Equal parts astonishment and disappointment. This is the best way to describe my reaction to a recent story out of New Orleans. The St. Bernard Parish Council, in a 5 to 2 vote, approved a new law restricting rental property in the area. The law states that property owners in St. Bernard can only rent to blood relatives.
This law smacks of the old Grandfather laws. Grandfathering, as we know it today, refers to the process of exempting certain people from a new law. A state passing a new driver’s license restriction, for example, can grandfather in drivers who already hold a license – that is, exempt them from the new law. But the original Grandfather laws, which were passed in many Southern states after the Civil war, were intended to prevent former slaves from voting; the laws held that a person was eligible to vote only if his grandfather also had the right to vote. Allegedly the laws were intended to prevent carpetbaggers from coming from the North and participating in elections, but in reality, the laws aimed to disenfranchise blacks. Since most voting-aged blacks in the 1890s were former slaves or children of slaves, almost none of them had grandparents who could vote. The law was very clever, because it applied mostly to blacks but never specifically mentioned race in its language. It was racist in practice without being racist on paper. A perfect disguise.
The St. Bernard Parish government says it intends its new grandfather law to maintain the character of St. Bernard. Council members say their concern is that residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina will rent out their property to others rather than moving back, and that St. Bernard will be transformed from a community of homeowners to a community of renters. This would upset the population makeup of the area.
Critics charge that the law is designed to exclude other races from moving to St. Bernard. Prior to Hurricane Katrina, St. Bernard Parish was 75% white, and homeowners were 93% white. Since very few white residents have black relatives, the effect of the law will be to maintain that high white to black ratio for now and evermore.
Perhaps the intent of the law is, as the Council has said, to try to stabilize the makeup of the population, and to maintain the predominance of home-ownership. Even so, that alone prompts an important question: Does a local government have the right to do that? I don’t suppose any local government likes wholesale population changes. The people who originally lived in Miami didn’t appreciate the coming of condos and hotels. No doubt Los Angelinos in the 1960s would have preferred not to see a constant influx of Hispanics. Deerborn, MI did not plan to become the largest Arab community in the United States. But it happened, and the people there dealt with it, because this is America, and in America people are entitled to live where they want. Except, I guess, in St. Bernard, USA.
To be fair, St. Bernard Parish was devastated by Hurricane Katrina. Devastated more completely than anywhere else in the hurricane zone: All but 5 of the 25,000 homes in the parish were flooded, and more than half of those were assessed as a 50% loss or greater. One hundred percent of the population of 68,000 was homeless after the storm. Today, only about 10,000 people are back, most of them living in trailers. Only a few hundred homes have been renovated and are livable again. This is a lot for any government to contend with. It is certainly fair to expect that a community ravaged like that is going to do some unconventional things to get back on its feet.
But on the other hand, given the degree of destruction, dramatic change is inevitable. It is foolish for the Parish Council to think that a law is going to put things back the way they were. St. Bernard will never, ever, be the way it was.
I had a home in St. Bernard Parish. It is razed now, and there is nothing left of it but a concrete slab. My old street, 4 blocks long with about fifty houses on each side, has almost no one living on it. A few homes have inhabited trailers on their lawns, but so far not a single family has rebuilt its home and moved back into it.
And with good reason. The Parish was flooded because of a pitifully designed levee system, and the consensus in my neighborhood is that unless the levees are dramatically improved there is no point in rebuilding. So we all sit and wait. Some people would consider rebuilding if they could rent the properties out. This would allow them to cover the house notes until they decide if it is feasible to go back. This is an approach I was considering.
Not now. If I can’t rent out my property there is no point in rebuilding. I am stuck with a property not worth selling and not worth improving. Thanks to the St. Bernard Parish Council.
When an economy is wiped out as completely as it possibly can be, a responsible government does whatever it can to ease the recovery. But I do not understand how dramatically reducing the pool of potential residents by eliminating new renters helps.
In a high-risk real estate market, most residents are going to be renters. Renting gives a person time to try a community out, to put down roots, and to decide if this is a place worth staying in. Any new population in St. Bernard is going to have to include a substantial number of renters, because (to review recent events in case the Council has not been reading the papers lately) a hurricane hit New Orleans last year and a lot of people are a little too broke to buy. Yes, it would be unfortunate if St. Bernard went from majority home ownership before the storm to 90% renters after, but this is life after Katrina.
The St. Bernard Parish Council, in typical head-in-the-sand style, seems intent on having things white as they were or having nothing at all.
It is pretty obvious that the latter is exactly what they are going to get.