Federal officials announced on Wednesday that they had reached a settlement with a group of homeowners who sued the federal government and the State of Louisiana alleging discrimination in the state’s Road Home program, which distributed grants to those whose houses were destroyed in Hurricane Katrina and the subsequent flooding.This could mean more rebuilding in places like Chalmette, which will make many displaced residents, the sister included, very happy indeed.
The plaintiffs agreed to drop their suit in response to the establishment of a program, announced by the state in May, that will distribute $62 million among people who were trying to rebuild their homes but had found that their Road Home payments fell significantly short of the cost of rebuilding.
Two fair-housing groups and five New Orleans homeowners filed the suit in 2008 on behalf of a potential class of roughly 20,000 black homeowners, arguing that the Road Home formula was discriminatory.The program paid out grants to people based on either the pre-hurricane value of their homes or the estimated cost of rebuilding, whichever was less. Under that formula, the plaintiffs argued, a person who lived in a poorer area was likely to receive far less than someone with virtually the same house in a wealthier neighborhood, even though the cost of rebuilding would be the same.The plaintiffs got a boost in August 2010, when Judge Henry Kennedy of Federal District Court ruled that they would be “likely to succeed” in making the case for discrimination.Judge Kennedy barred the state from applying the Road Home formula to the small number of homeowners who still had grants pending, but he said he could not legally order retroactive relief for the tens of thousands who had already received their grants.
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More later.
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