New Casualties In Becky's War

Already victims of Hurricane Katrina, some refugees now find themselves victims of a different kind of storm. A political storm. I posted previously on Fort Worth City Council-Lady Becky Haskin's campaign for a whiter Woodhaven. Now, Fort Worth Weekly is reporting that a new front on that war has opened. According to the Weekly, City of Fort Worth officials have tuned an offer of free rent for Katrina refugees.

That all seems reasonable — until what some see as racial politics is added to the regular bureaucratic mix. A few days after the storm, three apartment complexes on Boca Raton Boulevard in Woodhaven offered the city 100 units rent-free for three months for evacuees. Local residents and charities were rounding up furniture, and utilities would also be free during those months. The owners of the three complexes — Oak Hollow, Cherry Hill, and Villa Del Rio — didn’t even want FEMA money for the three months. The offer was a free gift of apartments that could house about 500 people.

There was a major problem, however. These are the same apartments that the city filed nuisance abatements against last year, claiming they should be torn down, allegedly because of high crime rates there. The apartment owners have fought the city, and some have charged that the city — specifically Fort Worth City Council member Becky Haskin — is singling out these apartments because homeowners in Woodhaven want the largely black, mostly poor renters out.

“A few days after the shelters started filling up, we wrote them saying we were setting up a program to serve this need,” said Dallas attorney Kenneth Chaiken, who represents the apartment owners. “We had the resources of available apartments and had area churches willing to raise money for furniture and food, etc. The owners of those three apartments reached out with absolutely three months of free rent. We didn’t hear from the city, so we contacted them again. At that point [Assistant City Attorney] Tom Patterson called me and said the city is not interested in helping out there.”

Chaiken said the city is using the Katrina victims as a way to try to put the apartments out of business. “There is a reason why they are not routing Katrina victims into the perfectly fine units,” Chaiken said. “They don’t want these apartments filling up. They have engaged in a campaign to make the apartments suffer economically through the loss of tenants.”

The apartment owners filed suit in state court two weeks ago against Haskin, the city, and Woodhaven Community Development, claiming the defendants have “affirmatively steered prospective residents of the apartments away from the apartments, including evacuees of the recent hurricane tragedy, who the plaintiffs invited to reside in their properties on very attractive terms that would assist them in rebuilding their lives.”

Chaiken said the city and the apartment owners had struck a deal earlier this year by which owners agreed that all new residents of the three complexes would be subjected to rigorous background checks. The apartment owners had asked the city to relax some of those background checks for the Katrina victims, noting that comprehensive background checks take time. City officials refused.

Neither Haskin nor Patterson returned calls seeking comment for this story. Watson said the city’s decision was the right one. “Those three apartment complexes in question were not operating in a manner that we want to have in our community,” the assistant city manager said. “We are not going to place folks in an apartment complex that we don’t feel meets a minimal standard.”

Norm Bermes and Pete Fletcher are Woodhaven community activists who’ve been fighting the city’s nuisance designation for the apartments. They had worked to get furnishings for apartments for the Katrina evacuees and set up a job counseling service in the neighborhood. The rejection of their efforts left them angry.

“My understanding is that the powers that be want lower-income folks out of Woodhaven” Fletcher said. “In order to do that [Haskin] needs to take down apartments. If the apartments were to have a positive effect here, then it would be tougher to get rid of them. The positive press does not serve that master very well.”

So city officials would rather refugees continue to live in shelters than apartments? The free apartments are not good enough? Many of these people had their homes literally washed away. The apartments are not in the best part of town? Some of these people were plucked from the roofs of their homes. It seems that Becy Haskin's war against apartments have chalked up some new casualties.