rental money
available to the small folks. So that's tough.
That's one thing. The other thing that's
interesting is supply and demand and its effect on the rental market.
You know, before the storm, if you paid $750 in rent, you
could live in a really nice apartment in the city of New Orleans. And if
you were willing to pay $1000, or $1200, you could
get into the Garden District or maybe even the French Quarter. But now,
$1000 a month, since the storm, gets you into a rinky-dink
apartment that still needs a lot of work, without central air
conditioning, with leaky faucets and all kinds of problems. And so the
other issue that's out there is just that the cost of rental
housing is so so so so high right now. For middle income people, who
want to come back, who rented before the storm, and need to rent after
the storm, or who own their own home, but can't move into the
home because it's flooded, they can't afford to
rent the properties that are available. You know, the law of supply and
demand says when you have a larger demand, you can sell your supply for
more. And that's what landlords have done. In five years
I'd be curious to see how that whole process panned out.
Because so far, the State Legislature has turned the door every time a
bill came up that would try to do anything about
rents, you know, to try to level them or ease them, even set guidelines
that didn't have the force of law. Even that has failed in
the State Legislature. So I think what's gonna happen is
we're going to have to see where the market takes us on that
issue. And it's gonna be interesting to see.
There are so many things that have the potential to be the deterrent that
keeps people from returning. I think largely the debate in the media has
been about public housing, but it's regular market-rate
housing that's also a big issue that really hasn't
had that much attention paid to it. But folks all the time say,
"Where am I gonna live? I can't rent
anything." So it's going to be interesting to see
that.
Historically, for this area, New Orleans has been the driver, you know,
it's the center of the economy, and so the suburbs, Metairie,
and St. Tammany Parish, and Jefferson Parish, all these other areas
really kind of work off of New Orleans, just like it happens in most
other areas. But so there's the potential here for one of
those other areas to become the center of the metro area, the core
economic driver for the metro area, because so many New Orleanians
can't get back into New Orleans and so they're
settling into these areas around us. And also so many folks, so many
businesses ended up relocating, and either can't or have
decided not to reopen in the city. So it's gonna be
[interesting to] see if Metairie becomes the core in five years, or if
New Orleans is able to revive itself.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
If New Orlean's history is so rich but the legacies are so
strong, it might be easier to break some of the patterns of
discrimination in a new place.
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Ehhhh.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Or are those patterns just as strong?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
You know I'm a little pessimistic. Yes and no, is I guess the
best way I'll put it. One of the great things about the
storm, and it's sort of forcing us to jump into looking into
these other areas of the state, is that when you have a census tract,
for instance, that's ninety or ninety-five percent white in
Lafayette, Louisiana, and you have landlords who—it
wasn't even an issue—they never really had to even
consider renting to someone of another race, or another ethnicity. So
the good news is now they have to consider it, and there are a lot of
good folks who are going to say, "Oh! No problem," and
rent to folks, and then meet them and get to know them and have a new
cultural experience and in the process, really further race relations in
their area. The other good news is that, when that doesn't
happen, because New Orleanians who are there know us, they'll
call us and we'll investigate and if that person's
heart doesn't change, then we'll use the law to
make their actions change at least. So it will further a lot of civil
rights, at least in housing, I think, because we'll look at
them much more closely than we would have looked at them before, and
even if we're not looking, there are interactions that are
happening that weren't happening before.
So on that front, yeah, I think that there are some good things
happening. That said, my overall pessimism is just that people are
inherently distrustful of things, of people who are different from them.
And it takes interactions with those different people before they get
it: "Oh, you're not that different!" And so
I gotta see how many people get to interact, you know. So it could be
for the better, and I hope it is.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
Do you think that people—not you, but let's say
the clients that you tend to work with—do you think that
they're becoming more politically aware about these issues
and politically involved, or is it still: it hits home when
it's about your home?
- JAMES PERRY:
-
Both. Before the storm we did an investigation of Bourbon Street
nightclubs. There was a guy who was on Bourbon Street, and there was a
big melee and this whole issue of him being able to get into a night
club. [He was] African-American, and he couldn't get in; they
said he didn't meet the dress code, but he had on dress
clothes, he had on slacks and shoes. He looks behind
him—he's African-American—he sees loads
of white guys in the club wearing t-shirts and tennis shoes. And so it
becomes this big argument, they get into a fight with the doormen, and
the doormen subdue him and his friend. The whole time, they sit on his
back. The doorman is 300 some-odd pounds, and they suffocate him, and he
dies, right there in front of the nightclub on the street, right? So the
Mayor calls for us, the Mayor calls and says, "Well, we should
have this investigation to see whether or not nightclubs are
discriminating."
So we sent testers out. We sent a black guy and a white guy to the
nightclubs to see whether or not there is discrimination happening. And
so what happened over and over again was that once our guys got into the
club, our [black] guy would order like a gin and tonic, and
they'd order it, and it might be eight or nine dollars, and
our [white] guy would order the same drink from the same bartender and
it'd be three or four dollars. Right? Over and over and over
again. So fifty-seven percent of the time our black testers were
discriminated against. And the reason I bring it up is the loads of
times African-Americans came up to me after—it was really
well publicized, lot of news headlines—and black folks would
come up to me and say, "You know, I had no idea that I could be
paying more for a drink than other folks. I had never even considered
it. Never a possibility. Thought hadn't even crossed my
mind." But afterwards, I would get all these jokes about folks
saying, "Well, now I only go to Bourbon Street bars with my
white friends, so I can make sure I pay the same
for drinks," and things like that. But the point is I think
that the public discourse does get people to talk about it and to think
about it, and when we get a big public settlement or case, we get more
calls afterwards. So I think it's not just in the case where
it's an individual's problem in housing, I think
it's also the headlines about the issues [that] make people
rethink what's going on with them and [become] more
politically astute and aware and then also more aware about civil rights
issues.
I don't know. I think that's the case. One more
story is I started a fair-housing center in Mississippi a few years
back, and the first investigation we did, it was just to see whether or
not discrimination was happening. There wasn't a complaint or
anything. So we sent a white guy and a black guy to an apartment complex
and the black guy is told that the unit is $700 a month, and
the white guy is told that it's $400 a month,
right? So we don't tell the testers what the result of their
case was, we just record the information and we release this report. And
so the black tester comes to me a few weeks later and he says, you know,
"Now that the report is done, I want to know if I can go back
and rent that apartment, because it was so nice, the lady was so
helpful, and I can afford it. I really liked it, and I need an
apartment." And so I had to break the rules and tell him,
"They told you 700, but they told the other guy 400
bucks." Or whatever the amount was. "They told the
other tester a different amount, and we're pretty sure that
you were discriminated against." So at least for him, even
though he was so involved, and he played a role, and he knew that we
found in that study that most of our testers were discriminated against,
because that person was so nice he just assumed, "No,
that's not happening to me!" He was ready to go and
rent it. And he really struggled after that. I kind of feel bad, because
he really had a problem afterwards, because he
couldn't gauge whether he should be distrustful of people,
because this woman was so nice and so helpful to him, but was about to
steal $300 a month from him just because he was black. And he
really had a lot of trouble dealing with it later on. But my point is
that even being in the heart of our work, it wasn't enough
for him to become more astute or aware of the situation.
- ANDY HOROWITZ:
-
I was just thinking about how at the beginning you said, back into
housing, it's the civil rights project that has done it for
you, and I've just been thinking sort of more broad